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From Unconsciousness to Conscious 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Unconciousness to Conscious 30 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/from-unconciousness-to-conscious-30/

Osho,You have forgotten to include one of your maxims in the requests. The maxim is: Live dangerously. Would you like to speak on this?Living itself is so intense for me that I certainly go on forgetting the right maxims for living, the right rules for living. It may seem a contradiction, but it is not. The people who remember maxims for life forget life completely. Yes, I have forgotten not only that, but a few more. It reminds me….The one that I have loved most is: The golden rule for life is that there are no golden rules. There cannot be. Life is so vast, so immense, so strange, mysterious; it cannot be reduced into a rule or a maxim. All maxims fall short, are too small; they cannot contain life and its living energies. Hence the golden rule is significant, that there are no golden rules.An authentic man does not live by rules, maxims, commandments. That’s the way of the pseudo-man. The authentic man simply lives.Yes, if you ask the authentic man, he may tell you about certain rules, but they are not the rules that he has followed himself. He has just found them on the way of living, just like collecting seashells on the beach. He had not gone to collect the seashells, he had gone to enjoy the early morning, the fresh air, the sun, the sea, the sand. Just by the way, he found those seashells.All the rules are collected by people who have not lived according to them, because the people who have lived according to them have committed suicide long before. Anybody living according to a rule is destroying himself, poisoning himself, because the rule was found by somebody who was not you, somewhere where you will never be, in some time, in some space, which is not your time and not your space. It is very dangerous to follow that rule. You will be distracting your life away from its center, its grounding – you will misshape yourself. Trying to shape yourself you will only misshape yourself, disfigure yourself.So all the rules I have talked about these two or three days – you have to remember: before all of them comes the golden rule. But I had simply forgotten about it. I got so immersed in wrestling with Moses – and poor Moses has never done any harm to me, nor do I intend to do any harm to him – but the word commandment triggered something in me.It reminds me of when I was a postgraduate student. In India it became a rule that every student had to participate in a two year army training. I went to the vice-chancellor and said, “I simply refuse. I will not participate in any army training; the very idea is nauseous – that somebody says to me, ‘Left turn’ and I have to turn left. Who is he? And why should I turn left in the first place? If I want to turn right or if I don’t want to turn at all…. It is going to be difficult. It is better you find some way to keep me out of it.”He said, “I can understand you, and I can see the difficulty. You have never followed any rule. I have had reports against you again and again, but I have never called you because I know that you may not be following the rule, but whatsoever you will be doing must be better than the rule itself. I know you, I have been watching you,” he said. “For example, many professors were reporting to me,” he told me, “that you fall asleep in their classes. Now, this is not right. And if they wake you up, you create so much fuss about it – that nobody has the right to wake you, and what harm are you doing? You are simply sleeping.”I had told my professors, “It does not disturb your lecture, and anyway, who cares about your lecture! And whatsoever you are saying is all nonsense, it is better not to hear it. And this is my time – from twelve to two I have always slept. From my very childhood, in my school, high school, undergraduate classes, I have always slept. It was a recognized fact that from twelve to two, I am going to sleep. And people have come to accept it, because I was not going to do anything else at that time. You can throw me out of the class; I will sleep there.” I have been thrown out of the class – I slept outside, it didn’t matter, but that is my time of sleep.The vice-chancellor said, “I told your professors, ‘Don’t be worried. You can look at his marks in your paper last year. How much did he get? Ninety-eight percent. What more do you think he will be able to manage by keeping awake?’”I told the vice-chancellor, “Here you are wrong. If I had been awake then ninety-eight percent would have been impossible. Even to get eighteen percent would have been difficult. That man was throwing so much crap into everybody’s mind; I somehow avoided him. The two percent they are missing…it seems that even in my sleep he has shouted something and it has entered my mind; otherwise why not a hundred percent? Those two percent must be his doing, and I am going directly to him to ask about the two percent: what happened about the two percent?”He said, “It has been reported that you don’t follow the hostel rules, and you are the prefect of the whole hostel. You are supposed to manage one thousand students and make them follow the rules, but you don’t follow them at all. How are you going to manage one thousand students?”I said, “Who bothers? And they are as happy with me as they have ever been with any prefect, because I never interfere. In fact I don’t even know the faces of all of them. I don’t know their names. I never take their attendance. Each month I mark them present, and send the register to the office. I have told them : ‘If you are absent, inform me; otherwise there is no problem. If you don’t inform me, it is accepted that you are present.’”He said, “You get up at three o’clock in the night, and a few of your disciples” – I had disciples already – “they also get up at three o’clock, and you make so much trouble for others.”I said, “Those people are fools”…because the university I was in, and the hostel, was in such a beautiful place that three o’clock was the right time there. It was just on a hilltop, and just below the hill was a vast lake. It was so serene and so calm and so quiet that to miss this whole thing sleeping…. “It is perfectly good to miss the lectures sleeping, because those idiots are simply telling things that they know nothing about. Some other idiot has told them, and they are simply transferring it.“But I have seen: every morning the lake is new, fresh; it is not the same lake. Every morning….” And I am simply surprised and amazed; even today I cannot believe that that place, the University of Sagar…I have been all over India, but I have never seen so much color in the sky as on that particular lake. So many colors, so much color in the sky, and everything is reflected in the lake. You could have just sat there and meditation would have happened. You were not required to do it.So I said, “Of course I get up at three. The lake wakes me up, the birds start singing at three, and those few people who have once come with me to sit there under the trees…the last stars disappearing, and the morning descending by and by…and the first flowers opening.”The lake was full of lotuses. And as the sun rises on the horizon, the lotuses start opening. They close up when the sun sets; the whole night they also stay asleep. As the sun rises – the first rays, and the lotuses start opening. And it is the most beautiful flower you can imagine – the biggest flower, the most fragrant, and the most alive…and floating in water, but it has such a velvety skin that water cannot touch it. Even dewdrops falling on the lotus leaf or the lotus flower remain there like pearls. Water cannot touch it, so the dewdrops cannot spread and make the leaf wet. They remain just like round shaped pearls sitting on it. And when the sun rises a little higher, all those lotuses, their leaves, and these millions of pearls, start reflecting the sunrays. Sometimes a rainbow is created on the lake.I told the vice-chancellor, “Those who have gone with me, once I have invited them, but I have never asked them twice. And the people who have been reporting to you don’t know anything about beauty, about existence.” I told him, “I know who has reported to you. I don’t think any student will report against me. It is the proctor, the professor in charge of the hostel, who is very worried because I will not listen to him.”I had told him, “You are the professor in charge of the students, not of the prefect.” I had shown him the book in which the rules were written – certainly there was no mention that he was an authority over the prefect. Certainly he was, because the prefect was also a student, but there was no mention of it. So I said, “There is no mention of it. You take care of the students if you want. I will take care in my own way. I am taking care – by not interfering. And my students are immensely happy that for the first time there is nobody authoritative forcing them to do this, not to do that: ‘Go to sleep at nine o’clock; all the lights should be put out at nine.’”But my own light was not put out. The proctor came on the first day to tell me that this was not right. I said, “Don’t you disturb me at all. I will read as long as I wish – sometimes the whole night, because there is the whole day to sleep in – and nobody can control me. And I always used to keep the book of the rules that was given to me as prefect. I said, “Look into this: there is no mention of it, that you have any authority over my sleep or my waking. I will wake in my time, I will sleep in my time; and my students will do according to themselves, whatsoever they want to do.”The vice-chancellor said, “All these reports have been coming to me. But I know you: rules are dead; all the prefects that have preceded you were dead. So I have not bothered about the reports against you, I have not called you. But now this is troublesome. This is a government affair. Now the government wants every student to be trained in the army; otherwise he will not be given the graduation certificate.”I said, “There is no problem. I will not ask for the graduation certificate, I can give you my word in writing. It is not a problem. What am I going to do with your graduation certificate? But I am not going to be forced by idiotic people.”And in the army the whole procedure is to destroy your intelligence – because if you are intelligent, you cannot be a good soldier. To be a good soldier, you have to choose…. You have to drop intelligence; otherwise how can you kill somebody who has done nothing to you, to whom you are not even introduced? You are killing him, and you don’t know, he may have an old mother and an old father who depend on him, or a wife and children who will all be orphans and beggars – and you are killing this man for no reason, just because you are getting a salary to kill? And he is getting a salary to kill; you are both hired killers. “I am not going to become a hired killer.”And to create this situation, that you can kill easily, first your intelligence has to be completely destroyed. That’s the training, what they call the training in the army – right turn, left turn, turnabout, go forward, go backward – three hours every day. The person is simply functioning like a robot. He is not to ask, “Why should I turn left? What is the reason? And if again I have to turn back to the same position, then why bother? Remain standing in the same position, people are going to come back sooner or later to the same position.” No, you are not supposed to ask.All those procedures are created to destroy questioning, doubting, inquiring – and these are what give sharpness to your intelligence. When for years you don’t ask and you simply follow, whatsoever is said you follow, your intelligence starts getting rusted. One day the order comes, “Shoot!” and you shoot. It is not that you are shooting. That intelligence that you used to have is no longer there to think. Now it is almost like, “Left turn.”So I said to the vice-chancellor, “I am not going. Count me out. If there is any problem, you have to fight for me. And I am ready to fight with anybody; with the state government…I am ready to stand before the state parliament and to fight for my right – that I cannot be destroyed. I will not allow anybody to touch my intelligence in this way. And if it is the federal government, I am ready to go there – but you remember that I am not joining. And I will not ask for the certificate.”He said, “Don’t you be worried.” He said, “To take you to the state government or to the federal government will create more trouble. So you keep quiet, you simply keep quiet; you don’t say anything to anybody. I will take care of it, I am responsible. So if any problem arises I am responsible.” I said, “That is your business.”And I never went to him to ask for my graduation certificates; he came to the hostel. I never went to the convocation, because that was the agreement. After the convocation he looked around – he had given the certificates, and the man who had topped the university and had won the gold medal was not there! Everybody was asking why I was not there; only the vice-chancellor knew. He said, “I know why he is not here – just because of an agreement. I will have to go to the hostel to give him his gold medal, his certificates, and apologize. I was worried about this, that he may get the gold medal and the trouble would be known to everybody, why he is not here.”He came, he gave me the certificates. I said, “That’s okay. If you are giving them, I will not refuse; but I have followed my agreement. I would never have come to ask for my certificates. And sooner or later I am going to burn them anyway.”He said, “What!”I said, “What am I going to do? Carry them all my life?”And after nine years, when I resigned from the professorship, the first thing I did was burn all the certificates. My father was there; he said, “Even if you have resigned, there is no need to burn the certificates. They can remain here. What is the trouble? You give them to me, I will keep them.”I said, “No, that means you are still hoping that someday I may need them. No, once I have passed a bridge I want to destroy it, so that I cannot go back. I am not going to give these certificates to you.”I burned them in front of him, and he said, “You are strange. I am not preventing you from resigning.”I said, “Once I have resigned, I am never going to need these certificates in my life, so why carry them?”I have never followed rules of any kind, so it is very natural for me to forget. Yes, I forgot to tell you that it is one of my requests to you to live dangerously.What does it mean exactly? It simply means that in life there are always alternatives. You are always at a crossroad, always and always. Each moment is a crossroad, and you have to choose where you are going, what is going to be your path; each moment you have to choose. Each moment is decisive because you are discarding many ways and choosing one.Now, if you choose the comfortable, the convenient, then you will never be able to live intensely. The comfortable, the convenient, the conventional, of which the society approves, means that you are ready to become a psychological slave. That’s why all this convenience…. The society will give you everything, if you give your freedom to it. It will give you respectability, it will give you great posts in the hierarchy, in the bureaucracy – but you have to drop one thing: your freedom, your individuality. You have to become a number in the crowd. The crowd hates the person who is not part of it. The crowd becomes very tense seeing a stranger amongst it, because the stranger becomes a question mark.You have been living a certain life, a certain style, a certain religion, a certain politics. You have been following the way of the mob, and you were very comfortable, cozy, because those surrounding you were all people just like you. What you were doing, they were doing. Everybody else was doing the same; that gave the feeling that you were doing the right thing. So many people could not be wrong. And in gratitude that you are following them, they give you respectability, honor. Your ego is fulfilled. Life is convenient, but it is flat. You live horizontally – a very thin slice of life, just like a slice of bread cut very thin. You live in a linear way.To live dangerously means to live vertically.Each moment then has a depth and a height. It touches the highest star and the deepest bottom. It knows nothing of the horizontal line. But then you are a stranger in the crowd, then you are behaving differently from everybody else. And this creates uneasiness in people, for the simple reason that they are not enjoying their life, they have not lived their life, they have not taken the responsibility to live it, they have not risked anything to have it – but because everybody else was also like them, the question did not arise.But this stranger comes who lives in a different way, behaves in a different way, and suddenly something is stirred in them. Their repressed life, which is like a spring, forcibly repressed, suddenly starts stirring, starts creating questions that this way too is possible. And this man seems to be having a different shine to his eyes, a different joy around him. He walks, sits, stands, not like everybody else. Something is unique about him. But the most impressive thing about him is: he seems to be utterly contented, blissful – as if he has arrived. You are all wandering and he has arrived. Now, this man is a danger to the crowd. The crowd will kill him.It is not a coincidence that people like Socrates are poisoned. What was the trouble with the man? He was such a unique genius, that if Greece had produced only Socrates, that would have been enough to make history, enough to be remembered forever. But the crowd could not tolerate this man. He was a very simple man, absolutely harmless. They poisoned and killed him. What was his crime? His crime was: he was an individual. He walked on his own path, not on the superhighway where everybody is moving. He was going through a labyrinth of his own. And the society soon became afraid because a few people started moving away from the highway, finding their own ways.Socrates was saying that you cannot walk on a way made by others for you. You have to walk, and make your road by walking. It is not that roads are made available to you readymade, you have simply to walk – no. You have to create the road by walking; just as you walk, you create the road. And remember, it is only for you, not for anybody else. It is just like the birds flying in the sky leaving no trace for any other bird to follow. The sky is empty again. Any bird can fly, but he will have to make his own way.This was the danger. Socrates was a real danger. Jesus was not a real danger. And you have to understand the difference – because Jesus was also crucified. But what was Jesus asking? He was asking to be accepted by the mob. He was not really a rebel, he was asking for respectability: “I am your awaited messiah.” He was asking the crowd to give him sanctity, respectability, and he was trying in every way to fulfill the demands of the crowd. Even going to the crucifixion was just to fulfill the demands of the crowd. It is a different story.People have always thought Socrates and Jesus belong to the same category of man – no; they are just the opposite. Socrates is not asking to be accepted. Socrates is saying, “Please leave me alone – just as I leave you alone. Please allow my freedom. I don’t trespass on your life, you should not trespass on my life.” It seems to be absolutely honest. He is not asking to be accepted. He is not saying, “Whatever I am saying is true, and you have to accept it.” No, he is saying, “Whatsoever I am saying, it is my right to say. You have your right to say.”The judges were a little guilty when they decided this man should be killed. He was the best flowering of Greek genius. So they offered him a few alternatives; they said, “One thing is, you can leave Athens….” In those days Greece was composed of city democracies, and that is really a far more democratic way. The smaller the unit, the more democracy is possible, because it is direct democracy.The people of Athens used to gather, raise their hands for or against, and decide things. Now, in a country like America the democracy becomes so indirect, and the person you choose…once you have chosen him for a few years then you don’t know what he is going to do. During those few years you cannot control him. He may have promised you something and he may do just the opposite. Exactly that is what goes on happening. But in Athens it was a direct democracy. Any important issue, and the people of Athens would be together there and they would vote for it or against it. So the power was not delegated for five years. The power was always in the hands of the people.So the judges said, “It is very simple: leave Athens. You can make your home in any other city, and wherever you are you will find disciples, friends – about that there is no question.”Socrates said, “It is not a question of surviving. What you are saying is certainly convenient, and any businessman would have chosen that. It is simple. Why get killed unnecessarily? Move to another town.” Socrates said, “I’m not going out of Athens because it is a question of choosing between convenience or life, and I choose life – even if it brings death. But I will not choose convenience, that is cowardly.”They offered him another alternative. They said, “Then do one thing: remain in Athens, but stop teaching.”He said, “That is even more difficult. You are asking birds not to sing in the morning, trees not to blossom when it is time to blossom? You are asking me not to speak the truth? And that is my only joy: to share my truth with those who are groping in the dark. I am going to be here and I am going to continue teaching the truth.”The judges said, “Then we are helpless, because the mob, with a majority, wants you to be poisoned and killed.”He said, “That’s perfectly okay. You can kill me, but you cannot kill my spirit.” But remember, by spirit he does not mean soul. By spirit he means his courage, his devotion to truth, his way of life. You cannot change that. “You can kill me. And about death I am not worried at all, because there are only two alternatives. Either I will simply die, so then there is no problem. When I am not, what problem can there be? So either I simply die, then there is no problem, or I don’t die and my soul goes on living. Then at least I will have the satisfaction that I was not a coward, that I stuck to my truth, that you could kill me, but you could not bend me.”He died joyously. The death scene of Socrates is something so beautiful in the whole history of man. In Greece it was not a cross; it was poison that had to be given. So outside the man was preparing the poison, the official poisoner who gives the poison to people who are sentenced to death. Six in the evening was the time. The sun was setting and Socrates asked again and again, “What is the matter? Ask that man; it is getting late.”And the poisoner was really trying to make it as late as possible. He had loved this man and he wanted him to live a little longer. That much he could make possible…he could go on preparing the poison, slowly. But disciples came again and again and they said, “The master is asking why you are late.”With tears in his eyes, he said, “He is really a dangerous man. I am trying to give him a little longer to live, but he is in a hurry.”The poisoner asked Socrates, “Why are you in a hurry?”He said, “I am in a hurry because I have lived life tremendously, totally; I know it. Death is unknown; it is a great adventure. I would like to taste death.”Now, you cannot kill such a man. There is no way to kill such a man, who wants to taste death, who wants to know death, who wants to jump into the challenge and the adventure of the unknown.Living dangerously means whenever there are alternatives, beware: don’t choose the convenient, the comfortable, the respectable, the socially acceptable, the honorable. Choose something that rings a bell in your heart. Choose something that you would like to do in spite of any consequences.The coward thinks of consequences: “If I do this, what will happen? What will be the result?” He is more concerned about the result.The real man never thinks of the consequences. He thinks only of the act, in this moment. He feels, “This is what is appealing to me, and I am going to do it.” Then whatever happens is welcome. He will never regret. A real man never regrets, never repents, because he has never done anything against himself. The coward dies thousands of times before death, and continuously regrets, repents: it would have been better if he had done that, married that man, that woman, chosen that profession, gone to that college…. Thousands of alternatives are always there, and you cannot do them all.The society teaches you: “Choose the convenient, the comfortable; choose the well-trodden path where your forefathers and their forefathers and their forefathers – since Adam and Eve – have been walking. Choose the well-trodden path. That is a proof: so many millions of people have passed on it, you cannot go wrong.” But remember one thing: the crowd has never had the experience of truth.Truth has only happened to individuals.The well-trodden path is not trodden by Socrates and people like Socrates. It is trodden by the mass, the mediocre, the people who have no courage to go into the unknown. They never get off the highway. They keep clinging to each other because that gives them a certain satisfaction, consolation: “So many people are with us….”That’s why all the religions continuously go on trying to make more and more converts. The reason is not that they are interested in people and their life and their transformation – no, they themselves are not transformed – but if you have more Christians than Hindus, naturally it seems you have better chances of having truth with you than the Hindus. If the Buddhists are more than the Christians, then of course they can go on believing that they have the truth, that’s why so many people are with them.But I want you to remember, truth has always happened to individuals. It is not a collective phenomenon, it does not happen to a crowd. It always happens to the individual. It is just like love. Have you seen a crowd in love? That is impossible…that a crowd falls in love with another crowd. At least up to now it has not happened. It is an individual phenomenon. One person falls in love with another person. But in love at least there are two persons. In truth, even two are not there. You alone, in your absolute aloneness, experience it.So beware of the crowd. Beware of the well-trodden path. Beware of the millions of Christians and Buddhists and Mohammedans, and Hindus and Jews; beware of all these people.If you have to find someone, then find someone who is not part of any crowd. Then find a Socrates, who does not belong to any crowd. That is why I said Jesus and Socrates are totally different. Jesus is trying to belong to the crowd. The crowd is discarding him; that is another matter. The crowd is not willing to accept him, but he is trying in every possible way…. He had never thought of any Christianity. He was a Jew, born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew, praying to the Jewish God, still trying to convince the Jews, “I am your awaited messiah.” He is not a rebel.Truth comes only to the rebellious, and to be a rebel is certainly to live dangerously.Every moment you will be faced from all sides, in every possible way. You live with a man you don’t love, but you go on clinging for the sheer comfort, that at least there is somebody you can cling to. Thinking of separating from the person, there is darkness, loneliness – what are you going to do? How are you going to survive? You may not love, he may not love, but still at least somebody is there. You are choosing the convenient, the comfortable. You are in a profession, you hate it….One of my uncles is a poet, and would have been one of the greatest poets of India if he had listened to me. But I was so young, and he was a university graduate. I tried my best; I said, “You may not listen to me, that is your choice, but I am going to tell you.”He said, “But why do you bother me?”I said, “It is going to decide your whole life. You are a poet. I do not understand much poetry, but whatsoever I have seen in your notebooks gives me a certainty that if you choose the comfortable and the convenient – that is the profession of my family….”My grandfather was telling him, “Now you are a graduate. Be finished; start looking after the business.”I told him, “Don’t listen to him. He will kill your whole future.”He said, “You are a strange boy. You are suggesting to me that I should not listen to my own father and I should listen to you.”I said, “One day you will repent. So listen to him.” He listened to him. And just before we left Pune he came to see me, and he told me, “Forgive me. I can still remember you, so small, trying to persuade me not to listen to my father. And of course that was the most convenient thing for me. The business was there; I was getting my inheritance. The business was settled, I was not to do much.”And once he went into the business, my grandfather immediately started looking for a girl for him. I said to him, “Look. You are getting caught by and by.”He said to me, “Are you my friend or my enemy? My father is looking for a wife, and you are telling me that he is looking for a prison for me.”I said, “It is up to you to decide. You should look for your wife. Why should your father look? Strange, his father looked for him – he missed. Now he is looking for you – you will miss. How can he find a wife for you?” But my grandfather was a strong man. It was not possible for my uncle to say anything to him; if he decided, it was final. And one day he decided for his marriage. The marriage happened. I went to his marriage, and I teased him all the way: “You are going to a life imprisonment.”When he came to Pune, he said to me, “You were right. It was a life imprisonment, and it went on growing bigger and bigger – first business, then wife, then children, now children’s education, now children’s marriage.” And now he is sixty-five, and he has no time for poetry. When he was in Pune, just for two, three weeks, he started writing poetry again. And he told me, “For years I have completely forgotten; there has been no time. But looking at you, remembering what you had said to me, I realized you were right. I would like to come here for a few months and to bring back my dreams and my visions, which have all disappeared.”And just two, three days ago, my secretary brought his letter: “Now you have gone too far away and it will not be possible for me to come there, and I was hoping to come to Pune.” For what was he hoping to come to Pune? And do you think now – since I had advised him, so much water has passed down the Ganges – he will be able to revive his poetry? I don’t think so, because he had shown me a few things that he wrote while he was in Pune – they were not of the quality that I remember was there when he was young. Now so much junk has collected. He is no longer young, but tired, bored, repenting continuously. The few days he was there, every day he was repenting, “Alas, I did not listen to you.” But nobody would have listened to a child. And what I was suggesting was rebellion against the father, his father.A profession you can choose, which is convenient; friends you can choose, who are convenient. I have seen strange people. I had one friend – I rarely had friends, and those I had were not much by way of friends. So I don’t remember really having any friend; it is just a word. But he thought that he was a friend to me – he was a professor in the chemistry department.In the whole university only I had a car and he had a car. First, only he had a car; he was a rich man’s son, so it was not a problem for him. It was not possible for me to have a car. I used to walk four miles to teach in the university, and back four miles – two hours every day. But I enjoyed it, it was such beautiful exercise. But one of my lovers could not tolerate that exercise; he presented me with a car. The day I came in the car to the college – that chemistry professor had never even bothered to be introduced to me – he came running to me. He told me his name, and said, “I would love to be a friend of yours.”I said, “Strange, so suddenly…? I have been here for two years. We have been crossing each other’s path almost every day, two or three times; you have never even said hello.” Of course, I had never said hello, because I don’t interfere in anybody’s life. Who knows what you are thinking…and I may say ‘hello’ and I may throw a stone and your dream is disturbed, or something happens. I don’t interfere, unless somebody invites me; then it is his responsibility. “What has happened so suddenly?”He said, “Come into the corner and I will tell you.” He took me into the corner; he said, “I have made it a point only to be friendly with people who have cars.”I said, “Why?”He said, “If you make friends with people who don’t have cars, they ask…they need your car, every day they ask for a lift and you even have to pay the petrol. And they will damage the car, they will do this, they will do that, and you have to look after it. So I have decided to be friendly only to people who have cars.”I said, “That’s a great idea. But you please forgive me. Listening to your idea, I decided that I will not have any friendship with anybody who has a car.”He said, “But why?”I said, “Because of your idea – perhaps that will be their idea too!”People’s minds function in the same way. People will become friends if they are of the same society, have the same standard of life; if they go to the same synagogue, the same church, if they are rotarians, or members of the lion’s club. They are people of the same standard of life; it is convenient. If you make friends with a poor man, it is inconvenient. Some day he is going to come and ask for a few rupees, his wife is sick….Now, a rotarian is not going to come to you. It is good to have a friendship with a rotarian. You are comfortable, he is comfortable; there is no trouble. You have your house, you have your car; he has his house, he has his car. You have servants, he has servants. There is no trouble. But just a step below and you will be in trouble, because the person may ask, is bound to ask…. Someday he will be in trouble, then where is he to look for help? You are a friend. That’s why people don’t make any friendship with servants. For years the servant will be in their house – but no friendship. They remain almost unacquainted.Living dangerously means: don’t put such stupid conditions between you and life – comfort, convenience, respectability. Drop all these things, and allow life to happen to you, and go with it without bothering whether you are on the highway or not, without bothering where you are going to end. Only very few people live. Ninety-nine point nine percent of people slowly commit suicide.Just the last thing to remember – because that is so absolutely essential I should not be forgiven for forgetting it: Live watchfully.Whatsoever you are doing – walking, sitting, eating, or if you are not doing anything, just breathing, resting, relaxing in the grass, never forget that you are a watcher.You will forget it again and again. You will get involved in some thought, some feeling, some emotion, some sentiment – anything will distract you from the watcher. Remember, and run back to your center of watching. Make it an inner process continuously. You will be surprised at how life changes its whole quality. I can move this hand without any watchfulness, and I can also move this hand absolutely watching the whole movement from inside. The movements are totally different. The first movement is a robot movement, mechanical. The second movement is a conscious movement. And when you are conscious you feel that hand from within; when you are not conscious you only know the hand from without.You have known your face only in the mirror, from the without, because you are not a watcher. If you start watching, you will feel your face from within – and that is such an experience, to watch yourself from within. Then slowly, strange things start happening. Thoughts disappear, feelings disappear, emotions disappear, and there is a silence surrounding you. You are just like an island in the middle of the ocean of silence…just a watcher, as if a flame of light at the center of your being, radiating the whole of your being.In the beginning it will only be an inner experience. Slowly you will see that radiation spreading out of your body, those rays reaching other people. And you will be surprised and shocked that other people, if they are a little bit sensitive, will immediately become aware that something has touched them which was not visible.For example, if you are watching yourself…. Just walk behind somebody, watching yourself, and it is almost certain the person will turn and look back suddenly, for no reason; because when you are watching yourself, your watchfulness starts radiating, and it is bound to touch the person who is ahead of you. And if he is touched by something which is invisible, he is going to look back: “What is the matter?” And you are that far away, you cannot even touch him with your hand.You can try that experiment: somebody is sleeping and you can sit by their side, just watching yourself, and the person will suddenly wake up, open his eyes and look all around as if somebody has touched him.Slowly you will also become able to feel the touch through the rays. That is what is called the vibe. It is not a nonexistential thing. The other person feels it; you will also feel that you have touched the other person.The English words, being touched, are used very significantly. You may use it without understanding what it means when you say “I was touched” by the person. He may not have said a single word to you. He may have just passed by. He may have just looked once at your eyes, and you feel “touched” by the person. It is not just a word – it actually happens. And then those rays go on spreading to people, to animals, to trees, to rocks…and one day you will see, you are touching the whole universe from within. Your aloneness remains absolutely as it was. It becomes bigger, vast. This is the experience I call the experience of godliness.

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The Goose is Out 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Goose is Out 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Is the goose really out?The goose has never been in; the goose has always been out. It is a Zen koan. First you have to understand the meaning of Zen and the meaning of a koan.Zen is not a religion, not a dogma, not a creed. Zen is not even a quest, an inquiry; it is nonphilosophical. Fundamental to the Zen approach is that all is as it should be, nothing is missing. This very moment everything is perfect. The goal is not somewhere else – it is here, it is now. Tomorrow doesn’t exist. This very moment is the only reality. Hence, in Zen there is no distinction between methods and goals, between means and goals.All the philosophies of the world and all the religions of the world create duality. However they may go on talking about non-duality, they create a split personality in man. That has been the greatest calamity that has befallen humanity: all the do-gooders have created a schizophrenic man. When you divide reality into means and goals you divide man himself, because for man, man is the closest reality to man. His consciousness becomes split. He lives here, but not really; he is always somewhere else. He is always searching, always inquiring; never living, never being, always doing; getting richer, getting powerful, getting spiritual, getting holier, saintly – always more and more. And this constant hankering for more creates his tense, anguished state. Meanwhile he is missing all that is made available by existence. He is interested in the far away and godliness is close by. Man’s eyes are focused on the stars and godliness is within him. Hence the most fundamental thing to understand about Zen is: the goose has never been in. Let me tell you the story of how this koan started:A great philosophical official, Riko, once asked the strange Zen master, Nansen, to explain to him the old koan of the goose in the bottle.“If a man puts a gosling into a bottle,” said Riko, “and feeds him until he is full-grown, how can the man get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle?”Nansen gave a great clap with his hands and shouted, “Riko!”“Yes, Master,” said the official with a start.“See!” said Nansen, “the goose is out!”It is only a question of seeing, it is only a question of becoming alert, awake, it is only a question of waking up. The goose is in the bottle if you are in a dream; the goose has never been in the bottle if you are awake. In the dream there is no way to take the goose out of the bottle. Either the goose will die or the bottle will have to be broken. Both alternatives are not allowed: neither has the bottle to be broken nor has the goose to be killed. Now, a fully-grown goose in a small bottle… How can you take it out? This is called a koan.A koan is not an ordinary puzzle; it is not a puzzle because it cannot be solved. A puzzle is that which has a possibility of being solved; you just have to look for the right answer. You will find it – it only needs intelligence to find the answer to the puzzle, but a puzzle is not really insoluble.A koan is insoluble, you cannot solve it, you can only dissolve it. And the way to dissolve it is to change the very plane of your being from dreaming to wakefulness. In the dream the goose is in the bottle and there is no way to bring it out of the bottle without breaking the bottle or killing the goose – in the dream. Hence, as far as the dream is concerned the puzzle is impossible; nothing can be done about it.But there is a way out – which has nothing to do with the puzzle, remember. You have to wake up. That has nothing to do with the bottle and nothing to do with the goose either. You have to wake up. It has something to do with you. That’s why Nansen did not answer the question.Riko asked, “If a man puts a gosling into a bottle and feeds him until he is full-grown, how can the man get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle?”Nansen didn’t answer. On the other hand, he gave a great clap with his hands and shouted, “Riko!”Now, this is not an answer to the question – this has nothing to do with the question at all – it is irrelevant, inconsistent. But it solves it; in fact, it dissolves it. The moment he shouted, “Riko!” the official with a start said, “Yes, Master,” and the whole plane of his being is transformed by a simple strategy.A master is not a teacher; he does not teach you, he simply devises methods to wake you up. That clap is a method, that clap simply brought Riko into the present. And it was so unexpected… When you are asking such a spiritual koan you don’t expect the master to answer you with a loud clap and then shout, “Riko!”Suddenly he is brought from the past, from the future. Suddenly for a moment he forgets the whole problem. Where is the bottle and where is the goose? There is only the master, in a strange posture, clapping and shouting for Riko. Suddenly the whole problem is dropped. He has slipped out of the problem without even knowing that he slipped out of it. He has slipped out of the problem as a snake slips out of its old skin. For a moment time has stopped. For a moment the clock has stopped. For a moment the mind has stopped. For a moment there is nothing. The master, the sound of the clap, and a sudden awakening. In that very moment the master says, “See! See, the goose is out!” It is dissolved.A koan can only be dissolved but can never be solved. A puzzle can never be dissolved but can be solved. So remember, a koan is not a puzzle.But when people who are accustomed to continuous thinking, logical reasoning, start studying Zen, they take a false step from the very beginning. Zen cannot be studied; it has to be lived, it has to be imbibed – imbibed from a living master. It is a transmission beyond words, a transmission of the lamp. The lamp is invisible.Now, anybody watching this whole situation – Riko asking a question, the master clapping and shouting – would not have found anything very spiritual in it, would not have found any great philosophy, may have become very frustrated. But something transpired, something which is not visible and can never be visible.It happens only when the silence of the master penetrates the silence of the disciple. When two silences meet and merge; then immediately there is seeing. The master has eyes, the disciple has eyes, but the disciple’s eyes are closed. A device is needed, some method, so that the disciple can open his eyes without any effort of his own. If he makes an effort he will miss the point, because who will make the effort?Christmas Humphreys, one of the great lovers of Zen in the West, the founder of the Buddhist Society of England and the man who made Zen Buddhism very famous in the Western world, writes about this koan, and you will see the difference. He says:“There is a method of taking the problem in flank, as it were. It will be nonsense to the rational-minded, but such will read no further. Those who read on will expect increasing nonsense; for sense, the suburban villas of rational thought, will soon be left behind. The mind will be free on the illimitable hills of its own inherent joy. Here, then, is the real solution to the problem of the opposites.“Shall I tell it to you? Consider a live goose in a bottle. How to get it out without hurting the goose or breaking the bottle? The answer is simple – ’There, it is!’”Now, the whole point is lost: it becomes philosophical. First, Christmas Humphreys thinks Zen is part of Buddhism; that assumption begins with a wrong door, with a wrong step. Zen has nothing to do with Buddhism. It certainly has something to do with the Buddha but nothing to do with Buddhism as such – just as Sufism has nothing to do with Islam, Hasidism has nothing to do with Judaism, Tantra has nothing to do with Hinduism. Yes, Tantra certainly has something to do with Shiva, and Sufism has something to do with Mohammed, and Hasidism has something to do with Moses, but not with the traditions, not with the conventions, not with the theologies.A Moses alive, a Mohammed alive, can transmit something which cannot be said, can show something which cannot be said, can create a certain vibe around him which can trigger enlightenment in many people, but without any explanation, without any logical proof.Enlightenment is almost like a love affair. Just as you fall in love – you cannot rationalize it; it is below reason – in the same way that you fall into enlightenment. It is above reason: you fall above words.There is a beautiful story of a master who was staying at a disciple’s house. The disciple was a little worried about the master because his ways were strange, unexpected. He could do anything! He was almost thought to be mad. So not to create any trouble for the neighborhood – because in the night he might start dancing, singing, shouting, sermonizing to nobody and create a disturbance in the neighborhood – they put him in the basement and locked him up in the basement, so that even if he went and did something nobody would hear him. They closed all the windows, all the doors, and locked them.In the middle of the night they were suddenly awakened. Somebody was rolling about on the roof with such a loud laughter that a great crowd had gathered all around and they were asking, “What is the matter?”They rushed up; they found the master rolling on the roof. They asked, “What is the matter? How did you manage this? We locked you in the basement just to avoid such a scene!”The master said, “That’s why I am laughing. Suddenly I started falling upward. I cannot believe it myself! It has never happened before, falling upward!”It is a beautiful story. Enlightenment is falling upward just as love is falling downward. But something is similar in both; the falling – unreasonable, unexplainable, inexpressible. Only those to whom it has happened know, and even when it has happened you cannot explain it to anybody to whom it has not yet happened.Christmas Humphreys calls Zen “Zen Buddhism”; that is starting in the wrong direction from the very beginning. Zen is not Buddhism – the essential core of the heart of Buddha, certainly, but it is the essential core of Moses too, the essential core of Zarathustra too, Lao Tzu too. It is the essential core of all those who have become enlightened, of all those who have awakened from their dream, of all those who have seen that the goose is out, that the goose has never been in, that the problem is not a problem at all in the first place, hence no solution is needed.Christmas Humphreys says, “There is a method of taking the problem in flank, as it were. It will be nonsense to the rational-minded…”He himself is rational-minded; otherwise, it is not nonsense. Nonsense is something below sense. Zen is supra-sense, not nonsense; it is above sense. It is something far beyond the reaches of reason. Logic is a very ordinary game; anybody who has a little intelligence can play the game. The moment you go beyond logic then you enter into the world of Zen. It is not nonsense, it is supra-sense. His very use of the word nonsense shows a deep-down bias toward rationality.He says: “…but such will read no further. Those who read on will expect increasing nonsense; for sense, the suburban villas of rational thought, will soon be left behind…”They are not left behind, because if you leave something behind, you are on the same track. You have left a milestone behind but the road is the same, the path is not different. Maybe you have gone a mile ahead but your dimension has not changed. The difference is only of quantity, not of quality.Reason is not only left behind, reason is transcended, surpassed. There is a difference, a great difference, a difference that makes the difference.I have heard a story. It happened in the Second World War:In a thick, primitive part of Burma, a small airplane was left by the army. They were in a hurry, they were retreating, and for some mechanical reason they could not manage to take it with them. The primitives found the plane; they could not understand what it was. They figured out that it must be some kind of bullock cart – that was the only possible thing for them to think; the bullock cart was the ultimate vehicle in their vision. So they started using the plane as a bullock cart, and they enjoyed it. It was the best bullock cart they had ever found!Then somebody was passing by – a man who lived a little further away from the primitive tribe but was part of the tribe. He knew – he had experienced cars, trucks, buses. He said, “This is not a bullock cart, this is a car, and I know something about cars.” So he fixed it, and they were immensely amazed that without horses, without bulls, the machine was working. It was such a toy! Every morning, every evening, they enjoyed just looking at it again and again from all sides, entering it, sitting in it; and because there were not many roads, even to go a few feet was a great excitement.Then one day a pilot passed by the primitive forest and he said, “What are you doing? This is an airplane, it can fly!”He took two primitives with him, and when they left the ground they could not believe it. This was absolutely beyond their imagination, beyond all their dreams. They used to think that only gods could fly; they had heard stories about gods flying in the sky. Yes, they had seen airplanes in the sky, but they had always believed they belonged to the gods.Now, the same mechanism can be used as a bullock cart or as a car, but between the bullock cart and the car the distinction is only of quantity, not of quality. The moment the airplane takes off from the ground it changes. It’s a plane: it surpasses the bullock cart and the car. It moves in a totally new dimension.So reason is not left behind, reason is simply transcended. Hence, Christmas Humphreys called it “nonsense,” “irrational.” His thinking that reason had been left behind was still thinking in terms of rationality.He says: “…and the mind will be free…”Now, that is absolutely stupid: the mind will not be free. When you enter into the world of Zen there is no-mind. Zen is the equivalent of no-mind. It is not freedom of the mind, it is freedom from the mind – and there is a lot of difference, an unbridgeable difference. The mind is not free, you are free – of the mind. The mind is no longer there, free or unfree; the mind has simply ceased. You have gone through a new door which was always available to you, but you had never knocked on it – the door of being, the door of eternity.Zen, the very word Zen comes from the Sanskrit word dhyana. Dhyana means meditation, but the word meditation does not carry its total significance. Meditation again gives you the feeling that mind is doing something: mind meditating, concentrating, contemplating, but mind is there. Dhyana simply means a state of no-mind, no concentration, no contemplation. It means, not meditation, but just a silence, a deep, profound silence where all thoughts have disappeared; where there is no ripple in the lake of consciousness; when the consciousness is functioning just like a mirror reflecting all that is – the stars, the trees, the birds, the people, all that is – simply reflecting it without any distortion, without any interpretation, without bringing in your prejudices. That’s what your mind is: your prejudices, your ideologies, your dogmas, your habits.Christmas Humphreys says: “…and the mind will be free on the illimitable hills of its own inherent joy.”This is real nonsense! First, “mind will be free.” Mind can never be free. Freedom and mind never meet. Mind means bondage, mind is a prison. In the mind you live an encapsulated life, surrounded by all kinds of thoughts, theories, systems, philosophies, surrounded by the whole past of humanity, all kinds of superstitions – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Buddhist, Jaina – political, social, economic, religious. Either your mind is made up of the bricks of the Bible, the Koran, the Gita, or maybe Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto. You may have made your prison differently from others, you may have chosen a different architect, but the prison is the same. The architect can be Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein – you can choose. Prisons come in all shapes and all sizes – and the interior decoration is up to you. You can put beautiful paintings inside, you can carpet it wall to wall, you can paint it according to your likes and dislikes, you can make a few changes here and there, a window on the left or on the right, a curtain of this material or that, but a prison is a prison.Mind as such is a prison, and everybody is living in the prison. Unless you get out of the prison you will never know what freedom is. Your prison can be very cozy, comfortable, convenient. It can be very well decorated; it can be golden, or studded with diamonds…. It will be difficult to leave it: you have worked so hard to create it, it is not going to be easy. But a prison is a prison; made of gold or made of mud, it makes no difference. You will never know the infinity of freedom; you will never know the beauty and the splendor of freedom; your splendor will remain imprisoned. You will never know what godliness is. You will never know that the goose is always out. You will live in all kinds of dreams. Howsoever beautiful they are, dreams are dreams, and sooner or later all dreams are shattered.Mind is self-perpetuating. If one dream shatters it immediately creates another dream – in fact, it always keeps one ready. Before the old one is shattered it supplies you with a new one – a better dream, more refined, more sophisticated, more scientific, more technological – and again you are infatuated, again the desire arises: “Why not try it? Maybe other dreams have failed, but that does not necessarily mean that all dreams will fail. One may succeed.” That hope goes on lingering, that hope keeps you running after dreams. And when death comes, one finds that one’s whole life has been nothing but the same stuff as dreams are made of: “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But this is how millions of people are living.Christmas Humphreys says: “…and the mind will be free on the illimitable hills of its own inherent joy.”This shows that he never understood even a single dewdrop of the Zen experience. He became the propagator of Zen philosophy in the West, but not knowing what he was doing, not experiencing anything of what he was talking.The mind cannot reach “the illimitable hills of its own inherent joy”; the mind has no inherent capacity for joy. The mind is the cause of all misery – the only cause, there is no other cause of misery. Hence mind knows nothing of joy. It only thinks about joy, and its thinking about joy is also nothing but an imagination against the suffering in which it lives.If you ask the mind to define joy, its definition will be negative. It will simply say, “There will be no suffering, there will be no pain, there will be no death.” But this is all negative definition; it says nothing about bliss, it simply speaks about painlessness. But the goal of painlessness is not of any worth. If you are without pain, will you find that life worth living, and for how long? If you have no illness that does not mean that you have the well-being of health; that is a totally different quality. A person may be medically fit, there may be nothing wrong as far as the diagnosis of the physician goes, but if he is not feeling an overflowing joy it is not health – an absence of disease perhaps, but not the presence of health. The absence of disease is not equivalent to the presence of health; that’s a totally different phenomenon.You may not be miserable; that does not mean that you are blissful. You may be simply in limbo, neither blissful nor miserable. This is a far worse situation than being miserable, because the miserable person at least tries to get out of it. The person who lives in limbo, just on the boundary line, neither miserable nor blissful, cannot get out of misery because he is not in misery. He cannot enter into bliss because there is no push from behind; the misery is not hitting him hard enough for him to take a jump. He will remain stuck, stagnant.Misery is a negative state, bliss is a positive state – but the mind knows only misery. The mind cannot know “the illimitable hills of its own inherent joy” because there is nothing in it. The mind is only a creation of society to help you perform your social duties efficiently. The mind is a strategy of the establishment to manipulate you, to enslave you, to keep you as unintelligent as possible, because the intelligent person is dangerous.In the whole of the Bible there is not a single statement praising intelligence. It is full of all kinds of rubbish, but there is not a single statement in praise of intelligence. Superstition is praised, belief is praised, all kinds of stupid things are praised.All the religions, organized religions, have been trying to make man a robot, a machine, and they have almost succeeded. That’s why there are so few Buddhas, so few Jesuses. The reason is simple: societies, factories, the state, the church, the nation – they are in a deep conspiracy to destroy the small child, who is very vulnerable, delicate and helpless.You can destroy him. And the basic strategy for destruction is to create a mind, impose a mind on him, so that he forgets his innermost qualities of joy. He forgets the innocence that he brought from the sources of existence; he forgets all that is beautiful and becomes only a cog in the wheel of society. He has to be a good servant, he has to be a good mechanic, he has to be a good stationmaster, a good professor, this and that, but he may not to be a divine being, he may not to function blissfully.The society is very afraid of blissful people for the simple reason that bliss is such a tremendous experience that one can sacrifice one’s life for it. But one cannot sacrifice one’s bliss for anything else. One lives for bliss, one dies for bliss, once one has known what bliss is. Hence the blissful person is absolutely beyond the imprisoning forces of the society. The society can only rule those who are miserable, the church can only exploit those who are miserable.Christmas Humphreys says: “Here, then, is the real solution to the problem of the opposites.”There is no “problem of the opposites.” Opposites are not opposites, they are complements, hence there is no problem as such. Darkness and light are one phenomenon, two aspects of the same coin. Life and death are inseparable, you cannot separate them – how can you make them opposites? They are complements, they help each other. Hence, there is no problem, and there is no need for any solution.Zen is not a solution to opposites, it is a transcendence. It is a higher vision, a bird’s-eye view from where all dualities look stupid.The most important thing that happened to the first man who walked on the moon was that he suddenly forgot that he was an American. Suddenly the whole earth was one, there were no boundaries, because there is no map drawn on the earth. The American continent, the African continent, the Asian continent, this country and that country all disappeared. He made no effort to put all the opposing camps together; there was not a Soviet Russia or an America, the whole earth was simply just one.And the first words that were uttered by the American were, “My beloved earth!” This is transcendence. For a moment he had forgotten all conditionings: “My beloved earth!” Now the whole earth belonged to him.This is what actually happens in a state of silence: the whole of existence is yours and all opposites disappear into each other, supporting, dancing with each other. It becomes an orchestra.Christmas Humphreys says, “Shall I tell it to you? Consider…”Now, see how small changes make great differences: “Shall I tell it to you? Consider…” This is the way philosophy moves, not Zen: consider… It is not a question of consideration – either you know or you don’t know.The master Nansen did not say, “Consider, now I will give a great clap. Consider, now I will shout, ‘Riko!’ and you have to say, ‘Yes, Master!’ Then I will say, ‘See, the goose is out!’” Then the whole point would have been lost.Just a few days ago in a darshan meeting in the evening I called Nirupa. She had broken one of her hands. She is one of my mediums, but now she cannot participate in the dancing. She was just sitting in the front row and I called her. For a moment she hesitated and everybody laughed, because what was she going to do with one hand? But Zen is done with one hand – the sound of one hand clapping! – and she did well. Of course, only I could hear the sound. The sound of one hand clapping – even when you are making a sound with two hands clapping the energy is one. Your left hand and your right hand are not two, they are joined in you. They are not opposites; they are complementary; they belong to one being.All opposites belong to one being, and it is not a question of consideration. If you consider, you take all the juice out of the beautiful koan.“Consider,” he says, “a live goose in a bottle. How to get it out without hurting the goose or breaking the bottle?”He cannot even say “without killing the goose” – a proper English-man! – ”without hurting the goose or breaking the bottle.” In fact, even to say “breaking the bottle,” his heart must be breaking! “The answer is simple…”It is not simple. In the first place, it is not an answer either. “There, it is out!” He has destroyed the whole beauty of the koan. But habits die very hard. It is just the way of thinking, the way of the mind.The Pope was given a pair of red silk slippers with the initials T.I.F inscribed on them. When His Holiness asked what the letters stood for, he was told, “Toes in first.”You ask me: “Osho, is the goose really out?”It has always been out, it has never been in. It is only a question of dreaming.Wake up!The second question:Osho,In the West I am a student of philosophy. Is there any love or wisdom in philosophy? I have not found them yet.It is good that you have not found it yet. I hope that you will never find it, ever, because Germans tend to find it!It is said philosophy is like a blind man searching on a dark night in a dark room for a black cat which is not there. But Germans find it! They have given the greatest philosophers to the world: Immanuel Kant and Hegel and Fichte and Marx and Feuerbach and so on and so forth.It is good that you say: “In the West I am a student of philosophy. Is there any love or wisdom in philosophy?”Love is not possible at all, because philosophy means logic and logic cannot be loving. Logic is the foundation of science but not the foundation of life. Logic is applicable to dead things, to objects, because the basic method of logic is dissection. The moment you dissect something you kill it, so if you want to find life through logic you will never find it; the very method prohibits it.You can cut a rose flower, you can dissect it, you can put all the ingredients separately into different bottles methodically labeled, but one thing will be missing: there will be no beauty to be found and no life to be found, no joy to be found, no dance of the rose flower in the wind, in the rain, in the sun; they will all be gone. There will be a few chemicals, but those chemicals are not the rose flower. Those chemicals were simply the situation in which the rose has appeared. They don’t constitute the rose, they only constituted the situation for the appearance of the rose. If you take them away the rose disappears into its invisible world.It is like dissecting a dancer – do you think you will find something like dance inside? You will find bones, you will find all kinds of nasty things, but you will not find a dance. You can cut the throat of a singer, but you will not find the song – and you had always believed that the song came from the throat! The throat is only a vehicle; the song comes from the beyond. The throat can be a good vehicle or a bad vehicle – that is a different matter – but it is only a vehicle. By dissecting the vehicle you cannot find that which was descending on it from the world of the beyond.Love and logic never meet, cannot meet. Logic means the outward journey, love means the inward journey. Logic means dissection, love means finding the organic unity. Logic thinks in terms of the many, the multiple.In fact, scientists should stop calling the universe “universe,” they should call it “multiverse.” “Universe” is a poetic name given by lovers; universe means one, uni. According to science it is not a universe, it is many, it is a multiverse. Only lovers know the unity, thinkers cannot know unity.In the unity of the whole one finds love, and one finds wisdom. Wisdom is the shadow of love: wherever there is love there is wisdom. When love is alive there is dance, there is song, there is beauty; those are all the qualities of wisdom. If you think logic can give you wisdom then you will have to decide one thing very clearly, and that is that knowledge has to be taken as wisdom. Then logic can give you wisdom, but then knowledge becomes equivalent to, synonymous with, wisdom – and knowledge is not synonymous with wisdom. Knowledge is all borrowed, rubbish; you have gathered it from others.Wisdom is the explosion of your own consciousness. Wisdom is intrinsic; it does not come from the outside, it explodes within you and spreads toward the outer world. It is like light radiating: you share it, you don’t accumulate it. Knowledge has to be begged for, wisdom has to be shared. They are totally different dimensions.Philosophy cannot give you love or wisdom, but it can go on giving you hope. If philosophy is the answer, it must have been a silly question.Remember it, if you can find any answer through philosophy that simply proves one thing: that your question was silly. If the question is really significant, philosophy has no answer. You will have to look in a different direction. That direction I call Zen, that direction I call awakening – not theorizing, philosophizing, but becoming silent; not becoming more knowledgeable but dropping all knowledge, discarding it so that you can be empty, utterly empty. In emptiness there is clarity, there is cleanliness, there is purity, there is innocence, a child-like wonder and awe. And those are the moments of love and wisdom growing in you; they grow together. Knowledge and logic grow together. Wisdom and love grow together.A famous zoology professor at the Sorbonne had the habit of giving his students an oral exam at the end of his course, and he always asked the same question: “Tell me all you know about worms.”Of course his students would goof around all semester and then just before the exam study assiduously all about worms. And they all got very high marks.Finally the professor became concerned that all his students were doing so well. The time came to give the exam and meanwhile all the students were studying all about worms. When the first student came for the exam, the professor asked, “Tell me all you know about elephants.”The student was profoundly flustered for a moment, then he answered, “Elephants have worm-like tails. Worms are classified…” and then he started.Knowledge is always unintelligent: if a question is asked for which you have a ready-made answer it is good; if a question is asked for which you don’t have a ready-made answer you are in trouble. You are just behaving mechanically. Knowledge is mechanical, and how can anything mechanical help you to be wise? Knowledge is nothing but categorization.Once upon a time there was a handsome young lion. He was captured in the African jungle and brought to America where he was put on display in a zoo. This made the lion very unhappy because he preferred the freedom of his wild native land and the companionship of other jungle beasts. But after a time he became resigned to his fate and made up his mind that if he had to live behind bars he would be the best zoo lion around.In an adjoining cage there was another lion, an old and lazy one with a negative attitude and no signs of ambition or capability of any kind. He lay all day in the sun, aroused no interest from visitors. In sharp contrast, the young lion paced for hours back and forth in his cage. He acted the true King of Beasts, rolling his maned head, snarling and baring his teeth. The crowds loved him; they paid no attention to the indolent old lion asleep in the next cage.The young lion appreciated the attention he was getting, but he was annoyed by his failure to win adequate reward. Each afternoon the zoo keeper came through the cages to feed the animals. The lazy old lion who made no effort to please the spectators was given a big bowl of red horse meat. The young lion, now a star attraction, was given a bowl of chopped-up oranges, bananas and nuts. This made him very unhappy.“Perhaps,” he mused, “I am not trying hard enough. I will improve the act.” So he strutted longer and more spectacularly. To the snarls and gnashing of teeth he added frequent roars that shook the bars of his cage. The crowds got bigger. Thousands of citizens came to see his performance and he was pictured on page one in the local newspaper.But the diet did not change. Still the lazy lion got the red meat and the young lion stayed on a vegetarian diet. Finally he could endure it no longer. He stopped the keeper with a challenge. “I am getting sick and tired of this,” he complained. “Each day you give that no-good lazy type next door a big bowl of red meat and you feed me oranges, bananas and nuts. It is grossly unfair. Why do you think all these people come to the zoo? They come to see me! I am the star attraction, the lion that is doing all the work and the one that gets the results. Why am I not entitled to meat for dinner?”The keeper replied, “Young man, you don’t know how lucky you are. The Table of Organization in this zoo calls for one lion. You are being carried as a monkey!”The philosophers are good at categorizing things; the scientists are good at categorizing things. Their whole effort is how to categorize, how to put everything in a particular category – this is this, that is that – and they go on and on. They are not in search of the organic unity of life, they are not in search of the ultimate principle of life that runs in the trees, and the mountains, and the stars, and the animals, and the birds, and men and women. They are not in search of that unifying factor. That unifying factor is what religions have called the truth, what Buddha has called nirvana, what Jesus has called the Kingdom of God.You will not find any wisdom, any love in philosophy. Yes, you will find all kinds of beautiful answers; you will find all kinds of parrot-like information and facts. You will become very efficient in repeating them, in quoting them, but you will only be becoming a computer. That can be done better by a computer than by you.Find out something within you which a computer cannot do and you will have found the right direction for your innermost being, for your freedom. That is the whole effort of Zen. That’s what we are trying to do here. The computer cannot love; it can say, “I love you,” but you know that it is a computer. It can make all the gestures of love, but if suddenly the electricity goes…”Grrr, grrr, grrr.” Or if the battery runs out, you have to replace the battery, then it will say, “I love you.”But people are foolish and people are trying all kinds of things to make man more like a robot.Just the other day I was reading this item in a newspaper, Mundane Mating, Toronto, 25th February:“Men and women in the future will have robot sexual partners, and erotic technology will offer them their hearts’ desires: stimulants, aphrodisiacs, and chemical orgasms.“Sexologists concluded during a seminar here that men and women will still mate, but only during well-defined periods. Some said that women will want the ‘profound and basic experience’ of pregnancy without giving birth.“One sexologist said that sexual relations with robots will help to ‘supplement or enrich fantasy life and contribute to the establishment of a milieu which fosters rather than arrests sexual growth and development.’”It is going to happen! In a way it has already happened. For thousands of years man has been making love mechanically, and the so-called mahatmas – Mahatma Gandhi and the Polack Pope and Mother Teresa – they all say that if you make love for one reason only – that is reproduction – then it is not sin. If you make love just for the sheer joy of it, for the sheer fun of it, it is sin.Reproduction is chemical, biological; fun is a higher value. No animal knows anything about fun. Have you seen animals making love? Do you see any fun? They don’t even say, “Hello!” to each other, and when they are finished they don’t even say, “Thank you, see you soon!” They don’t even look at each other; they seem to be utterly bored. Look at animals making love – they seem to be utterly bored, as if some biological force is forcing them to do something and they have to do it. Once they are finished they go on their ways; they will never recognize each other again, they will not write love letters.Fun is not animal, fun is human. All these mahatmas go on condemning man for everything animal except reproduction – and reproduction is absolutely animal! All animals reproduce; there is nothing special in it. The only thing is they don’t enjoy it, they don’t have any fun in it, they don’t have any loving relationship growing out of it, they don’t transform the sexual energy. But reproduction is thought to be a virtue and fun is thought to be something absolutely condemnable. These people have always changed human joy into a robot-like phenomenon.People have been making love to each other in the darkness, under blankets. If a Martian comes to the earth, particularly to India, he will not see any sign of anybody making love. He will be very puzzled about how these people reproduce. His basic inquiry here will be to find out how you reproduce, because he will not see anybody making love. Love is far away, he will not even see any people holding hands.I have heard:Once a couple reached Mars, and of course their basic inquiry was…because they could not find out how people made love there. They tried hard; they did all kinds of things that they had done on Earth to know about other people’s love affairs – they became peeping toms – but they could not find out anything.Finally they asked a Martian couple, very politely, “We have come from Earth, we are on a research tour. We want to know how you make love.”They said, “It is very simple!” They opened their fridge, brought out two jars, started mixing the chemicals in the jars into a third small jar, mixed them well and put the jars back into the fridge.The couple inquiring about lovemaking could not see any lovemaking in it. They said, “What are you doing? Are you preparing coffee or something?”The Martians said, “No, because in nine months this new jar will have a child in it. We have mixed all the ingredients needed. This is how we reproduce.”The couple from Earth started laughing. They said, “Then tell us one thing more – how do you prepare coffee?”Then the Martians undressed and started making love! And the couple from Earth went into hysterical laughter; they could not believe what was happening. They were making coffee!The Martians asked, “What are you laughing at? Why are you laughing?”They said, “Because this is the way we reproduce – and you are making coffee! So this is the coffee which you served us this morning!”Man has been trying to find some scientific way to reproduce so that everything can become mechanical. Then even love will no longer be private. Wisdom has already been taken over by the churches, the universities; love is still a little bit private. Of course, society has dominated almost ninety-nine percent of it through marriage, through all kinds of laws, through all kinds of legal bindings, but still one percent remains private. The society is not very happy about that part either; that part has also to be encroached upon – your love also has to be taken away from you. Wisdom was taken away long ago, now love has to be taken away. Then you are reduced to a machine, a servile machine, a slave; then you will only repeat cliches.A man rings at the chaplain’s door. When the housekeeper opens the door the man says, “I am bringing you the twenty-four thousand liters of oil you ordered.”The housekeeper is very surprised and asks the chaplain if he ordered all those liters of oil. The chaplain is even more surprised, but suddenly he remembers his parrot. So he storms into the room and shouts, “Did you order twenty-four thousand liters of oil?”“No,” says the parrot.“Are you sure? Quite sure?” asks the chaplain.“Yes!” shrills the parrot.“Well, just wait!” replies the chaplain. “If I find out that you have been lying, I’ll nail you by your two wings to the wall!”Sure enough, he soon discovers that it is the parrot that placed the order, so he nails it to the wall.After the parrot has been hanging there for a while, he sadly looks out of the window and sees the crucifix in front of the church. He lifts his head and says, “Well, Jesus, did you order twenty-four thousand liters of oil too?”Man has been reduced to a parrot. My sannyasins have to come out of all these cages – the cages that philosophy, theology, science and all other kinds of things have created around you. You have to come out of it all, in toto – not partially, not gradually, not slowly, not tomorrow but now, at this very moment.“Riko!”“Yes, Master,” said the official with a start.“See,” said Nansen, “the goose is out!”Enough for today.

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The Goose is Out 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Goose is Out 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I feel that we need to hurry, that there is not much time left. The cocoon of slumber I am existing in seems to suffocate me, and I am afraid I will never make it.You say the goose is out already. Why does it feel so impossible to grasp?It is difficult to grasp because the goose is out; if it were in there would be no difficulty in grasping it. The bottle is dead, you can grasp it. The bottle is like a philosophy, theology, dogma, creed, cult, doctrine – just a corpse. The goose is alive, it is life itself; you cannot grasp it. It is not conceptual, it is existential. Who is going to grasp whom?You are the goose! The mind is your bottle, and the mind is not something that can be broken. It is not material; it is just a thought, an imagination, the same stuff as dreams are made of. You cannot destroy a dream, you cannot kill a dream, you cannot cut a dream with a sword, you cannot burn it with fire. You just have to be awake, and the dream disappears. In fact, to say that the dream disappears is not right, because it was not there in the first place; it only appeared to be there.That is the meaning of the Eastern word maya: illusion, a mirage – it appears but it exists not. You can see the horizon far away – it appears; it appears real. It seems that the earth is meeting the sky there; just a little effort and you will reach it. It seems within your capacity to reach it, but you can never reach it for the simple reason that it is only a mirage, it is not a reality. The earth and the sky never meet, there is no meeting place. So the closer you come to the so-called horizon, the more the horizon goes on and on disappearing ahead of you. The distance between you and the horizon always remains constant.Albert Einstein says that the only thing constant in existence is the speed of light. I am not a physicist, I don’t know whether he is right or wrong, but I know one thing which is absolutely constant and that is the distance between you and the horizon. That is absolutely constant – not a single inch less can it be, not a single inch more can it be. The difference, the distance, between the real and the unreal cannot be reduced.The mind is unreal, hence it is not really a question of coming out of it; it is only a question of seeing.Hence, the crazy master Nansen said, “See, the goose is out!” He was not making a logical statement – he was not saying, “See, therefore the goose is out.” He was not even saying what Christmas Humphreys implies. Christmas Humphreys says, “There, the goose is out!” It cannot be said by Nansen. Nansen is not referring to there and here, he is not even referring to then and now. He is simply saying, “See, the goose is out! It has never been in, it cannot be in.”Your consciousness is always free, it is freedom itself. The problem is arising, because you want to grasp it. This is mind trying to grasp something which is beyond its capacities. The illusory cannot grasp the real and the real cannot grasp the illusory, remember. The illusory cannot grasp because it is not; the real cannot grasp the illusory because how can you grasp the illusory? It is not there at all.Hence Gautama the Buddha says, “The moment you are absolutely empty and aware, all is found.” It is only a question of shaking you up. It is a nightmare; the goose in the bottle is a nightmare. And sometimes it can happen in a very strange situation. It happened in many strange situations in the past.In Joseph Grimaldi’s memoirs, as edited by Charles Dickens, there is the following story:“In the July of this year a very extraordinary circumstance occurred at Sadler’s Wells, which was the great topic of conversation in the neighborhood for some time afterward. It happened thus:“Captain George Harris, of the Royal Navy, had recently returned to England after a long voyage. The crew had been paid off; many of them followed their commander to London and proceeded to enjoy themselves after the usual fashion of sailors. Sadler’s Wells was at that time a famous place of resort with the blue jackets, the gallery being sometimes almost solely occupied by seamen and their female companions. A large body of Captain Harris’ men resorted hither one night. Among them was a man who was deaf and dumb, and had been so for many years.“This man was placed by his shipmates in the front row of the gallery. Grimaldi was in great form that night; although the audience was in one roar of laughter, nobody appeared to enjoy his fun and humor more than this poor fellow. His companions good-naturedly took a great deal of notice of him and one of them, who talked very well with his fingers, inquired how he liked the entertainments; to which the deaf-and-dumb man replied through the same medium, and with various gestures of great delight, that he had never seen anything half so comical before.“As the scene progressed, Grimaldi’s tricks and jokes became still more irresistible; and at length, after a violent peal of laughter and applause which quite shook the theater and in which the dumb man joined most heartily, he suddenly turned to his mate, who sat next to him, and cried out with much glee, ‘What a damned funny fellow!’ ‘Why, Jack,’ shouted the other man, starting back with great surprise, ‘can you speak?’ ‘Speak!’ replied the other, ‘Ay, that I can, and hear, too.’“Upon this the whole party, of course, gave three vehement cheers, and at the conclusion of the piece adjourned in a great procession with the recovered man, elevated on the shoulders of a half-dozen friends, in the center. A crowd of people quickly assembled round the door, and great excitement and curiosity were occasioned as the information ran from mouth to mouth that a deaf-and-dumb man had come to speak and hear, all owing to the cleverness of Joey Grimaldi.“The landlady of the tavern, thinking Grimaldi would like to see his patient, told the man that if he would call next morning he would see the actor who had made him laugh so much. Grimaldi, being apprised of the circumstances, repaired to the house at the appointed time, and saw him, accompanied by several of his companions, all of whom still continued to manifest the liveliest interest in the sudden change that had happened to their friend, and kept on cheering and drinking and treating everybody in the house, in proof of their gratification.“The man, who appeared an intelligent well-behaved fellow, said that in the early part of his life he could both speak and hear very well; and that he had attributed his deprivation of the two senses to the intense heat of the sun in the quarter of the world to which he had been and from which he had very recently returned. He added that on the previous evening he had for a long time felt a powerful anxiety to express his delight at what was passing on the stage; and that after some feat of Grimaldi’s which struck him as being particularly amusing he had made a strong effort to deliver his thoughts, in which to his own astonishment, no less than that of his companions, he succeeded.“Mr. Charles Dibdin, who was present, put several questions to the man; and from his answers it appeared to everyone present that he was speaking the truth. Indeed, his story was in some measure confirmed by Captain Harris himself; for one evening, about six months afterward, as Grimaldi was narrating the circumstances in the Green Room at Covent Garden, that gentleman, who chanced to be present, immediately remarked that he had no reason from the man’s behavior while with him to suppose him an impostor, and that he had seen him on that day in full possession of his senses.”What actually happened? It was a laughter which shook him from his very roots. For a moment he forgot that he was in the bottle, for a moment he was outside the bottle, for a moment those forty years of deafness and dumbness disappeared. It is a simple forgetting.That’s what happens in the presence of a master. Sometimes it can happen without the master – Grimaldi was not Nansen. Grimaldi himself was surprised, he could not believe his eyes; he was not trying to wake the man up.It has happened in the past in many strange situations, unexpectedly. In fact, it has happened more unexpectedly than it has ever happened with expectation, because expectation belongs to the mind, and when you are not expecting anything you are more relaxed, you are more calm, at ease. The goose can slip out of the nonexistential bottle more easily if it is relaxed. If it is tense and trying to get out of it, that very tension will keep it in.That’s what is happening to you. You say: “Why does it feel so impossible to grasp?”It is impossible to grasp! If you are trying to grasp it, it is impossible; if you drop grasping, it is immediately possible, instantly possible – not even a single moment is lost.The story is told that sometime in the last century a prominent European physician was examining an elderly man. After checking him over thoroughly and listening to his many vague complaints, the physician could find nothing physically wrong which would account for this patient’s symptoms. We might imagine that it occurred to the doctor, just as it might to one of his latter-day colleagues, that his patient’s physical complaints were in all probability serving as a mask for deep-seated emotional stress and depression.Suddenly, an inspired idea came to him. He said to the old man that Joseph Grimaldi, perhaps the greatest clown of all times, was in town for a performance that very evening, and he told the whole story which I have just told you. The physician shrugged his shoulders about his inability to arrive at a diagnosis and suggested to the patient, “Why don’t you go to see Grimaldi tonight?”A distressed and disappointed expression suddenly played across the old man’s face, and he exclaimed, “Oh, but you don’t understand. I am Grimaldi!”It has happened that in the company of a pseudo master somebody becomes enlightened; in a situation where no master was present, a natural accident took place, and somebody has become enlightened.Lao Tzu became enlightened through seeing a dead leaf falling from a tree. He was sitting under a tree meditating for years, and nothing was happening – and he had been to great masters. Something was missing. He was trying too hard to grasp the truth; that very effort was the barrier. That early spring morning, the birds singing, the trees swaying, the sun shining, the fragrance of the flowers… He forgot all about enlightenment.Once in a while it is very good to forget all about enlightenment; otherwise it can drive you nuts – more than anything else! Money will not drive you as crazy, nor will politics, because they are all graspable. If you try hard you can get as much money as you want; just a little effort, a little cunningness, a little calculation – something Jewish in your blood – and you can manage. Something of the insane in you, and you can become a politician.When Adolf Hitler started, nobody ever thought that he would become one of the greatest historical figures of the twentieth century. Two friends, a great psychologist and a great theologian, heard him speak for the first time, and both agreed that this insane man would never be able to make his name in any possible way. Both agreed on it: one was an expert in psychological matters; the other was an expert in theological matters. It was a great agreement between a psychologist and a spiritualist.The man who was a theologian finally became the Pope. By that time Adolf Hitler had become the most powerful man in the world. The Pope’s old psychologist friend came to see him and he reminded him, “What do you say about it now? We both agreed that this man would never make his name in the world of politics; he was simply insane. Who was going to be impressed by him in a country like Germany which can brag about its intelligence and brag sincerely, truthfully? It is one of the most intelligent countries in the world. Who was going to be befooled by this maniac? We agreed, but what do you say now? He has made his mark; his name is going to remain part of history forever.”The Pope looked at the psychologist and said, “Yes, I made that comment, but at that time I was not infallible!”Neurotics, nuts, cuckoos, they can make their name, they can be great politicians, they can be the wealthiest people in the world, they can become very famous. All that is needed is a crazy urge to be on top – it is graspable.Enlightenment is ungraspable, so the more you try to grasp it, the less it is possible. You cannot hold enlightenment in your fist – the tighter the fist, the less is the possibility. But you can hold enlightenment in your open hands; that is the only way to hold it. In your open hands you can hold the whole sky, all the stars, the whole existence, but in your closed fist there is nothing. The more closed it is, the more tight it is, the less is the possibility of anything being there. Enlightenment has to be achieved with open hands, by a relaxed, calm, quiet resting in your being.It happened to Lao Tzu that way. For years he was trying to grasp and grasp, and nothing was happening. That morning he simply forgot all about it. It was so beautiful, so sunny, there was so much delight all around, who cared about enlightenment? For a moment that ambition was put aside. And just by coincidence a dead leaf, which must have been hanging off the tree, started falling.Lao Tzu saw it falling from above, slowly, slowly. He watched it, he became just a watcher; there was nothing to do. He observed it: he remained aware of the swaying, and the leaf falling in the subtle breeze of the morning. As it settled on the ground something settled in Lao Tzu too. Suddenly the feeling of “Eureka!” Suddenly a great outburst of joy: “Aha!” He danced…the goose was out!When the goose is out, what else can you do except dance, sing, laugh – laugh at the whole absurdity of it all, that you were never in, though you had believed that you were in? Your belief was the only imprisonment.You ask me: “I feel that we need to hurry…”What is the hurry? All of eternity is yours! You have always been here, you are here, you will always be here. Nothing is ever lost. Now it is a confirmed scientific truth that nothing is ever destroyed. If matter is not destroyed, why should consciousness be destroyed? Matter belongs to a very gross plane of existence. If the gross plane is so valued by existence, do you think the higher manifestation is not valued by existence? The higher plane is more valued! If matter persists and is impossible to destroy, consciousness cannot be destroyed either. It is the highest expression of life; there is nothing higher. It is the very Everest of life, the peak beyond which there is nothing. All of existence is moving toward that peak. There is no hurry.The whole idea of hurry is a creation of the mind. Let me say it in this way: mind and time are synonymous; the moment your mind stops, time also stops. The more you are in your mind, the more you are in time; the less you are in your mind, the more you are out of time.There is a famous statement of Jesus Christ – of course, this is not related in the Bible. The Bible has missed many beautiful statements of Jesus, but truth has its own way of persisting. It has been carried by the Sufi mystics down through the ages.The statement is: somebody asked Jesus, “You talk again and again about the Kingdom of God. What will be the most special thing about the Kingdom of God? What will be the most unique phenomenon in this Kingdom of God that you talk about?”Jesus said – it is a very simple statement but very pregnant; he said, “There shall be time no longer.” Strange, unexpected. One would have expected something else from Jesus: God the Father will be there; the Holy Ghost will be there; all the saints will be there, and angels will be playing “alleluia” on their harps – something like that. And what he said was totally different. He said, “There shall be time no longer” – and he was right.Eternity means timelessness. But the Judaic tradition out of which three religions were born – the Jewish religion, the Christian religion and the Mohammedan religion –all contain the idea of one life. That idea of one life creates hurry, worry, a constant rush to reach, not knowing exactly where you want to reach to, or what to reach for, or what you will do even if you do reach the goal. A craziness has been created because time is short, and it is slipping out of your hands, and soon death will knock on the doors, and you are still unfulfilled – nothing special has happened yet.Hence, as days pass your anguish becomes deeper and deeper; your anxiety becomes greater and greater. Your life becomes a burden; you start dragging yourself. You are constantly trembling and afraid that you are not going to make it.That’s what is in this question. It reads: “The cocoon of slumber I am existing in seems to suffocate me, and I am afraid I will never make it.”There is nothing to make! All that is needed has happened; it is there from the very beginning. You have to enjoy it, not make it. You have to rejoice in it, not make it. The idea of a small span of life, say seventy years, gives rise to a great trembling, because one-third of it will be lost in sleep, another third will be lost in education, schools, colleges, universities and all kinds of nonsense. The remaining third will be wasted in earning bread and butter, quarreling with the wife, taking care of the children, nagging the husband, fighting with the neighbors, competing for this and that.In fact, if you sit down quietly one day and write down how your life has been spent up to now, you will be shocked! What have you been doing? Even small things take much of your time – shaving your beard and mustache every day… Look at women standing before the mirror for hours – even the mirrors get tired! How much time are you wasting reading the same stupid newspapers every day? It is the same story –nothing new ever happens. There is no news, it is all old – the same rape that has been happening for thousands of years…Just the other day Sheela brought me a cutting from an English newspaper. A bishop – and who else? – had been sentenced to twelve years’ jail time for raping many women. That was his only work; he was doing it religiously. But this is not an exception; the poor bishop’s only fault was that he was caught; otherwise all bishops are bound to do it. They are ordained to do it, disciplined to do it! Their whole lives are structured such that they have to be phony, pseudo, double. He was living a double life, and all the rapes that he committed were committed after his beautiful, spiritual sermons. First he would sermonize about the great things of life – and celibacy must have been one of those great things – and then, because of his beautiful sermons, his learned scholarship and his mask of a religious holy man, he was able to seduce all kinds of women. And they were innocent girls, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen years old. He had been doing it for years, but when you do it behind a religious screen it is easier.It was a long report, a full-page story: I told Sheela, “Keep it, because this is an old thing; it has always been happening. This is what the rishis, the munis, the bishops, the saints have always been doing. This man is unfortunate.”One of my teachers, a very beautiful old man, used to say before every examination in school… He used to be the superintendent of the examinations. I loved that old man, his honesty, his truthfulness. He would come and tell all the students, “I am not against it if you are copying from others, or if you have brought books with you, or if you have brought notes with you – that has nothing to do with me. My whole concern is that you should not be caught. If you are caught then you will be in difficulty, so make sure… If you are certain you will not be caught there will be no problem with me, but if you are caught then I cannot save you.”So he would say, “I will give you five minutes. Close your eyes and ponder over the situation, and those who have brought books, notes, etcetera, to cheat with can give them to me – no notice will be taken. But once you decide to cheat then don’t get caught. Then be clever enough; then be intelligent enough… And remember one thing: that if you are intelligent enough you need not have those notes! So let me warn you that having those notes simply proves you are not intelligent enough, and you will be caught!”Immediately people would start bringing their copies, their notes, and he would gather them from almost everybody!I loved that old man, he was sincere. He was saying that the question is not that you are cheating, the question is that you should not be caught.What you read in the newspapers is that some people have been caught. Everybody is doing the same – with very few differences. The quantity may be different but the quality is the same. Murders are being done, rapes are being done, wars continue, all kinds of stupid things go on and on for centuries, and you are reading all these things and wasting your time, seeing a movie, seeing a TV show or listening to the same old scriptures. You have heard them thousands of times, you know the whole story, but still you go on keeping yourself occupied.If in a seventy-year life you can find even seven minutes which were just yours – unoccupied, undistracted, relaxed, resting in your own being – that will be enough. But those seven minutes are missing, hence the hurry. Life is short and it is running by, and there is no other life. Death will come and you will die utterly empty, unfulfilled. This hurry is not going to help, this hurry simply makes things more difficult. It keeps you running, certainly, it keeps you chasing shadows, but while you are chasing shadows you are again wasting your time.So, you say: “I feel that we need to hurry…”If you are here with me forget all about hurrying, forget all about time. Jesus says: “There shall be time no longer in my Kingdom of God.” I say to you: drop time, and this very moment, here and now, you are in the Kingdom of God. Why wait for the Kingdom of God? I would like to reverse Jesus’s statement. He says: “Enter the Kingdom of God, because there shall be time no longer”. This is not right; it is putting the horse behind the cart. How will you enter the Kingdom of God? Where will you enter the Kingdom of God from? The very idea that there will no longer be any time in the Kingdom of God will put you in a deep hurry: “How to reach it quickly? How to enter the Kingdom of God so that there will be no time, no problem, no anxiety, and one will live in the eternal now?” But that “now” becomes a “then.” Now becomes a goal.If you see the point, I say drop time, and in that very dropping the goose is out – because time is mind. Drop time and you are in the Kingdom of God. Not only are you in the Kingdom of God, but you have always been in it – time was creating a nightmare around you, your mind was there fabricating all kinds of dreams. You were surrounded by a mist of your own creation.You say: “The cocoon of slumber I am existing in seems to suffocate me, and I am afraid I will never make it.”I am also afraid! If you try to make it, you will never make it. Drop the whole idea of making it, forget all about it. Rejoice in the moment! Can’t you listen to the distant call of the cuckoo, can’t you listen to the crows, can’t you listen to the birds? They are now and here. No hurry, no yesterdays, no tomorrows.Jesus says to his disciples, “Look at the beautiful lilies in the field. They are far more beautiful; they have far more grandeur than even King Solomon had, attired in all his glory.” What is the secret of those poor lilies? The secret, Jesus says, is that they think not of the morrow, they live now. Life is now, so there is no need to make it. It is already here! You are in it!Kabir says; “You are like a fish which is thirsty in the ocean.” You are born in it, you are part of it, you live in it, you are a manifestation of it and you will disappear into it. You are just like a wave in the ocean. But the fish is thirsty in the ocean because she is contemplating some other ocean, some other life, some other time, some other space, some Kingdom of God.Drop all that rubbish! There is no other Kingdom of God than this moment. The trees are already in it, the mountains are already in it, the stars are already in it – only man has fallen away, only man has gone astray. The reason why man has gone astray is his effort to grasp it, to understand it, to make a conceptual system in which he can logically put everything. Existence is paradoxical. If you try to make it logical you are never going to make it, you are never going to grasp it.You say: “Osho, you say the goose is out already. Why does it feel so impossible to grasp?”Because it is already out! Just see the point; don’t think about it. A moment’s thought and you have gone far away. Don’t brood about it, just see it. It is not a question of thinking about and about, going in circles, it is not a question of great intellectuality, of philosophical acumen, of logical efficiency. It is not a question of a trained mind, it is a question of an innocent heart.Just see it! Wipe your eyes of all the tears, wipe your eyes of all the dust that has accumulated on them, and just look at existence. A leaf falling from the tree may become your enlightenment.Buddha became enlightened seeing the last star in the morning disappearing. As the star disappeared, Buddha became enlightened.Enlightenment is not something that has to be achieved, it is something that is your very nature. So don’t try to chase your own tail. You must have seen dogs doing it… Dogs are very philosophical, Aristotelian; they suffer from aristotolitis! You can see them in the winter morning enjoying the sun, but they cannot fully enjoy it because of the tail. The tail is always there; they would like to catch hold of it. They jump, and the tail jumps away, they jump harder – a logical conclusion: you have not jumped hard enough, you have to make a greater effort. The greater the effort they make, the faster the tail jumps – and they start going crazy. It is the dog’s own tail; there is no need to chase it.Existence, enlightenment, truth, they all belong to you; there is no need to grasp, to achieve in the first place. And then it is achieved, and then it is grasped.The second question:Osho,I am a radical revolutionary politician. Have you something to say to me?You have already gone too far, you will not listen. Just to be a politician is enough, but you are a revolutionary radical politician – cancer doubled, trebled! Is not politics enough? Do you also have to be radical, revolutionary? We always find beautiful words to hide ugly realities.No politician can be revolutionary, because the only revolution is spiritual. No politician can be radical either; the very word radical means concerning the roots. The politician only prunes the leaves; he has nothing to do with the roots. Only enlightenment takes you to the roots, only meditation takes you to the roots of the problems.Politics has always existed, politicians have always existed, but what has happened? The world remains the same sorry-go-round! In fact, misery goes on becoming multiplied every day. All these revolutionaries and radical politicians have only proved to be mischievous – with good intentions, of course. But intentions don’t count at all; what counts is consciousness.The politician has no consciousness; in fact, he is trying to avoid his own inner problems, he is trying to escape from his own problems. The easiest way to escape from oneself is to become concerned about world problems, economics, politics, history, service to the poor, transformation of the conditions of society, reformation. All these are strategies for escaping from one’s own problems, subtle strategies – dangerous, because one feels that one is doing something great, while one is simply being a coward.First face your own problems, encounter them. First try to transform your being. Only a transformed person can trigger processes of transformation in others.You ask me: “Have you something to say to me?”Remember two things. First, the three rules of ruination. There are three ways to be ruined in this world: first is by sex, second is by gambling, and the third is by politics. Sex is the most fun; gambling is the most exciting; and politics is the surest.The second rule, remember the fundamental law of all revolutions: when the revolution comes, things will be different – not better, just different.Politicians have been driving the whole world for centuries – where to, to what end? Is it not time that we see the stupidity of the whole game? At least we are aware, fully aware, of five thousand years of politics; before that the case must have been the same. But in five thousand years of political games what has happened? Man remains in the same darkness, in the same misery, in the same hell. Yes, politics goes on giving man hope, a hope for a better tomorrow which never comes. Tomorrows never come.It is the opiate of the people. Karl Marx says religion is the opiate of the people. It is true, it is true ninety-nine point nine percent; only point one percent it is not true. A Buddha, a Jesus, a Lao Tzu, a Zarathustra, these few people can be counted in that point one percent. Otherwise Karl Marx is ninety-nine point nine percent accurate; religion has proved the opiate of the people. It has kept people in a drugged state, in such a sleep that they can tolerate an intolerable existence – they can tolerate all kinds of slavery, starvation – in the hope of a better tomorrow. Religions used to provide a better tomorrow in the other world, after death.People come to me and ask, “What will happen after death?” I don’t answer them; I ask them another question instead. I ask them, “Forget all about after death, let me ask you one thing: “What is happening before death?” Because whatsoever is happening before death will continue to happen after death. It is a continuum: your consciousness will be the same – before or after will not make any difference. The body may not be the same, the container may change, but the content will remain the same. Whatsoever happens is happening to the content, not to the container.Think about the goose, don’t be bothered about the bottle. You may have a different bottle, better produced, of better material, more sophisticated, a crystal bottle, a diamond bottle, but that does not make any difference. What makes the difference is your consciousness – the goose.First, religion was giving opiate to the people tomorrow, after death. Millions of people remained in that state of druggedness, under that chloroform – religious chloroform. Now politics is doing the same. Even communism has proved nothing but a new opiate for the masses – communism is a new kind of religion. The strategy is the same: “Tomorrow will come the revolution, and everything will be all right.” You have to sacrifice your today for tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes.Sixty years have passed since the Russian revolution, and tomorrow is still as far away as before. Thirty years have passed since the Indian revolution, the Gandhian revolution, and tomorrow remains as far away, in fact, farther away than before. The people who sacrificed sacrificed in vain; it would have been better if they had lived. The people who were killed were really committing suicide, hoping that they were doing a great service to humanity.Don’t create more madness in the world; it is already full of madness.A colleague of mine once worked in a mental hospital. While making the rounds he would test the patient by asking, “Why are you here?” The response usually revealed the patient’s degree of reality orientation.One morning the psychologist received a response that rocked him. “I am here,” replied the patient, “for the same reason you are, doctor: I couldn’t make a go of it in the outside world.”The patients and the doctors, the people and the politicians are all in the same boat. They are all Ayatollah Khomaniacs! All kinds of maniacs are loose in the world. If you drop out of your radical revolutionary politics there will be at least one Khomaniac less, and that will be a great blessing.The third question:Osho,I have heard you say that knowledge is useless. Then what is needed to guide us to the ultimate goal?There is one good thing about your question that I appreciate: you say, “I have heard you say.” All the Buddhist scriptures begin in that way; that is a very sincere thing. The Christian, the Judaic, the Hindu, the Mohammedan scriptures don’t begin that way, but all Buddhist scriptures begin, “I have heard the master say” – because it is not a question whether the master has said it or not, “I have heard it”; these are two different things. The master may have said one thing; you may have heard something totally different, because between you and the master there is a great barrier – the barrier of the mind – prejudices, concepts, preconceived ideas. So what you hear is not necessarily the thing that is said.This is good that you say, “I have heard you say.” You are not saying that I have said it. You are saying, “I have heard…” It may be right, it may not be right; I may have said it, I may not have said it.This has to be remembered by all of my sannyasins: whenever you are quoting me, remember, it is what you have heard. There is a possibility it may have been said, there is a possibility it may not have been said at all; something else may have been said.And that’s actually what has happened.You say: “I have heard you say that knowledge is useless.”No, I have not said that. Knowledge is very useful – wisdom is useless! Knowledge is needed in the marketplace, in business, in politics. Everywhere knowledge is needed – in technology, in science – everywhere knowledge is needed. Knowledge is very useful, utilitarian. Wisdom is absolutely useless, but that’s its beauty. It is not a commodity, you cannot use it in any way; you cannot sell it, you cannot purchase it. It does not belong to the utilitarian world; it is a flowering.What use is a rose flower? What use is the song of a bird? What use is it? If you look around in existence – the stars, the clouds, the mountains, the rivers – what is the use of it all? It is all useless. Why are butterflies so beautiful? Why does God take so much care in painting their wings? What is the point of it all?Remember, the outside world is the world of utility; the inside world is the world of significance, not of utility. The outside world has a totally different dimension – it is needed. You need bread, you need butter, you need a house, you need medicine, you need clothes, shelter; you need thousands of things. But the inner world is simply one of luxury; it is not a need, it is a joy. It is sheer rejoicing.If somebody asks you, “What is the use of love?” the question is unanswerable, by the very use of the word use. Love is not a commodity, the world can go on without love – it is already going on without it. Everything is going perfectly well; in fact, it is only when love happens that some disturbance happens. Hence, all societies are against love.The world will go on perfectly well without musicians. Who needs musicians? They will not be able to drive a train, to pilot an airplane; they are not reliable people.I used to travel in India. One of my friends who died just a few months ago was a lover of traveling. I used to go on the fastest trains possible, because I had to cover the whole country. He loved to travel by passenger trains which stopped at every station, every small station. The journey that could have been completed within ten hours would take four days, five days, sometimes seven days. Whenever he was with me he would insist.One time I agreed and it was really a joy, because he knew every place where the tea was the best, where the milk was the purest, where you could get a good sweet, where you could get good apples, mangoes. In those five days of traveling with him I forgot all about where we were going – there was no need to go anywhere! And everybody knew him – the porters, the stationmasters, the drivers – because he was always traveling on these slow trains. At each station the train would stop for one hour, half an hour, two hours.One small station was a really beautiful place. The whole station was surrounded by a big mango grove, hundreds of mango trees. He took me out of the station and he started climbing a tree. I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “The mangoes are ripe!” And I said, “If the train leaves we will be in difficulty!” He said, “Don’t be worried. Come along with me.” I went with him. I was constantly telling him, “It is time now, the train will leave.” He said, “Don’t be worried. Do you see the man above us?” There was one man up in the tree. He said, “He is the driver. Unless he gets down, the train cannot move!”I enjoyed that moment!Life can be lived either with utility as your very style or it can be lived as a playfulness. Music, love, flowers, stars, poetry, painting, dancing, all belongs to the inner world. I am not against knowledge; when you are doing something in the world use your knowledge. There, to use wisdom is foolish; there, sitting in a car and meditating is dangerous. There, you should use all of your efficiency, all of your knowledge, all of your know-how, but you should not be confined by it. You should not become obsessed with it; you should be able to go inside. When the work is over you should be able to close the doors to the outside world and return to the inner. Then dance, sing, meditate, love, live. One should be flexible, liquid.This misunderstanding is possible with me, but you can see my approach if you don’t bring your mind in. I am not telling you to renounce the world for the simple reason that you can always use your knowledge. Sitting in a cave in the Himalayas you will not be able to use your knowledge. The outside world is as beautiful as the inside world: if we can have both, why choose one?My whole message is that you can eat the cake and have it too, so why go for half? Knowledge is useful in the outside world, in the inside world it is a hindrance. The same is true about the inner wisdom: it is of immense joy inside, but don’t try to use it outside.Both things have been done. The West has lived through knowledge only; hence it has lost the inner dimension. It has lost the inner flowering, and it has lost contact with its own being. The East has done the reverse: thinking that knowledge is useless, it has become unscientific, non-utilitarian, so its outside world has become shrunken. It is poor, ugly, unscientific.The West has lost contact with its own soul, and the East has lost contact with its own body. Man is a dance of these two complements; these two are partners in the dance. These two are like two wings: you cannot fly into the sky with only one wing. With one wing, you will fall. The West has fallen, the East has fallen; both have proved to be utter failures.We need a new kind of human being who has both wings: the wing of knowledge – science, technology; and the wing of meditation – enlightenment, love, and freedom. When both wings are functioning in a deep synchronicity, in a deep togetherness, in accord and harmony, only then is man complete, total.Knowledge is not needed for the inner world. About the inner world, you ask: “Then what is needed to guide us to the ultimate goal?”There is no ultimate goal – let it be clear from the very beginning. There is no goal as such; hence there is no question of there being an ultimate goal. All that is, is immediate – let me repeat, immediate. There is nothing ultimate anywhere; immediacy itself is the ultimate. There is no goal; the pilgrimage itself is the goal. Each step is the goal, each moment is the goal.For that, knowledge is not needed because knowledge is a guide for goals, for achievements. For that goal-less, immediate life, innocence is needed, not knowledge. Innocence, like a child – what Dionysus calls a “luminous ignorance” –that is exactly what is needed; a luminous ignorance, an enlightened state of not-knowing.You always think in terms of enlightenment, as if it were the ultimate in knowing. You are wrong. Enlightenment is the ultimate state of not-knowing; it is luminous ignorance, it is child-like. The sage again becomes a child. He starts collecting on the beach – colored stones, pebbles, seashells. He starts collecting wildflowers for no reason at all, just for the sheer joy of it.The Sunday school teacher asked her class of youngsters if they could name any of the Ten Commandments, and the kindergarten-aged boy stood up and announced proudly, “Thou shalt not omit adultery!”This is luminous ignorance, so innocent: “Thou shalt not omit adultery!”The pretty young schoolteacher was concerned about one of her eleven-year-old students. Taking him aside after class one day, she asked, “Victor, why has your schoolwork been so poor lately?”“I can’t concentrate,” replied the lad. “I’m afraid I have fallen in love.”“Is that so?” said the teacher, holding back an urge to smile. “And with whom?”“With you,” he answered.“But Victor,” exclaimed the secretly pleased young lady, “don’t you see how silly that is? It’s true that I would like a husband of my own someday, but I don’t want a child.”“Oh, don’t worry,” said Victor reassuringly, “I’ll be careful!”A stern father was taking his little son Johnny for a walk in the park when suddenly a honeybee settled on a rock in front of them. Just for spite, the boy smashed it with a rock, whereupon his father said, “That was cruel, and for being cruel you’ll get no honey for a whole year.”Later, Johnny deliberately stepped on a butterfly. “And for that, young man,” said the father, “you will get no butter for a year.” When they returned home, Johnny’s mother was busy fixing dinner. Just as they entered the kitchen, she spied a cockroach and immediately crushed it. The little boy looked at his father impishly and said, “Shall I tell her, dad, or will you?”The grade school principal dropped into the new third-grade teacher’s room to see how she was adjusting to her first day of school. “There is one problem,” she said. “That little boy in the first row belongs in the second grade but insists on remaining here, and he is so smart I hate to send him back.”“He can’t be that smart,” said the principal. “Ask him something.”The teacher called the boy forward and inquired, “What does a dog do on three legs that a man does on two legs that I do sitting down?”“Shake hands,” said the boy.“What has a cow got four of that I have only two of?” she went on.“Legs,” the boy replied.“What is a four-letter word meaning intercourse?” she continued.“Talk,” he answered.The teacher turned to the principal. “Well, what should I do?”He drew her aside and whispered, “Better promote him to the fourth grade. I missed all three questions!”The fourth question:Osho,Will you say something serious so that I can also understand?This is really a difficult question! I don’t know what seriousness is. I can try, but I don’t think I will succeed. I have never been serious – the more serious I look, the less I am! But let us try a few things for you. Who knows? You may get something serious out of it. People get all kinds of things which I have not said, which I have not meant, which I have not even dreamed of. And you may even understand something!In the old days it was the custom in the old Jewish villages that the night after someone got married the rabbi would come and inspect the bedsheets to see that the bride had been a virgin.The young bride knew this and also knew she would not pass the test. So she got up in the middle of the night and put some spots of ink on the bedsheet, but as it was dark she grabbed the wrong bottle and got green ink.The next morning, the rabbi came as expected and did his inspection. Suddenly he shouted, “What a monster! He poked her through the gallbladder!”No, it was not serious! Let us try again.An old gentleman and an old lady have a conversation. They talk about the good old times and he asks her, “Excuse me, did you ever blush?”“Oh yes,” she says, “four times. The first time when I undressed in front of my husband. The second time when I undressed in front of my lover. The third time when I took money for it. And the fourth time when I paid someone for it. And you?”The man is silent for a moment and then says, “I blushed twice. The first time when I couldn’t do it the second time. And the second time when I couldn’t do it the first time.”I missed again! I am not a good archer, because I don’t believe in targets and goals, so my arrows go everywhere except the target.The last attempt:It is the annual hunting season in heaven. But the Holy Ghost is reluctant to participate – every year up to now he has ended up with a shot in his bum.God the Father finally convinces him to participate and promises to watch over him carefully. But toward the end it happens again: there is a shot and the Holy Ghost jumps around in agony, hands on his lower back.In rage, God the Father runs into the bushes and pulls Joseph out. “Joseph!” he screams. “Will you never be able to forgive what he did with Mary?”Enough for today.

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The Goose is Out 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Goose is Out 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You are calling from the peak. I am lost in the echoing valleys. How may I come to you?There are no peaks, no valleys; the whole idea is a fabricated. There is no higher, no lower; there is no hierarchy in existence at all. It is just one cosmic whole; it is an organic unity.The egoist has always been trying to divide people into different categories: the ignorant, the enlightened; the sinners, the saints; the criminals, the virtuous; the notorious, the famous; the moral, the immoral. The game is the same: divide people and then try to belong to the higher category so you can pretend to be “holier than thou.”Hence, I want it to be continuously remembered by you that there are no peaks, and there are no valleys; we all belong to one oceanic whole. The smallest blade of grass is as significant as the greatest star. They all participate in the same cosmic play; they all contribute to its beauty, to its joy, to its song, to its celebration. Existence will be less even if a small blade of grass is missing; there will be something lacking, there will be an emptiness.My approach to life is non-divisive. My sannyasins are not my followers; they are not to imitate me; they are not to become me. So, don’t use such language; don’t use such concepts. Don’t say: “Osho, you are calling from the peak. I am lost in the echoing valleys.”The peaks and the valleys are part of one whole: the peaks cannot exist without the valleys; the valleys cannot exist without the peaks. So which is important? Both are interdependent. Life is neither dependent nor independent; life is a continuum of interdependence. It is beautiful wherever you are; it is lovely to be whatsoever you are.The desire to be on the peaks is a wrong desire. All desires as such are wrong, and religious desires are far worse than any other desires for the simple reason that other desires can be fulfilled. Of course, even by their fulfillment you will not go beyond frustration; fulfilled or not fulfilled, frustration is inevitable. If your desire is fulfilled you will be frustrated –because now you will see you were chasing a shadow; you have got it and there is nothing in it. If your desire is not fulfilled you will be frustrated, because your whole life is wasted and you have not been able to fulfill a single desire. All your hopes are shattered.Hopes are bound to be shattered. To hope is to hanker for hopelessness, to desire is to breed frustration. In worldly things at least there is a possibility of succeeding, failing, attaining, not attaining. But in spiritual matters there is no question of attainment at all because the goose is out! Nothing can be done about it; it is already out. The moment you start enjoying your valley you are on the peak – there is no other peak!One day I suddenly decided, enough is enough. I dropped the idea of the peaks and started enjoying the valley, and I saw a miracle: the valley disappeared. In fact, from the very beginning there had been no valley, I was always on the peak – but because I was searching for a peak I could not see where I was.Your eyes are focused far away, hence you miss the obvious. It is here, and your mind is there, arrowed into the blue sky. The reality surrounds you: it is closer than your very heartbeat, it is closer than your breathing, it is closer than the circulation of your blood, it is closer than your very marrow, it is closer than your very consciousness. It is your very core, your very being!Don’t ask for the peak, otherwise you will go on missing it. The more you miss the more you will be in a vicious circle, because the more you miss the more you try to reach. The more you miss the greater the endeavor, the more you miss the more you become an American: “Try it again and again, try harder.” A simple conclusion: if you are missing, that shows you are not trying hard enough, so put your total energy into it. And you will still be missing; there is no way to make it. You are trying for the impossible and the impossible does not happen; it cannot happen, it has never happened – it is not in the nature of things.Buddha said again and again, “Aes dhammo sanantano”: this is the nature of things. Listen to the nature of things and you will never be in misery; try to improve upon it and you will live in hell. Hell is our creation, and we create hell by trying to do the impossible. Heaven is our nature, it is our spontaneity, it is where we always are.You have heard the biblical story that God threw Adam and Eve out of his kingdom, the Garden of Eden. It is basically wrong; it is wrong for two reasons. First: the reason why he threw them out is very despotic – they had not obeyed him. He seems to be a very ordinary daddy, too ordinary, fanatic! A small, childish rebellion, which is part of nature, part of growth… We should be immensely grateful to Adam and Eve because they disobeyed. That is the beginning of humanity, that is the beginning of revolution, that is the beginning of growth, of maturity, of freedom, of a sense of dignity. They revolted against being animals. All other animals were very good Catholics, all going to church every Sunday, reading the Bible, following the commandments, following every order without ever questioning it. They are still doing the same, hence dogs have remained dogs, eagles have remained eagles, buffaloes have remained buffaloes, donkeys, howsoever saintly and holy they look, have remained donkeys. Only man has grown; his growth started with the rebellion.The rebellion was simple – every child has to go through it. A moment comes when the child has to say no, he has to insist on the no. In fact, unless a child learns to say no he will never be able to say yes; his yes will be impotent without a background of no. A fundamental no is needed as a blackboard; only on that fundamental blackboard of no can he write a beautiful yes.God denied man his fundamental right to say no, and in that very denial he denied man’s ultimate growth to say yes. The whole story is fanatical, ugly.Second: where can you drive man out to? All of existence is the Garden of Eden! There is no other place, there is no other space, there is no other time. The whole universe is divine, so wherever you are you are in the Garden of Eden. The idea has been implanted in man that you have to reach the Garden of Eden. You are in the garden, and the idea that you have been thrown out of the garden and that you have to get back to the garden is creating your whole trouble, your whole misery, your whole anguish. Not recognizing where you are, you are hankering for something which is not possible, because this is the place. “This very body the buddha; this very place the lotus paradise.” There is no other buddhahood, and there is no other lotus paradise.The word paradise comes from the Persian firdaus; firdaus means a garden – the same story, the Garden of Eden. Everybody is searching for a paradise. You can give it different names – nirvana, enlightenment, samadhi, Kingdom of God, ultimate truth – you can go on giving it different names. But you will still be missing – missing not because you have been thrown out of the garden, but missing because you are in the garden and you have fallen into a deep dream-like state. The dream consists of your desires to reach somewhere else, to reach to the peaks.My insistence is that you are already there. Just sit silently and look around; sit silently and look within. You have never been anywhere else! Aes Dhammo Sanantano – this is the nature of things – you cannot be anywhere else.A rose is a rose is a rose, there is no other possibility. But you can drive a rose crazy – you can put the idea into the mind of the rose that “You have to be a rose. What are you doing here? Wasting time, wasting a great opportunity. God has given you an opportunity to be a rose. What are you doing here? Swaying in the wind, dancing in the sun, taking life as fun? Be serious, be somber, become holy! Read the Koran, the Gita, the Bible,” and you will have driven the rose crazy.It is good that roses don’t understand your language. It is good that they don’t care a bit about what you are saying. It is good that they go on doing their thing without bothering at all about your politicians, your priests, your professors. That’s why they are so beautiful, so innocent. Your priests cannot be so beautiful, they cannot be so innocent; they are bound to be cunning.After checking into the large motel complex, the evangelist read in his room for several hours, then sauntered over to the bar where he struck up a conversation with the pretty hat check girl. After she had finished working they shared a few drinks and then retired to his room. But when the evangelist began removing her blouse she seemed to have second thoughts. “Are you sure this is alright?” she asked. “I mean, you are a holy man.”“My dear,” he replied, “it is written in the Bible.”She took him at his word, and the two spent a very pleasant night together. The next morning, however, as the girl was preparing to leave, she said, “You know, I don’t remember the part of the Bible you mentioned last night. Could you show it to me?”In response, the evangelist took the Gideon Bible from the nightstand, opened the cover and pointed to the flyleaf on which someone had inscribed, “The hat check girl screws.”These are your priests, your evangelists, your great spiritual leaders! They are neurotic and they are driving the whole of humanity neurotic. Avoid all spiritual nonsense – and spiritual nonsense is real nonsense; all other nonsense is very ordinary, very mundane. In fact, with mundane matters you cannot be too nonsensical – reality will prevent it, science will prevent it, your own sense of pragmatism will prevent it. But with religious nonsense there are no checks. There is no reality, no criterion so that you can judge, so you can fly off into all kinds of esoteric bullshit.Your priests are such bullshitters; for centuries they have been bullshitting you! You are crawling in holy cowdung! It is time to get out of it.The way you are is the only way you can be. Accept it – not only accept it but rejoice in it, love it, and the peak will start opening up within your very heart. Suddenly you will find you are awake in the Garden of Eden, immediately. It is not a question of going anywhere, just of being here.You ask me: “How may I come to you?”There is no need. You have to come to you, not to me. I am not here to create a new kind of neurosis. There are enough alternatives available! – Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Jainism, Buddhism…three hundred religions in the world. You can choose your own kind of neurosis; they come in all shapes, in all sizes. You can easily pick any kind of fanaticism, neurosis, and that will keep you engaged your whole life – but simply engaged. It will not give you time or space to dance, to sing, to celebrate.All kinds of goals basically create deep down in you a split – hypocrisy. You are that which you are, and you start trying to be that which you are not. In the beginning it is only an effort to be that which you are not; slowly, slowly you start pretending that you are becoming that which you are not, because to encounter failure continuously is very humiliating. At least you can pretend to others, you can wear masks, you can create a certain persona, a personality, a garb, a facade, and you can start living behind that facade. And people will look only at your mask and they will believe it. Once they start believing it, you will start believing it – because they are believing that you are holy, that you are saintly, that you are this and you are that.It is a very strange game: you start it, and soon you will be caught in it yourself – in your own lie! Once you are caught in your own lie you will try to hide the truth, to evade the truth, to repress the truth; you will begin investing more and more in your lie. You may be a marigold and you may invest your whole life in being a rose. You may be a rose and you may invest your whole life in being a diamond – which you cannot be. This is the sheer stupidity of the experience humanity has been living with for centuries.Hence what I say hurts. It is not a question of small dimensions; it is a question of immense dimensions. For thousands of years man has lived a hypocritical life, utterly false, pseudo, and now to shatter his whole investment, to shatter his whole mind, certainly hurts. Hence everybody is going to be against me except for just a few people who are intelligent enough to wake up.“My so-called liberal mother is really such a prude,” the high school cheerleader sadly told her locker partner. “She said that I could only pet with my dates if they didn’t touch me below the waist.”“Oh, that’s too bad,” her schoolmate commiserated. “What do you intend to do about it?”“Well,” the cheerleader giggled, “the first thing I’m going to do is learn to stand on my head.”That’s what your religious people have been doing: sirshasana – the art, the yoga of standing on your head. It certainly fulfills something: the ego. Whenever you can do something unnatural or at least pretend that you are doing it, it fulfills the ego. Nature cannot fulfill the ego. If you eat and enjoy eating, what is there to brag about? If you make love and you enjoy it, what is there to brag about? But if you become a celibate then there is something to brag about; if you fast then you have something which nobody else has. Then you can feel superior, higher, greater, bigger, chosen. The unnatural has an attraction – although it destroys your whole life – but the attraction is in the ego. And unless we drop this whole game of the ego, hypocrisy cannot disappear from the world.Rabbi Goldstein had just moved into his apartment and decided he should get acquainted with his neighbor across the hall. When the door was opened, he was pleasantly surprised to be confronted by a young damsel considerably more than passably fair and considerably less than fully clad.Though justifiably flustered by this smiling apparition, the rabbi nevertheless managed a remark singularly appropriate to the occasion: “Hi, I’m your new sugar across the hall – can I borrow a cup of neighbor?”You can try to be unnatural, but your nature will assert itself in a thousand and one ways; it will come up again and again. You will have to hush it; you will have to repress it.It was eight a.m. at a Las Vegas gambling palace and two lone bettors were still standing by a dice table awaiting further competition, when a lusciously endowed brunette attired in a suit happened by.“Although it’s quite early in the day,” she announced, “I feel lucky this morning. I’d like to roll the dice once for twenty thousand dollars. Would the two of you care to take me up on the wager?”“Sure, lady,” answered one of the men, “we’ll take your action.”“I hope you gentlemen won’t mind,” she then said, “but the only way I can get lucky is to roll the dice without my panties on.”So saying, the lissome lovely proceeded to remove her slacks and panties. With a shout of “Mamma needs a new pair of pants!” she rolled the dice, gave a squeal of delight and yelled, “I win!” She then picked up her money, her slacks and her underwear and made a hasty exit from the room.The two men exchanged double takes, and one of them blurted out, “Hey, what did she roll anyway?”“How the hell should I know?” snapped the other. “I thought you were watching the dice!”We have created such a strange humanity – the whole rationale of all this mad earth, this mad humanity, is religious, spiritual. Search for the truth, search for God, search for the peaks, and you have lost yourself in the search.There is only one search – to find yourself – and for that you need not go anywhere else. For that you have to withdraw from all your desires, ambitions, goals. You have to come back home.You are not to become me. I am not your enemy – I cannot tell you to become me. If you try to become me you will only be a carbon copy, a hypocrite, you will only be an imitation.Those who have gathered around me are not my followers, not my imitators – just companions, fellow celebrants, dance partners! Existence to me is a carnival; it is just a festival. It is for those who know how to dance. And the dance need not wait for tomorrow – tomorrow never comes – the dance has to be now, here, this very moment. This very silence has to become the dance!So don’t hanker for any peaks, just be where you are totally, utterly, and the goose is out! Hanker for the peaks, and the goose is in the bottle. Those peaks are the bottle, those goals are the bottle. They keep you encapsulated; they keep you imprisoned. The future is your bondage and the present is your freedom.Here I differ totally from Jesus, from Buddha, from Krishna, from Mahavira, from everybody else. Knowingly, unknowingly, they have created a pattern of imitation for humanity. I want to destroy this whole pattern, this whole status quo. I want you to be just yourself. Whatsoever you are, you are beautiful as you are; you need not be somebody else to be beautiful.That’s the only way to enjoy, but it is up to you. If you want to suffer…and there are people who love suffering, they cannot live without suffering; their only joy is in suffering and more suffering. The more they suffer the more they feel that they are doing something great. Then it is up to you; don’t make any fuss about it, then go to the peaks. But the peaks won’t satisfy you, because from those peaks you will again be looking far ahead for further peaks.The headmistress of a girls’ boarding school was abruptly awakened one night by one of her students, a rather mature-looking sixteen-year-old. “Miss Forbes,” she cried, “I’ve just been raped!”“Now, be calm, Melissa,” the headmistress told her firmly. “The first thing you must do is to go to the refrigerator and eat half a lemon.”“Half a lemon?” asked the surprised student. “Will that keep me from getting pregnant?”“No,” admitted the headmistress, “but it will get rid of that silly grin.”That’s what religious people have been doing: removing all your smiles, making you look as sad as possible, as long-faced as possible.Christians say Jesus never laughed. If it is true, then whatsoever he has said is wrong. If what he has said is right then this cannot be true, because the man continuously says, “Rejoice! I say to you again and again rejoice!” And Christians say he never laughed! Laughter seems to be mundane for them, laughter seems to be worldly; it is not good for holy people. Holy people have to be continuously sad; hence they have created a long tradition of sad, ill, sick, pathological people whom they worship.The more pathological you look the more you will be worshipped. The more you are a sadist and a masochist the more you will be worshipped. Torture yourself and teach others to torture themselves – they call it asceticism – become a monk, renounce the world…The word monk means one who lives alone, escapes from people. In fact it is in relationships where you find the opportunities to grow; it is love that is a challenge to growth; it is friendship that brings you to your real flavor. It is life – in all its adventures and challenges – that helps you to become mature, integrated.Monks remain retarded; they remain stupid. They are bound to remain stupid – they have been taken out of the soil of life. At the most they are greenhouse plants: bring them into the world and they will immediately shrink and die. They are very afraid people, continuously trembling, afraid of hell, which does not exist, greedy for heaven, which does not exist – and between hell and heaven missing everything that exists.The inexperienced young man had heard that a good way to arouse sexual desire in a girl, who proved impervious to the more usual forms of wooing, was to forthrightly place her hand on his organ. Having parked with a date for more than an hour in the local lovers’ lane with nothing to show for it but some sisterly kisses, he decided to try this new technique. The response was instantaneous: the girl berated him with the longest stream of invectives he had ever heard. Stunned, he tried to reply, but she refused to listen, insisting instead that he take her home at once.As he pulled up in front of her house, she again started shouting imprecations. Finally out of breath, she demanded, “Well, do you have anything to say for yourself?”“Yes, I have,” was his pained reply. “Please let go.”The second question:Osho,I am a homosexual Catholic and badly suffer from stuttering. Can you help me out of my mess?The first thing you should get out of is your Catholicism; that is the real mess. Homosexuality is not such a big problem; it is not a problem at all, in fact. It is part of the human freedom. There is nothing wrong if two persons choose a certain style of sexual relationship; it should be nobody’s business. But the priests and the politicians are poking their noses into everything! They create guilt in you – absolutely unnecessary.If two men are in love, what is wrong in it? What harm are they doing to anybody? In fact, they look happier than the heterosexuals; that’s why they are called “gay.” This is strange: I never see lesbians looking gay – they look sad, they look very serious – but homosexuals always look very gay, very sweet, real honeys.I have been wondering what the matter is, why are lesbians not so happy? Maybe they cannot enjoy nagging, which has been an eternal joy for women. In fact, without their nagging I don’t think anybody would ever have become religious. All your saints are the by-product of nagging. All your saints should be immensely grateful to women: they have driven their mates to be spiritual! There was no possibility left for them in the world; they had to escape to the monasteries. They say they are going in search of God; in fact, they are simply going away from the wife. They are cowards.Lesbians don’t look very happy. Something is missing, and that something seems to be that they cannot torture each other. They understand each other perfectly well, and because they understand each other very well there is no mystery left.Men live in the head, women live in the heart. The heart can rejoice only when there is something very mysterious, something like a koan – the goose in the bottle. Neither does the bottle have to be broken nor the goose killed, and it has to be taken out too. The heart enjoys the mysterious. The head is not interested in the mysterious; it is interested in the act of puzzling, of riddling. Any riddle, any puzzle, interests the head. The approach of the head is logical.To men women are mysterious; to connect with the woman a man must come to his heart, and he lives in his head. Hence the woman always remains a problem. He cannot understand her; he cannot explain what is happening; he cannot explain it away either. He has to live with a mystery, and that is a constant pain in his neck; it is beyond his grasp.But with two men things are simple: both are logical. They understand the language, they understand logic; they understand mathematics, calculation. At the most a man is just a new question to be solved – not a mystery to be lived but a question to be solved; a problem which can be solved, which is not impossible to solve. That keeps two men interested, keeps them intrigued. Hence I see homosexuals looking gay. Lesbians looking very sad.One more thing happens: homosexuals become more feminine and they start having a certain beauty, a certain “niceness” about them, a certain roundness, a grace. The lesbian becomes more manly; she starts losing her feminine grace; she becomes masculine, aggressive, hard. Hence, if you were a woman it would have been a problem, and I would have helped you to come out of it. But you are a man. Why bother? Why make much out of a simple thing? If you are enjoying a relationship with a man, enjoy it!The Christian God himself seems to be homosexual – the whole trinity consists of three men. How they are managing it nobody knows – not a single woman! Only the Holy Ghost is a little suspect; maybe the Holy Ghost is bisexual? Ghosts can do any kind of thing! Otherwise the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost – what kind of trinity is this? It is very homosexual! They have not allowed a single woman to be in it, just to keep out of trouble. One woman would have destroyed the whole trinity; it would have become a real triangle!Homosexuality is not a problem. We should start looking at real problems and should not be concerned about unreal problems. There are real problems to be solved. It is a trick of the human mind – to create unreal problems so that you become occupied with them while real problems go on growing. This is an old strategy: politicians, priests, so-called religious leaders go on giving you pseudo problems to solve so that you become occupied with the pseudo.The problem in itself is meaningless; the problem is not a problem at all, but how much fuss has gone on down the ages about homosexuality! There are countries where people are still killed for homosexual acts, murdered, sentenced to jail for their whole lives. Strange world! This is a twentieth-century world? Homosexuality is not a problem at all; there are thousands of real problems to be solved. But man has to be kept engaged with toys.My effort is to withdraw all your attention from toys so that you can focus on the real problems of life; and if you focus on the real problems of life they can be solved. I don’t see how homosexuality becomes a problem. How does it become a problem? Why should it be of concern to anybody? A love affair is two individuals’ private concern; it is their intimacy, it is not a social phenomenon.In fact, it will help the world population if more people turn homosexual. It will be good, very good for the world: less people will be born, the earth will be less burdened; there will be less poverty. Of course, less orphans and less Mother Teresas! There will be less need for contraceptives, birth control methods, sterilization, and of course the whole business of the Polack Pope will go out of his hands. That is his whole business! For one year continuously he has been talking against contraceptives, against birth control, sterilization, abortion. Homosexuality can solve all these problems simply!So I don’t see that there is much of a problem in it. The only problem is your Catholicism.Rodney, the eldest son of a respectable Boston family, announced to his shocked father that he intended to live openly with his swishy boyfriend on Beacon Hill.“Damn it, Rodney,” the parent responded, “our family came over with John Winthrop, and we have never had a scandal such as this.”“I can’t help it, father, I love him.”“But for God’s sake, son, he’s a Catholic!”That is the true problem! Come out of your Catholicism. And when I say come out of your Catholicism, I mean come out of all kinds of stupid ideologies – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian. Come out of ideologies and start living life as if you are Adam and Eve, the first man on the earth, the first woman on the earth. Start afresh, from scratch.As far as your stuttering is concerned, what is wrong with it? It may just be because you have made such a problem out of homosexuality that you are stuttering. Stuttering – I have watched it in many people – comes in a state of stress, tension.When I was a student in the university, my neighbor…a young man, a beautiful man, healthy, in every way intelligent. I had never seen him stuttering. Once his father visited him, and he immediately started stuttering in front of his father. I could not believe what was happening. The moment the father left he was perfectly okay. I asked him about it.He said, “This is a problem. When I go back home, I cannot avoid stuttering in front of my father and mother. It happens…the more I try to avoid it the more it happens. Even when my father’s letter comes and I start reading it, I suddenly feel a trembling. I cannot read my father’s letter without stuttering. Otherwise I am perfectly okay.”So I said to him, “So it is not a question of stuttering; there is some stress, some tension. Your father is heavy to you, and you regress back to your childhood, back to your old fears, and those fears start overcoming your intelligence.” I said to him, “Do one thing: next time your father comes, try to stutter with every word!”He said, “How is that going to help?”I said, “Try it. Don’t try not to stutter; on the contrary try to stutter. Make every effort that not a single word should come out without stuttering!”He said, “What are you suggesting? I have been doing just the opposite and have failed utterly. Your method seems to be such that it is bound to create more troubles for me!”I said, “Give it a try.”The father came, and I was there, and he tried it – and he could not stutter!There are a few things which happen only if you are trying; there are a few things which happen only if you don’t try. The very effort comes out of fear and if fear is the cause then the effort cannot help.Hypnotherapists call it “the law of reverse effect.”If you are learning to ride a bicycle you may be on a sixty-foot-wide road, absolutely empty, nobody on the road, and then you see a milestone by the side of the road, and suddenly your cycle starts moving toward that milestone for no reason at all. You start feeling afraid; you try to avoid the milestone. Now, on a sixty-foot-wide road even a blind man has only a rare chance of hitting the milestone, but you will try hard, and the more you try the more you will become focused. Now the whole road disappears, there is only that milestone standing there like Hanumanji, the monkey god, giggling at you, making faces at you, attracting you like a magnetic force. You are doing everything to avoid it, but you are going…you know you are going. It is unavoidable! The more unavoidable you feel it is, the more energy you put into it. You become tense. The whole world has shrunk to Hanumanji…and the crash!This is one of the fundamental laws of life. Homosexuality may seem to be the cause, but it is not homosexuality really; it is your attitude toward it, your approach to it. You are making a problem out of it; then there will be trouble.My suggestion is: stutter beautifully – make stuttering songs! You will enjoy, others will enjoy, and that’s what we are here for.“Have faith and ye shall be healed!” intoned the evangelist at the revival meeting. A woman on crutches and a man came forward. The evangelist asked, “What is your name, my good woman?”“I’m Mrs. Smith,” she answered, “and I haven’t been able to walk without crutches for twenty years.”“Well, Mrs. Smith,” he said, “go behind that screen and pray.”Turning to the man, he asked, “What is your name?”“My name ith Thamuelth,” he answered, “and I have alwayth thpoken with a lithp.”“Alright, Mr. Samuels,” the evangelist said, “go behind that screen with Mrs. Smith and pray.”After several minutes had passed, the revivalist announced, “I think the time has come. Witness these miracles. Mrs. Smith, throw your left crutch over the screen.” The audience gasped as it sailed over. “Mrs. Smith, throw your right crutch over the screen.” The crowd cheered as the second crutch appeared.Encouraged, the evangelist commanded, “Mr. Samuels, say something in a loud, clear voice, so we can all hear you.”Samuels answered, “Mithuth Sthmith jutht fell on her ath!”So what is wrong with it? It is a far greater miracle! So don’t be worried about unnecessary things. Stutter joyously, enjoy it, and there is a possibility that you may stop stuttering – beware of it! If you don’t want to stop it, then don’t listen to me, you just go on trying not to stutter.My suggestion is stutter, and don’t be a miser. Fill the whole place with stuttering! Whomsoever you meet, stutter – don’t miss an opportunity. Even the words that you can speak well, don’t speak well, stutter! And you may be surprised that once you relax, once you start enjoying, once the tension is dropped, stuttering may disappear. If it disappears, good; if it does not disappear there is no harm in it. It is innocent!Take life as easily as possible. But people don’t understand me. I say to them, “Life is a mystery. It is not to be solved but to be lived.” And somebody has asked me, “Osho, when you said that, I heard, ‘Life is a misery, not to be solved but to be lived.’” That is up to you. To me it is a mystery, not to be solved but to be lived, but you can hear it as “misery.”Don’t make unnecessary problems for yourself, so that your whole energy can become focused on the essential problem. And the essential problem is only one: Know thyself.The third question:Osho,I am immensely interested in going to the moon. This longing has always haunted me as long as I can remember. Can you tell me one or two jokes about the moon?Perhaps that’s why you have come to me – my name means the moon. You are moonstruck; that means you are a lunatic! Lunatic simply means struck by the moon…and this is a gathering of mad people. You have come to the moon!Your long-cherished desire is fulfilled – the goose is out!But I have two jokes for you:Shortly after his spaceship landed on the moon, the astronaut debarked and began exploring the strange new terrain. He had walked for only fifteen minutes when he came upon a lovely young moon girl who was busily stirring an empty pot with a stick.“Hi,” he said, introducing himself, “I’m an astronaut here to discover things about the moon.”The moon girl stopped stirring long enough to throw him quite a pleasant smile. “How nice it is that you are formed just like our moon men,” she observed. Throwing off her clothes, she asked, “And am I structured as are Earth women?”“Yes, you are,” answered the now excited astronaut. “But tell me, why do you stir that pot?”“I’m making a baby,” she said. And, sure enough, a few minutes later a baby appeared in the pot.“Now would you like to see how we make babies on Earth?” asked the astronaut. The girl agreed, and the astronaut proceeded with his passionate demonstration.“That was enjoyable,” she said afterward, “but where is the baby?”“Oh, that takes nine months,” explained the astronaut.“Nine months?” she asked. “Then why did you stop stirring?”A small group of scientists had spent an enlightening week on the moon comparing life there with our own.“Tell me,” one Earth scientist asked his moon counterpart, “just how do you reproduce the species here on this planet?”“I shall be pleased to demonstrate,” replied the leader of the moon group, and he called forth a voluptuous moon beauty with three heads. They then engaged their tentacles for a few moments, and almost at once a small pouch began to form on the female’s back; it grew, and within little more than a minute it opened up very much like a blooming flower, and a small moon child dropped out, as fully developed as the adults but much smaller, and began scampering about the room.Once the Earth scientists had recovered from this unexpected experience they attempted to explain how procreation differs in our world. The Moonians insisted upon being shown, and after unsuccessful attempts to dissuade them, the chief scientist of the expedition finally agreed. Choosing a comely scientific aide from the group, he took her to a cot in the corner of the room and there proceeded to make love to her in a manner to which we here on Earth are more accustomed.The Moonians examined the couple from every angle, and when they were finished, their leader said, “That was certainly unusual and, I must say, interesting, but where is the baby – or was the demonstration a failure?”“It is difficult to say,” replied the Earth scientist. “We cannot tell at once. But if the contact was successful, then the baby will arrive in approximately nine months.”“Nine months!” exclaimed the Moonian. “Amazing! But tell us then, doctor, if the Earth child will not be born for nine months, why were you in such a hurry there at the end?”Enough for today.

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The Goose is Out 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Goose is Out 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why do Indians think of sex in terms of need instead of fun? They also think at the same time that they have transcended sex, but in reality it has only been suppressed. Is there any similarity between suppression and transcendence which can mislead people, as you sometimes say that there is some similarity between a buddha and a madman?Indian culture is the most rotten culture that has evolved in the world, the rottenest – rotten to the very core. It is so rotten that it has forgotten how to die. To die one needs to be a little bit alive, and unless you know how to die you simply vegetate, you stagnate.Death is a process of revival. Just as each individual has to die to be born again, each culture has to die to be born again. Each society, each civilization has to pass through life to death, from death to life again.Indian culture is the only culture which has not died for thousands of years. There have been many cultures in the world: the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Greek, the Roman, the Egyptian. They all flowered, blossomed: they contributed their beauty to the world – their sculpture, their music, their poetry, their drama – and then they disappeared without leaving a trace behind. This is how it should be.If all the old people in your family were alive – your father and your father’s father and his father’s father to the very end, to Adam and Eve and God the Father – then one thing is certain: you would be crushed. So many old people, all corpses, are enough to crush a small child who is delicate like a rose.One of the greatest things that Friedrich Nietzsche did was to declare: God is dead and man is free.God as father has to be dead, otherwise his weight will be too much, it will be too mountainous. It won’t allow the freshness of humanity. It won’t allow exploration, it won’t allow adventure. The old man will be too cautious, too cunning, too calculating, too Jewish. His whole experience of the past will be enough to destroy the child. The child needs exploration; and, of course, when you explore you commit many mistakes – that is part of growth. One should be allowed to commit mistakes. One should certainly be intelligent enough not to commit the same mistakes again and again; one should be creative enough to invent new mistakes. That’s the way one expands, grows. That’s the way consciousness becomes integrated.Life is a trial-and-error process. The old man drops all mistakes, errors. He becomes so accustomed to doing the right thing that exploration, adventure, disappear from his life. And because of his own fears he won’t allow the new generations to go in new directions, in new dimensions. He will make them afraid; he will paralyze them, he will cripple them. That’s what has been happening in India.India is a strange case. It is extraordinary in a way: this has never happened anywhere else. All the countries, all the cultures, civilizations, have lived, died and were resurrected again; India has remained the same. It is more like a plastic flower than like a real rose. It is more concerned with stability than with aliveness. Its whole concern is how to go on and on forever.But that is not the real thing. How to live each moment totally is the question. It is not a question of endurance; the question is one of depth. Only those who live in depth know what life is all about. Those who live in endurance live horizontally, superficially. Their life is a mask; there is no authenticity in it. Hence, I say Indian culture is neither alive nor dead but living in a kind of suspension, in a kind of limbo. It is a ghost culture: all that is significant, all that makes life a joy, has been dropped because it is dangerous, and all that is stable, permanent, plastic, has been gathered together because it is safer.Remember, this is the way of an old man. The old man always thinks of safety, security, his bank balance; he always thinks in terms of fear, because death is always standing in front of him.The child never bothers about death; his concern is life. He is interested in going into the uncharted, into the unknown; he is ready to take risks. Those who are ready to risk, they are the only truly alive ones. They may not live long, but that is not the point at all. To live for a single moment with authenticity, totality, integrity is more than enough. A single moment of total experience is far greater than the whole of eternity. It contains the whole of eternity, it contains timelessness. But one can go on vegetating for thousands of years like a cabbage, a cauliflower – very holy looking, very saintly.Cabbages are not sinners, and cauliflowers are great scholars. A cabbage becomes a cauliflower through college education. Cauliflowers are pundits, theologians, religious people. This country is full of these people, and the burden of them is great. Somebody needs to help this country to die so that it can live again. Crucifixion is a basic condition for resurrection. The art of living is preceded by the art of dying.This country is stinking, it has nothing else to brag about, so it brags about the past. It brags about its phoniness, it brags about its holiness, it brags about its spirituality – which is all nonsense because the basic foundation is missing. We talk about the temple – the temple is possible, but first you have to put the basic foundation together.Life is a hierarchy of needs. First the physical has to be taken care of; material existence has to be taken care of. Science fulfills a basic need. If you miss science you will miss religion. Between science and religion is the world of art. These are the three basic dimensions of life. Science has to take care of the material, the physiological, the biological – the external needs of man. Religion has to take care of the innermost – interiority, subjectivity. Between the two is the world of aesthetics: art, poetry, music, dance, drama, literature.A man who is hungry cannot think of poetry. A man who is hungry cannot conceive of meditation. It is impossible! This long, long traditional ego tries to hide its poverty. The so-called Indian spiritualism, the so-called desire of the Indian culture to guide the whole world toward spirituality is just stupid. It is sheer nonsense, it is rubbish. But that is their only face-saving device – they can save face only behind that screen. They know their bodies are hungry, they know that things which are absolutely necessary to them are not available. They are starving; they are ill, sick in every way. Eighty percent of the country is living as beggars. Few are well nourished: almost everybody is undernourished. When a person is undernourished it is not only the body that suffers, remember; undernourishment in a very subtle way destroys the capacity of your mind.Mind needs its own nourishment, and unless the body is adequately nourished the mind cannot be nourished. First the body’s needs have to be fulfilled. When there is something more after the body’s fulfillment, then nourishment goes to the brain cells. The mind is a luxury that does not exist in animals; it is a human prerogative. It came into existence only because man could manage his bodily needs so totally that there was energy left, and that overflowing energy became his brain, became his mind, became his psychology.When psychological needs are fulfilled, totally fulfilled, and again there is more energy available, that energy transforms into spirituality, into meditation, into buddhahood.India is in a sad state, and the saddest thing is that Indians try to hide it rather than expose it. They are angry at me because I am exposing the truth as it is. They are angry at me because I am not trying to cover it up. They would like me, they would respect me, they would call me a great mahatma, an incarnation of God and all kinds of rubbish, under the condition that I go on covering their wounds.I cannot cover anybody’s wounds. I can heal them, but the healing process is a totally different process. First you have to expose your wounds to the sun, to the air. You have to expose them. It hurts! Wounds which have been kept secret for thousands of years, suddenly exposed… You cannot believe it. You have always believed that you are great spiritualists, but I see the whole phoniness of it; I see the hypocrisy of it. The greatest hypocrisy that happens happens through two denials: food and sex. These are basic needs, and they are two sides of the same coin. They are not very different.Food is needed for the existence of the individual. An individual can exist without sex. It will not be much of a joy, but he can survive. Without food the individual cannot exist; he will shrink and die. At the most, if he is perfectly healthy, he can exist without food for three months – ninety days – but that too only if he is perfectly healthy, and if he has too much extra food accumulated in his body in the form of fat and other things. Then he can survive for three months.That survival, remember, has nothing to do with religion; that is sheer cannibalism – one is eating oneself. When you fast you are eating your own meat, hence I am against fasting; that is the worst kind of meat-eating. You can fast and every day you will lose weight. Where is that weight disappearing to? You are digesting it. Within three months you will die.The individual can exist for a little while without food, he can exist without sex – he can survive – but the human race, the species, cannot exist without sex. That is food for the species. Sex is food for the species. Without sex humankind will disappear. And the people who have been teaching celibacy are murderous. The people who have been teaching celibacy to humanity are basically cutting the very roots of humanity. If they were to be followed literally there would be no humanity left.There would have been no Mahavira, no Buddha, no Krishna; there would have been no Mohammed, no Kabir, no Nanak, if their parents had followed the idea of celibacy. It is good, it is fortunate that Buddha’s father did not follow the stupid idea of celibacy, otherwise the world would have missed one of the greatest flowerings.If celibacy is perpetuated, then humanity will disappear. It is a very egoistic idea, egoistic in the sense that you only care about yourself. Indians go on talking about spirituality, selflessness, and at the same time, with the same face, they go on talking about celibacy. Celibacy is selfishness, absolute selfishness. Your parents and their parents and their parents have all joined together to give birth to you. Now, trying to be celibate, forcing celibacy, simply means you are closing the doors to future humanity. And you call it selflessness? You call it spirituality?This is pure egoism – as if you were the center of the whole existence, as if the whole existence existed only for you: because you have been produced, now there is no need for anything; the whole can disappear.Although the teaching continues, nobody follows it. Unnatural teachings cannot be followed. That is one good thing about them. Only a few fools, maniacs, obsessed people may try to follow them, but any man of intelligence will not follow such ideas.Such ideas create two kinds of difficulties. One: those who are cunning, they become hypocrites. And those who are innocent, they become guilty. That’s what has happened in India, and the same has happened on a wider scale all over the world. The disease is contagious. It must have started in India; its origin seems to be Indian. That is the only contribution that India has made to the world – a contagious disease which creates hypocrites and guilty people. Both are ugly specimens. The world needs neither the hypocrites nor the guilty.The hypocrites become priests, monks, mahatmas, sages, saints, and the guilty become the followers. This is the game that is going on.You ask me: “Why do Indians think of sex in terms of need…?” Because their needs are not fulfilled. They are in all kinds of need – to them sex is also a need. A needy person has an eye which projects his needs everywhere. You see only that which you can see, you hear only that which you can hear: you are continuously choosing according to your need. To a hungry person a beautiful woman simply looks like a delicious dish. The very idea shows where the man stands.There are expressions in all the languages of the world for love. People have started using words like eating – ”I would like to eat you” the lover says to the woman. What kind of love is this? Lovers bite each other, lovers chew each other – as if they are chewing gum. Lovers leave tooth marks on each other. What kind of poetry is this? They scratch each other with their nails… Is this love or is something else masquerading behind it?Love should be deep caring. One should not think in terms of food, of eating, biting – these are ugly expressions.India lives with all kinds of needs. Hence, sex also becomes only a need, at the most, a release, a tranquilizer – the same kind of release that you feel when you have a good sneeze: some burden, some tension is gone. But there is no fulfillment in it, there is no rejoicing in it.Indians make love as if they are thieves, as if they are doing something wrong. They make love as if they are going against God, as if they are committing some sin.Of course they have to make love because that is a need. It can only be a need when their other needs are fulfilled. When all the needs are fulfilled, love starts having a totally different dimension to it – the dimension of fun, the dimension of dance and music. Then you are not using it as a relaxation, as a tranquilizer, as a sneeze – you start sharing. Love becomes more prominent; sex becomes secondary. When it is a need love is just a word: sex is the only thing, the reproductive activity is the only thing.You know it – it is a well-known fact scientifically observed all over the world – that poor people produce more children. Why? They don’t have any other ways of entertaining themselves. They don’t have the idiot box, the TV, they cannot sit glued in their chair for six hours. They don’t have a chair, in fact! They don’t have the money to go to a hotel to participate in some celebration, to go to a movie, to drink alcohol, to dance, sing… All possibilities are closed. The tiredness of the day, the routine of work, the continuity of the same rut… The only possibility, a free amusement available to them, is sex. That becomes their last act in the day. So before going to sleep they religiously devote one, two minutes to it, and then they fall asleep like a log.The newly-married couple were entertaining a bachelor in the den of their suburban home when the conversation turned to sexual morality.“Since you claim to be so liberal,” the Indian bachelor challenged the husband, “would you let me kiss your wife’s breasts for a thousand dollars?”Not wishing to seem prudish, and needing the extra money, the couple agreed, and the wife removed her blouse and bra. Then pressing his face between her breasts the chap nestled there for several minutes, until the husband grew impatient to complete the deal. “Go ahead and kiss them,” he urged the bachelor.“I would love to,” the fellow sighed, “but I really can’t afford it.”The question is whether you can afford anything else… Hence, to the Indian mind, sex remains an animal act. It never rises to the realms of poetic beauty, it never becomes love. So whenever you talk to the Indian about love, he immediately thinks you are talking about sex. Love is immediately, automatically translated as sex. It is impossible to talk to the Indian about love. This is my experience of talking to millions of Indians all over the country. Talk about love, and by the time the word reaches them it is no longer love, it becomes sex.They know only sex. Love has no other connotation for them. It is such a misunderstanding, one feels almost helpless. Talking to Indians is really troublesome.You can talk about God, you can talk about the soul, you can talk about moksha, nirvana; you can talk about the Vedas, and there will be no misunderstanding, because they are like parrots – for thousands of years they have been repeating those words. Not that they will understand you, but at least they will understand the words. When you say “God” they know its meaning. They don’t know the experience, but at least the meaning is known. But when you talk about love, even the meaning is not known. The experience of it is far, far away.She had just finished her shower when the doorbell rang. Tiptoeing to the front door, shivering in plump, pink nudity, she called, “Who is it?”“The blind man,” came a mournful voice.So she shrugged and opened the door with one hand while reaching for her purse with the other. When she turned to face the man he was grinning from ear to ear. And she saw that he was holding a large package in his arms.“You can see!” she exclaimed.“Yeah,” he nodded happily, “and mighty pretty too. Now, where do you want I should put these blinds?”The romantic young man sat on the park bench with a first date. He was certain his charming words and manner would win her as they had so many others.“Some moon out tonight,” he cooed.“There certainly is,” she agreed.“Some really bright stars in the sky.”She nodded.“Some dew on the grass.”“Some do!” she said indignantly. “But I am not that sort!”It is really difficult to talk with Indians about love: they have never lived the experience. All that they know is the sexual mechanism, and all that they know is sexual animalness; that is their experience. They cannot understand sex as fun – because sex cannot be fun, only love can be fun.Love is fun: it is a play, it is playfulness. And at the ultimate peak of love, the same playfulness becomes prayerfulness.These are the three stages: need, playfulness, prayerfulness. Unless you have experienced love at its ultimate, utmost peak as prayer, you have not really lived your life; you have missed the point.You say: “Why do Indians think of sex in terms of need instead of fun?” They don’t know anything about fun, about playfulness. They are serious people – very holy, very spiritual. They are walking corpses. You cannot expect playfulness from them; you can expect only long faces.You cannot live with saints for long. Even to be with a saint for twenty-four hours is a punishment; it is not a reward because within twenty-four hours he will make you so bitter toward life, he will make you so sad, he will make you so sour, he will make you feel guilty, condemned… That is his only joy. Religious people only enjoy one thing: making everybody sad, taking away people’s laughter.They condemn me because I am teaching people laughter. I am teaching people love; I am teaching people how to rejoice in the moment, in the very ordinariness of life. There is no other kind of life anywhere; there is no other world; this is the only world! And we have to live this world. We are not to sacrifice this world for some other world.I am not teaching sacrifice, I am not teaching asceticism, I am not teaching fasting, I am not teaching celibacy. I am teaching the celebration of life. That’s what they have been missing for thousands of years.They cannot understand sex as fun; it is a misery. If they cannot understand it as fun, they cannot understand it as prayer; that is impossible.You say: “They also think at the same time that they have transcended sex, but in reality it has only been suppressed.” Transcendence of sex is possible only when sex reaches to the flowering of prayerfulness. Before that, sex cannot be transcended. You can only jump beyond sex from that borderline. Then it is not celibacy, it is simply the disappearance of the ego into the whole. It is not really transcendence of sex but becoming part of the whole orgasmic universe. It is reaching to the ultimate of union with the whole.What are you doing when you are making love to a woman? You are trying to have a certain union with the opposite pole. For a moment the union happens – rarely, because so many conditions have to be fulfilled. Unless all conditions are fulfilled you may simply go through the gestures of making love. Only once in a while are a man and woman really in tune – at-one-ment, attunement – and then for a moment, the orgasmic joy.What is orgasmic joy? The disappearance of the ego for a moment. But even for a moment it is tremendously significant, precious, far more precious than any Kohinoor. The same thing happens on a deeper level in prayer. With prayer you are not trying to meet with the other person, but you are trying to meet with the universe. The other person has become just a window. You are no longer attached to the window frame. You are going through the window into the world of the stars, clouds, birds. You are moving beyond. Love teaches you how to go beyond the window and to search for the stars. Once you have taken flight, the window is left far behind. Once you leave the window, a miracle happens. Because your ego was framed by the window: once you leave the window behind, your ego is also left behind. The ego needs the other: when the other is no longer there, the ego is also no longer there.Psychologists say the ego comes later on. First, you start feeling the presence of the other. The child first feels the presence of mother, father, brothers, sisters, walls, paintings, whatsoever surrounds him. Slowly, slowly he becomes aware of the fact: “I am separate from all these. Sometimes Mother is there and sometimes she is not there, but I am always here.” First enters the experience of the other, and then the ego arises.In the same way in prayer – the reverse order – first there is the disappearance of the other and then the ego dissolves. Once you have left the frame, the small frame of the lover and the beloved, and you have taken yourself into the beyond, the dissolution happens. Buddha calls it nirvana. The word is beautiful: nirvana simply means cessation of the flame. Just as you extinguish a lamp and suddenly the flame disappears into the whole, so it is in the ultimate state of love. Then one knows transcendence. Transcendence of the ego becomes the transcendence of sex.Remember, it is not against sex. In fact, you have moved your momentary experience of sex into cosmic sex; you have become one with the orgasm of existence itself. Now it will be there each moment, you cannot lose it. Now the goose is really out! You cannot enter the bottle again.Transcendence of sex is a totally different phenomenon from the suppression of it. But suppression can give you the feeling that you have transcended.The old maid rushed up to the policeman. “I have been raped! I have been attacked,” she cried. “He ripped off my clothing; he smothered me with burning kisses. Then he made mad, passionate love to me!”“Calm yourself, calm yourself, madam,” said the officer. “Just when did all this take place?”“Twenty-three years ago this September,” said the woman.“Twenty-three years ago?” he exclaimed. “How do you expect me to arrest anyone for something he did twenty-three years ago?”“Oh, I don’t want you to arrest anyone, officer,” said the woman. “I just like to talk about it, that’s all.”You will be surprised that all your so-called saints continuously talk against sex. Why? If they have transcended it, why this obsession with sex? In Indian scriptures you will find such obscene descriptions of women that you will be surprised. Your Playboys and magazines like that are nothing by comparison. You can go and see the temples at Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri, and you will see that your so-called obscene literature is just the beginning. Khajuraho has the most obscene sculpture that has ever existed anywhere in the world. It took hundreds of years to do because it is stone sculpture; it is not just a photograph of a nude model in a Playboy magazine. Thousands of sculptors for hundreds of years must have worked on it; and not one temple, hundreds of temples. Why are these sculptures on the temples? What have temples got to do with it?They have much to do with it. Saints need it, religious people need it. These are their fantasies. These are what they are seeing inside themselves; they want them to be projected. In Indian scriptures you will be surprised to note that Indian gods are the worst rapists in the world. They are not contented with heavenly beauties; they continue to descend to the earth and seduce and rape earthly women. They become tired of the heavenly beauties for the simple reason that heavenly beauties are a little stale, stale in the sense that they never grow old, they always remain the same. They don’t perspire; hence they don’t need a shower. Their bodies are not ordinary: they are made of gold and silver. Now what can you do with a woman with a body of gold and silver, eyes of emeralds and diamonds? Sooner or later you will get tired. It is a toy, a doll, it is not a woman. She never nags you; she never throws pillows at you. No drama, no life!They descend to earth. All the Indian devas – the Indian gods – are very sexual, obsessively sexual. The saints who have been writing these scriptures describe women in such beautiful words. That shows their minds. But they are pretending at the same time that they are condemning sex, they are telling you these things so that you can remain aware of them.The elderly spinster hired a young lawyer to prepare her will. “I have ten thousand dollars set aside,” she explained, “and I want to spend it on myself. Nobody in this town has ever paid any attention to me, but they will sit up and take notice when I die.”Warming to the subject she cackled, “I want to spend all of eight thousand dollars on the biggest, fanciest funeral this town has ever seen.”“Well,” said the lawyer, “that’s a lot to pay for burying someone in these parts. But it is your money, madam, and you are entitled to spend it any way you like. Now, what about the other two thousand?”“I’ll take care of that,” the old woman replied with a broad smile. “I’ve never been to bed with a man and I aim to try that at least once before I’m through. As you can see I’m not much to look at, but I figure for two thousand dollars I can get me a man that is young enough and handsome enough to please me.”That night the lawyer reported the conversation to his wife. As they discussed the situation, the wife casually mentioned how nice it would be to have the two thousand dollars. Minutes later they were on their way to the spinster’s house, the wife driving. As the lawyer stepped from the car he instructed his wife, “Pick me up in two hours.”Returning at the prescribed hour, the wife tooted the horn. No response from the house. She then blew a prolonged blast. An upstairs window was raised and the lawyer thrust out his head. “Come back in four days,” he shouted. “She’s decided to let the municipal committee bury her.”These are the people, real people. Don’t be deceived by their faces. Look deep inside them, and you will find tremendous madness. Suppression brings madness; transcendence brings buddhahood.Yes, I have said there is some similarity between a buddha and a madman. The similarity is that a buddha goes beyond the mind, and the madman falls below the mind. The same similarity exists between transcendence of sex and suppression of sex. Transcendence is going beyond sex – and to go beyond one has to go through; sex has to be used as a ladder – and suppression is falling below sex.Suppression creates neurosis. Transcendence brings flowering, flowering of all that is best in you, flowering of all that is your real being. It is the release of your hidden splendor.The second question:Osho,You said recently that you loved Wilhelm Reich. I have studied and written about him for years. While your ideas – sex equals energy, living in the now, and God is life – agree with his, you go far beyond him. In what way was he limited?Edward Mann, I have read your book on Wilhelm Reich. I also remember you quoted me in that book.Wilhelm Reich and my ideas have a certain superficial similarity, but remember it is superficial. Wilhelm Reich is a thinker, not a meditator, and sometimes thinkers groping in the dark can find a few things, they can stumble upon a few things. But to have eyes is a totally different phenomenon.Yes, once in a while you can find the door by groping in the darkness – even a blind man can find it – but to have eyes, and to have light, and to go directly to the door without groping is a totally different phenomenon.Wilhelm Reich is certainly appreciated by me, appreciated for the fact that he is not a meditator, and yet he has stumbled upon something which only meditators can come across. That is also his limitation: he is only a thinker. What he preaches he cannot practice. In fact he does just the opposite of it. His blindness can be seen in his life, not in his words.Wilhelm Reich’s wife wrote about him that he was a very jealous man. Now that is impossible. If a man has transcended sex, then jealousy is impossible. He continuously talked about getting rid of possessiveness, jealousy, but about his wife he was very suspicious. Finally they had to separate, and the cause of separation was Wilhelm Reich, himself. He meddled with all kinds of women continuously. He had many love affairs in the name of freedom, in the name of love, in the name of nonpossessiveness, in the name of friendship and sharing. But he wouldn’t allow the same for his wife.Even when he would leave his town, he told his friends to keep an eye on his wife. Wilhelm Reich’s wife was herself a psychoanalyst. It was impossible for her to understand. But I can see why it happened – he was only a thinker.Thinkers are, in a way, cunning. For themselves they find all kinds of excuses, but for others there is a totally different standard. That’s where he was limited. Because he was not a meditator he could not transform his sexual energy into playfulness, prayerfulness, and ultimately into an orgasmic existence.That’s why he went mad. It is dangerous to play with fire. If you don’t understand its nature it is better to leave it alone. Sex is fire because it is life: to play with it without understanding the whole process of its transformation is certainly dangerous. And that danger was what happened to him.He was on the right path, but he was blind. He needed grounding in meditation. He would have become a buddha, but he became just a madman.You say, “While your ideas – sex equals energy…” These are not my ideas, these are my experiences. A clear-cut distinction has to be understood. For Wilhelm Reich these are ideas. A blind man can have ideas about light, but that will not help him. A deaf man can have ideas about music, but that will not make him understand music, experience music. I don’t have any ideas, these are my experiences. Whatsoever I am saying to you I am not saying it as a philosopher.I am not a thinker at all; to me thinking is a very low-quality activity. What I am saying is my experiencing. So these are not my ideas on sex; these are actual experiences. I am not trying to indoctrinate you; I am simply inviting you to experience what I have experienced. So I don’t ask you to believe in me.Wilhelm Reich was a fanatic. He wanted his followers to believe in him, to believe in him absolutely. He was very dictatorial. He would not allow any doubt in anybody’s mind, and he was constantly living in fear –fear of persecution, as if he were being persecuted continuously, as if somebody were after him. These are the signs of a fanatic mind.He had the possibility of growing, but he needed the right soil. That was missing. Had he been one of my sannyasins, there would have been a totally different kind of man born out of him.He lived in the bottle. The goose could not come out. He became too attached to the bottle – his ideology, his philosophy. And this constant fear of persecution, suspicion, drove him mad.You say: “Your ideas – sex, living in the now, and God is life – agree with his…” They only appear to agree. Living in the now, how can you feel persecuted? Persecution is always going to be tomorrow. Right at this moment how can you feel persecuted? It can happen only in the next moment.His whole life he was talking about living in the now, but it was only talk, mere talk; he never lived in the now. He was thinking of himself in the old foolish pattern, as being a prophet.This stupid Judaic idea of being a prophet has tortured many people in the West. Christians, Mohammedans, Jews – all the three religions which were born outside India, have revolved around the idea of the prophet. Sigmund Freud had the same attitude, and Wilhelm Reich was a disciple of Sigmund Freud. Then Carl Gustav Jung had the same idea; he was also a follower of Sigmund Freud. Then Adler had the same idea; he was also a follower of Sigmund Freud. All by-products of the Jewish mind: they were all thinking in terms of the salvation of the whole of humanity depending on them.That is living somewhere else, not in the now.Just the other day, Sheela brought a report from a Christian theologian, a big report against me. He must have come with preconceived ideas, and got very confused. He could not manage with his preconceived ideas and he could not let go of them either. So he is wishy-washy: one thing he says against me, one thing he says for me. He has got into such a mess. But I liked one thing that he said – although he thought he was making a very significant criticism.He said: “The moment Osho dies, his whole movement will disappear like a soap bubble.” I loved it! That’s how it should be! Why should it continue? What for? There is no reason. I live now; I am not interested in the future at all. What does it matter whether my movement disappears like a soap bubble or not? I love soap bubbles! They look beautiful in the sun. And they should disappear so that a few other people can make other soap bubbles. I have no monopoly over them. In fact, the world would have been better if the soap bubble that was created by Jesus had disappeared with him. Then these Polack Popes would not be here. Now they are making much fuss about a bubble which is not there. The soap bubble that Buddha created, had it disappeared, would have been a great blessing to humanity, because all these Buddhist monks and theologians, and all kinds of stupid people…we would have been saved from them!Just the other day I was reading a Buddhist scripture. Buddhist scriptures say that there are thirty-three thousand rules for each Buddhist monk to follow. Thirty-three thousand rules! Even to remember them you will need a computer. What kind of rules? I will tell you just one rule. When a Buddhist monk goes to the toilet he should remove the lid of the toilet very slowly; no noise should be made. Why? Because there are always hungry ghosts who eat shit. If they eat your shit, you are responsible; then you will suffer in your future lives. Great people! Great religious rules!This idea is of prophets who are trying to solve everybody’s misery, who come for the salvation of humanity. There is no established fact that Jesus came, and yet Christians still go on bragging that he came for the salvation of humanity. But the salvation of humanity has not happened yet. Two thousand years have passed. He proved a very impotent prophet. What kind of salvation has happened? Jainas say that Mahavira came to uplift humanity. Humanity is where it is. Buddha came to deliver everybody…I want to put a full stop to all this nonsense. I am not here to deliver anybody. Why should I deliver you? Your parents have already done that! I have no responsibility. I am not responsible to anybody – to any humanity, to any future. I am enjoying my moment, and those who want to enjoy this moment, this beautiful soap bubble in the sun, they can enjoy with me.He thinks – the Christian theologian who came from Germany just to study what is happening here – that of course it looks beautiful now, but as Osho dies it will disappear.It should disappear. I will make every arrangement for it to disappear. It should not remain even for a single moment, because that will be a dead thing.Wilhelm Reich lived with this prophetic mission. All prophets are in a way mad, a little neurotic. Even good people, even people like Jesus, have a little strain of neurosis: “the only begotten son of God.” Just see the neurosis. So what are all the others, bastards?Jesus claims that he is born of a virgin mother. What nonsense! Some neurosis, some streak of neurosis! The slate is not absolutely clean…some hangover from the past. He was waiting for miracles. At the very last moment, on the cross, he was waiting. He shouted at God, “Why have you forsaken me?” You see the expectation? You see the demand? He is frustrated, he is angry: “Why have you forsaken me?” He must have been waiting deep down for a miracle to happen, expecting that God will descend and save his only begotten son. But no God descended, because there is no God. It was not possible. He was continually praying, raising his hands toward the sky, and calling, “Abba, Father.” These are childish attitudes. But this is what has happened in the past.With me it is a totally different phenomenon. I want to make a complete break from the past. I am not a prophet, I am not a messiah, I am not the only begotten son of God, I have not come to make arrangements for your salvation. There is no need – the goose is out!Wilhelm Reich lived in reaction, not in rebellion. And the distinction is subtle. He was reacting. When you react against something you remain attached to it; you cannot be free of it. Reaction is a kind of negative attachment.I am not reacting, I am simply disconnected. I am discontinuous with the past because that is the only way to live now. I have no past and no future. This moment is all!The third question:Osho,I don't have any questions. Still there is one… Could you please say something crazy that has no purpose?What do you think I have been doing all along? Do you think there is any purpose in what I am saying? Can you find a crazier man than me?I am utterly crazy, and I have no purpose at all. I am just enjoying myself. I love to talk, so I love to talk… Hence, I have freedom which no thinker can ever have, because he has to be consistent. I don’t care at all about any consistency. The moment I have said anything, it is finished; then I don’t look back. I have never read any of my books – I don’t even remember the names.If somebody asks me, “Osho, You have said this in that book…” I say, “Really? It must have been said by somebody else. That man died long ago.”So everything that I am saying is purposeless, as purposeless as the roses, as a bird on the wing, as the stars, as the dewdrops in the early morning sun. What purpose could there be? I am not in any way purposive. It is sheer joy.Three Polacks are standing outside a brothel discussing what prices they are willing to pay for the services inside. They decide that one of them should go inside first while the other two wait outside.Half an hour later, the one who went inside comes out with a gleaming smile across his face.“What happened? What was it like?” his friends ask.“Well, I paid five zlotys, went into a room and this tall sexy woman was waiting for me. She took my clothes off, put two pineapple rings over my prick and proceeded to slowly eat them off. It was great!”The second Polack, pleased with his friend’s report, goes inside. An hour later he comes out, a big Cheshire cat grin on his face.“What happened?” asked the other two.“Well, I paid ten zlotys, and it was the same as our first friend. But this time she put four pineapple rings over my cock and ate them off very, very slowly.”The third Polack, by this time was very horny. He rushed into the brothel and came out fifteen minutes later with a long, sad face.“Well,” ask his friends, “what’s wrong? What happened?”“Well, begins the sad Polack, “it started off great. I paid twenty zlotys and she put six rings of pineapple over my cock, plus a big scoop of whipped cream.”“Wow!” the friends exclaim.“That’s not all,” continues the third, “a handful of crushed nuts, a sugar wafer, hot chocolate sauce, and topped off with a beautiful red cherry.”“That sounds great,” one of the others said. “What could possibly make you so sad then?”“Well, it looked so fucking good, I ate it myself!”Enough for today.

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The Goose is Out 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Goose is Out 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Are you infallible?I am infallibly fallible! First, I am not a perfectionist because to me perfectionism is the root cause of all neurosis. Unless humanity gets rid of the idea of perfection it is never going to be sane. The very idea of perfection has driven the whole of mankind to a state of madness. To think in terms of perfection means you are thinking in terms of ideology, goals, values, should’s, should-not’s. You have a certain pattern to fulfill, and if you fall from the pattern you will feel immensely guilty – a sinner. The pattern is bound to be such that you cannot achieve it. If you can achieve it then it will not be of much value to the ego.The intrinsic quality of the perfectionist ideal is that it should be unattainable; only then is it worth attaining. You see the contradiction? That contradiction creates a schizophrenia: you are trying to do the impossible, which you know perfectly well is not going to happen – it cannot happen in the very nature of things. If it can happen then it is not much of a perfection; then anybody can do it. Then there is not much ego nourishment in it: your ego cannot chew on it, cannot grow on it. The ego needs the impossible and the impossible, by its very nature, is not going to happen. So only two alternatives are left: one is, you start feeling guilty. If you are innocent, simple, intelligent, you will start feeling guilty – and guilt is a state of sickness.I am not here to create any guilt in you. My whole effort is to help you to get rid of all guilt. The moment you are free of guilt, rejoicing bursts forth. Guilt is rooted in the idea of perfection.The second alternative is: if you are cunning then you will become a hypocrite, you will start pretending that you have achieved it. You will deceive others and you will even try to deceive yourself. You will start living in illusions, hallucinations, and that is very unholy, very irreligious, very unwholesome. To pretend, to live a life of pretensions, is far worse than the life of a guilty man. The guilty man at least is simple, but the pretender, the hypocrite, the saint, the so-called sage, the mahatma, is a crook. He is basically inhuman – inhuman to himself because he is repressing; that’s the only way to pretend. Whatsoever he finds in himself which goes against perfection has to be repressed. He will be boiling within, he will be full of anger and rage. His anger and rage will come out in thousands of ways; in subtle ways, indirect ways, it will surface.Even people like Jesus – nice, good – are full of anger, rage. And they are against such innocent things, you cannot believe.Jesus comes followed by his followers, that bunch of fools they call apostles. He is hungry, that whole bunch is hungry. They come to a fig tree, and the fig tree is not in season. It is not its fault, but Jesus gets so angry that he condemns the fig tree, he curses the fig tree. Now, how is this possible? On the one hand he says, “Love thy enemy as thyself.” On the other hand he cannot even forgive a fig tree which has no fruits because it is not the season.This dichotomy, this schizophrenia has prevailed over humanity for thousands of years.He says, “God is love,” but still God manages a hell. If God is love, the first thing to be destroyed should be hell; hell should be immediately burned, removed. The very idea of hell is of a very jealous God. But Jesus was born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew; he was not a Christian, he had never heard the word Christian. And the Jewish idea of God is not a very beautiful idea.The Talmud says – the declaration is made in God’s own words – “I am a jealous God, very jealous. I am not nice! I am not your uncle!” This God is bound to create hell. In fact, to live even in heaven with such a God who is not your uncle, who is not nice, who is jealous, will be hell. What kind of paradise will you attain by living with him? There will be a despotic, dictatorial atmosphere – no freedom, no love. Jealousy and love cannot exist together.Even the so-called good people have been the cause of human misery. It hurts because we have never pondered over these things. We have never tried to excavate our past, and all the root causes of our misery are in our past. Remember perfectly well – your past is more dominated by Jesus, Mahavira, Confucius, Krishna, Rama, Buddha than by Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Nadir Shah. History books talk about these people, but they are not part of your unconscious. They may be part of history, but they don’t make up your personality; your personality is made by so-called good people. Certainly, they had a few good qualities in them, but side by side there was a duality, and the duality arose from the idea of perfection.Jainas say that Mahavira never perspired. How can a perfect man perspire? I can perspire – I am not a perfect man! Perspiration in summer is so beautiful that I would rather choose perspiration than perfection! A man who does not perspire simply has a plastic body, synthetic, nonbreathing, nonporous. The whole body breathes, that’s why you perspire; perspiration is a natural process to keep your body temperature constantly the same. Now, Mahavira must be burning inside like hell! How will he manage to keep his body temperature constant? Without perspiration it cannot be done, it is impossible.Jainas say that when a snake wounded Mahavira’s feet, milk, not blood, flowed out of the feet. Now, milk is possible only if Mahavira’s feet were not feet but breasts, and a man who has breasts on his feet should be put in a circus! This is their idea of perfection: a perfect man cannot have a dirty thing like blood, he is full of milk and honey. But just imagine: a man full of milk and honey will stink! Milk will turn into curd, and the honey will attract all kinds of mosquitoes and flies; he will be completely covered with flies! I don’t like this kind of perfection.Mahavira is so perfect that he does not urinate, does not defecate; these things are for imperfect human beings. You cannot imagine Mahavira sitting on a toilet seat, impossible! But then where does all his shit disappear to? He must be the shittiest man in the world.I have read in medical journals about a man – this was the longest case of constipation: eighteen months. These medical people are not aware of Mahavira. He lasted forty years! This is the longest period that any man has been able to control his bowels. This is real yoga! The greatest case of constipation in the whole history of man…and I don’t think anybody is going to defeat him.These stupid ideas have been perpetuated just to make humanity suffer. If you have these ideas in your mind then you will feel guilty about everything. Pissing, you are guilty – what are you doing? Sitting on a toilet, and you are falling into hell! If you bleed, a deep humiliation.Jesus walks on water; he tries to revive a dead friend, but cannot survive, himself, on the cross. He tries to cure blind people, deaf people, but cannot make a single stupid man enlightened, cannot help a single fool to come out of his foolishness, cannot save a single human being by hitting him hard on the head and saying, “See, the goose is out!”Yes, I am very fallible because I am not a neurotic, I am not psychotic; I am not a perfectionist. I love my imperfections…I love this world because it is imperfect. It is imperfect, and that’s why it is growing; if it were perfect it would be dead. Growth is possible only if there is imperfection. Perfection means a full stop; perfection means ultimate death; there is no way to go beyond it.I would like you to remember again and again: I am imperfect, the whole universe is imperfect, and to love this imperfection, to rejoice in this imperfection is my whole message.The psychiatrist leaned back and placed the tips of his fingers together while he soothed the deeply-troubled man who stood before him. “Calm yourself, my good fellow,” he gently urged. “I have helped a great many others with fixations far more serious than yours. Now, let me see if I understand the problem correctly. You indicate that in moments of great emotional stress you believe that you are a dog, a fox terrier. Is that not so?”“Yes, sir,” mumbled the patient. “A small fox terrier with black and brown spots. Oh, please tell me you can help me, doctor. If this keeps up much longer, I don’t know what I’ll do…”The doctor gestured toward the couch. “Now, now,” he soothed, “the first thing to do is lie down here, and we’ll see if we can’t get to the root of your delusion.”“Oh, I couldn’t do that, doctor,” said the patient. “I’m not allowed up on the furniture.”Once you get an idea deep-rooted in you, it starts becoming a reality. Perfectionism is a neurotic idea. Infallibility is good for stupid Polack popes but not for intelligent people. An intelligent person will understand that life is an adventure, a constant exploration through trial and error. That’s its very joy, its very juice!I don’t want you to be perfect. I want you to be just as perfectly imperfect as possible. Rejoice in your imperfections! Rejoice in your very ordinariness! Beware of so-called “His Holinesses” – they are all “His Phoninesses.” If you like such big words like “His Holiness” then make a title such as “His Very Ordinariness” – HVO, not HH! I preach ordinariness. I make no claims for any miracles; I am a simple man. I would like you to be very simple also so that you can get rid of these two polarities: one of guilt and the other of hypocrisy. Exactly in the middle is sanity.St. Peter challenged the Archangel Gabriel to a game of golf. St. Peter’s first drive resulted in a hole-in-one. Gabriel’s first drive produced the same result. The same thing happened at the next shot.St. Peter looked at Gabriel thoughtfully and then said, “What do you say we cut out the miracles and play some golf?”I am not infallible, and I would never like to be infallible either, because that is suicidal. I would like to commit as many mistakes as possible and I would like to go on committing mistakes to the very end of my last breath, because that means life. If you are capable of committing mistakes even to the very last breath you have conquered death.A Zen Master was dying…. I have a deep love for the Zen approach for the simple reason that they also rejoice in ordinariness. That’s the beauty of Zen: no religion has been able to rise to such heights of ordinariness.The Master was very old, around eighty years of age. He gathered his disciples and said, “Now this is my last day. I don’t think I will be able to see the sunset, and the sun is setting on the horizon. I have called you all to suggest to me some new way to die.”They were a little puzzled. They said, “What do you mean by ‘new way’?”He said, “People have died in bed, people have died in the bathroom, people have died this way and that. All those things have been done before, and I always like to do things in a new way, in my own way. Can you suggest something? Have you ever heard of somebody dying in a standing posture?”There was silence. One man said, “Yes, I have heard about a Zen Master who died standing.”He said, “Then that is dropped! Have you heard of anybody dying standing upside-down, on his head, doing a sirshasana, a headstand?”Everybody said, “We have not heard of such a thing. We have not even imagined such a thing, that anybody would die standing on his head!”So he said, “That will do!” The old man stood on his head, and it is said that there were all the visible signs that he was dead. But there was a difficulty: the difficulty was that the Zen disciples were in a very puzzling situation; what were they to do with this old man now? They had never heard of any ritual for somebody dying standing on his head. What should be done? They knew perfectly well what had to be done when somebody died in bed, but what should they do with this man? He was standing there dead – on his head!Somebody suggested: “We should run… His old sister lives very close by; she is a nun. She may be able to do something or suggest something. She is even crazier than this old man!”So they ran to the sister. She came and shouted at her brother and said, “Look, your whole life you have been a trouble! At least die peacefully; don’t make much fuss about it! Why are you driving these poor disciples crazy? Get up and lie down on the bed!”The old man laughed, got up and lay down on the bed, and he asked, “Who has brought this crazy sister of mine here? She won’t even let me die in an improper way!”Then he said, “Okay, you can be happy. This is your last desire, and I have never followed any advice of yours. At least this much I can do before I depart.”However, the woman did not stand there to see him depart. She said, “You just lie down there; I am going. You die on the bed in a proper way! No more trouble.”And she left, and the old man died in the bed in a proper way.This is how life should be lived.I am not a saint; I am not a sage. All those hocus-pocus words don’t mean anything to me. I am certainly a little bit crazy, and it is because of my craziness that you can rely on me! Never rely on saints, never rely on sages – they will drive you nuts!It was teatime in the pad, and the air hung heavy in thick blue folds as the bunch of Beatniks and their tourist friends lit up. Suddenly, a loud voice in the hall demanded that they open the door in the name of the law. The smokers frantically gathered their still-smoking weed and stuffed it in the cuckoo clock. The police entered, searched diligently, found nothing and left. The bunch breathed a sigh of relief and made for the cuckoo clock just as the clock’s hands announced 3 a.m. The little door popped open, the bird poked his head out and said, “Hey, man, what time is it?”The second question:Osho,I have heard that behind each so-called great man – like Julius Caesar or Napoleon, or even a really great man like Socrates – there was a woman in charge.I have always managed to turn from being an admirer of women into a woman's fool. What is your secret?You have put more women in charge than is really possible, and yet you have remained free and loved by them all. And I love you too.The so-called great men – Julius Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and others – were certainly driven by women; they were trying to prove themselves.Woman has one very special quality about her: she is, in a way, very contented with small things. Just because she is a woman she has a natural capacity to create children; her desire for creativity is fulfilled – she becomes a creator naturally, biologically. There, man feels impotent: he cannot produce children. Something like an empty womb hurts inside. He wants to prove before the woman, particularly the woman he loves, that “I can also create,” that “I can also conquer,” that “I can also show the world that I am not just useless, just like an appendix,” that “I have also something to contribute to the world, to its beauty, to its power, to its art, to its music, to its dance. I have to prove it!”That is a very unconscious longing in every man – to prove something. The moment a man falls in love with a woman, immediately the question becomes of predominant importance. He starts proving himself by earning more money, by becoming a president or prime minister, by conquering the world. Whatsoever he does still remains incomplete – he cannot compete with the woman. She remains so round, so centered and grounded, that the man can go on to the very end of the world, but still he will not be grounded. He will go to Everest, he will go to the moon, he will become a world conqueror, he will discover great truths of science, he will fight wars, he will explore the unknown, but wherever he is he will find that something is missing. That missing link is biological.Woman has a balanced biology; her chemistry is equally balanced. Man has a biology which is a little unbalanced: one part is heavier and the other part is a little lighter, and that creates an inner tension in him. That’s why more men go mad than women, more men commit suicide than women, more men commit murder than women. And if you look at the world you will see that it is dominated by man for the simple reason that woman is not interested in dominating; there is no need – she feels a certain kind of fulfillment in her innermost core. Man is always rushing, going somewhere, always on the go. All men are American tourists! They cannot be here, now.It starts even in the womb. An experienced mother who has given birth to one or two children knows perfectly well after a few months whether inside the womb there is a boy or a girl. The boy starts kicking, he starts becoming an Alexander the Great! The girl remains quiet, at ease, meditative; she does not create much disturbance.It is because of this that woman was easily dominated by man. It is not because of the superiority of man. It is not because of his power, that he was able to dominate the woman; it is just the opposite. Woman is superior in many ways, and because man suffers from inferiority he has to dominate the woman; only then can he get rid of a little bit of his inferiority.Man has dominated the whole of history; he has in every possible way tried to enslave woman, but he has not been successful. On the surface it may look as if he has succeeded, but each husband knows perfectly well that the moment he enters the home he is no longer the lion that he pretends to be on the outside. He suddenly becomes a dog, a poor dog, with its tail between its legs! When he goes out of the home he goes like thunder, when he comes home all the gas is lost! Somehow he enters afraid, trembling, and starts reading the same newspaper he has been reading the whole day just to avoid his woman. That newspaper is just a curtain. Even a small woman is enough to bring any Muhammad Ali the Great to his senses.There is a beautiful story in the life of the great Indian Emperor Akbar:One day one of his friends, Birbal, told him, “As far as I know, all men are dominated by women, whatsoever they may pretend.” Akbar was offended. He said, “You will have to prove it. There must be a few men who are not dominated; your statement cannot be taken as a generalization. So I will give you two beautiful horses. You go around, and take a few hens also with you. If you find a man who is henpecked, present him with a hen. If you find a man who is not henpecked, then give him a choice: he can either have the black horse or the white horse. These are the most beautiful horses I have got, the most costly.” In those days horses were of tremendous value.Birbal went around Delhi, and wherever he went he had to present a hen. Only in one place was he in a little difficulty. A very muscular man – he had never seen such a strong, muscular body – was sitting in the sun, massaging his muscles.Birbal asked him, “Are you a henpecked husband?”He simply showed his muscles to Birbal and said, “Just hold my hand and I will show you!” He crushed Birbal’s hand so that Birbal screamed, and he said, “Now, do you have to ask me again? Then I will hit you! The very question is an insult! Who can dominate me?”A very little woman was cooking food inside – just a little woman that the man could have crushed with a single hand. No cross would have been needed, just a little pressure on her neck and she would have kicked the bucket!Birbal asked, “Where is your wife?”He said, “That is my wife cooking inside. You can look at her and you can look at me, and you can decide who is the master.”It was so absolutely clear that Birbal said, “Certainly you are the master, so I will have to take my generalization back. You can choose as a gift from the king either of the horses, black or white.”And the man looked at the woman and said, “Which horse should I choose, black or white?”And the woman said, “Make it the white one!”Birbal said, “Now you get a hen! It is finished! You may have muscular power, but that does not prove anything.”The woman has a psychological grip.Andrew Carnegie, one of the great wealthy industrialists of the world, was asked on the last day of his life, “How did you manage to earn so much money? What was the secret behind it?”He said, “There was no secret. I was just trying to see whether I can earn so much that my wife could not spend it, but I failed, she succeeded.”You ask me: “I have heard that behind each so-called great man – like Julius Caesar or Napoleon, or even a really great man like Socrates – there was a woman in charge.”It is true. About the so-called great men it is true because they were trying to be great just to compete with their wives, and about the really great men like Socrates it is also true.A young man asked Socrates, “I am thinking to get married. What is your advice?”He had heard all the stories about Socrates and his wife, Xanthippe. She must have been a really dangerous woman, an Amazon! She used to beat Socrates. Once she poured hot water, boiling hot water on him; she was preparing it for tea but became angry and poured it on Socrates’ face.Socrates was an ugly man, very ugly – snub-nosed, nothing worth looking at, disgusting. Xanthippe made him more disgusting! Half of his face remained burned his whole life.So this young man had come to the right person to ask, “You have experienced what it is to be a husband more than anybody else, and the whole of Athens is full of stories about your wife and you, and you are the wisest man, declared so by the Oracle of Delphi, so I have come to ask you – I am in a dilemma – should I get married or not?”Socrates said, “You should get married.”The young man could not believe it! He had not expected this answer. He said, “You are saying it after your whole experience of having Xanthippe as your wife?”He said, “Yes. If you get a good wife she will make you succeed in life, she will put ambitions in you. You are young; you will need some ambitions. If you get a wife like mine then you will become a philosopher. My wife has helped me immensely to learn the art of remaining unaffected. Whatsoever happens – success or failure, misery or happiness – it is all the same to me. She has made me centered. Either way you will not lose, so get married.”There is a possibility – every possibility, in fact – that the whole credit for Buddha becoming enlightened goes to Yashodhara, his wife. The whole credit for Mohammed becoming the prophet of God must go to his nine wives. There is every possibility that these people were trying somehow not to be disturbed, not to be distracted, and they started searching for a beyond, they started searching for a within, the beyond within, so that they could forget the whole world.A wife, your woman, is really the closest world around you: she surrounds you from everywhere, from every nook and corner. Your so-called great men are indebted to women, and your many really great men are also indebted to women, although they have not accepted it. That is ugly.Many times I am asked why women don’t become enlightened. The reason is, no man is capable of driving them to that extreme! It has nothing to do with women, it is just the impotence of the man – he cannot drive them to that point. Moreover, women are always grounded, centered; man is not grounded, not centered. He remains airy-fairy and he needs grounding, he needs centering.Strolling through London’s Soho district, the young Cockney noticed an attractive girl furiously struggling to hold down her microskirt in the brisk wind. Tipping his hat, he said, “Airy, ain’t it?”“What the hell did you expect?” she replied. “Feathers?”Sheila and George were spending the first night of their honeymoon in a quaint medieval town in France. To add piquancy to the evening, Sheila suggested coyly that they make love every time the old night watchman rang his hourly bell. George smiled in delight at this prospect, but four rings later he pretended that he had to go out to get some cigarettes and staggered off to the watchman’s tower.“Listen, old man,” he wheezed to that worthy man, “do me a favor, will you? For the rest of the night ring that bell of yours at two-hour intervals instead of hourly!”“Ah,” replied the ancient watchman, fingering his mustache, “I would be happy to oblige, monsieur, but I cannot do this.”“Why not?” George demanded. “I’ll give you money, if that’s what’s troubling you!”“Not at all,” the old man responded. “You see, a beautiful young lady has already bribed me to ring the bell every half hour.”“I have always managed to turn from being an admirer of women into a woman’s fool…” If you are an admirer of women you will inevitably turn into a woman’s fool, because admiration is illusory; admiration is possible only from a distance. The closer you come the more foolish you will look, and when you are caught by the woman you are bound to be turned into a damned fool. You were trying in every possible way to be caught, so you cannot easily get out of it.A mousetrap never runs after a mouse; the mousetrap simply sits centered, grounded. The mouse in his airy-fairy romanticism starts dreaming about the coziness inside the mousetrap, the smell of the food inside, the spaghetti and all that, and gets caught. It is easy to get caught, it is very difficult to get out again, because the mousetrap has only an entrance and no exit.So, it is going to happen again and again!I don’t admire any woman: I am not a romantic, I am very factual. Whatsoever I say about men or women is simply a fact – no fiction about it! And once you are caught you will be constantly in difficulty because there are other mousetraps all around which look cozier, warmer, more beautiful, more spicy. In fact, the word spicy is only a plural of spouse! Marriage is a very strange affair: the dessert is served first and then everything goes down the drain!After a heart-transplant operation the patient was receiving instructions from his doctor. He was placed on a strict diet, denied tobacco and advised to get at least eight hours sleep at night.Finally the patient asked, “What about my sex life, Doc? Will it be all right for me to have intercourse?”“Just with your wife,” responded the doctor. “We don’t want you to get too excited.”A middle-aged husband went to a doctor and explained that his wife was constantly nagging him about his vanishing potency. After giving him a bottle of pills the doctor assured him that they would work wonders.A month later the man returned, obviously satisfied with the results. “The pills are terrific!” he said. “I have been doing it three times a night.”“Wonderful,” the doctor replied. “What does your wife say about your lovemaking now?”“How should I know?” the fellow shrugged. “I have not been home yet!”You ask me: “What is your secret?”In my life there is no secret – or you can call it “the open secret.” I have nothing hidden; I don’t live like a fist, I live like an open hand. Nothing is hidden, nothing is esoteric, nothing is secret; all is simple and plain.You say: “You have put more women in charge than is really possible, and yet you have remained free and loved by them all.”The open secret is that you can be free only if you have put too many women around you. Then they are so concerned with each other that they leave you absolutely alone. In fact, they forget all about you! Their jealousies, their envies are enough to keep them occupied. If one wants to be really free of women, that’s the only way. This is my open secret!They all love me for the simple reason that I am not possessed by anybody, nor do I possess anybody. If you possess some woman then there will be trouble; if you are possessed by some woman then there will be trouble. I don’t possess anybody; I am not possessed by anybody. I go on sitting, doing my own business – which is nothing – and I keep the women going round and round. They have so many problems; they can afford to forget all about me!You say, “You have put more women in charge than is really possible…” No, you don’t know the limit. Even the sky is not the limit! When the new commune happens you will see: I will put so many women in charge that even if I die it will take you years to discover that a man is no longer there! They will make so much fuss and dance and love and all kinds of foolish things that you will not even come to know whether I am still here or gone.I have put them in charge because they are more pragmatic than men, they have a greater capacity to cope with reality, they are earthbound. Man leans more toward the sky and woman is rooted in the earth. It is a very pragmatic arrangement.If women take charge of the whole world, the world will drop many stupid things. For example, wars will disappear. Of course, there will be more beautiful clothes, fashion shows, modeling; but weapons, atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, etcetera, will disappear. No woman is interested in all these things. Hiroshima and Nagasaki will not happen again; it is only man who can do these things. Crusades will disappear, religious wars will disappear, jihads will disappear. No woman is interested; her interest is very pragmatic, real. She is more interested in clothes, in cosmetics, in beauty; and those concerns are good – they keep you more alive. Man’s concerns are very dangerous – political, religious, economic – and they make more and more mischief.In the name of serving humanity more mischief happens than anything else: in three thousand years, five thousand wars have been fought and the whole credit goes to men. Millions of people are killed in the name of love, in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of God. Now, no woman can do that. I don’t think you can have a world war because of cosmetics, or clothes and designs, or dramas and new dishes – you can’t have world wars because of these things!I want my commune to be very earthbound, because this is my experience, the observation of many lives: that the tree has first to go deep into the earth; the deeper the roots go, the higher the branches rise. If you want to touch the stars with the flowers then you have to go to the very rock bottom of the earth.All the religions of the world have remained a little foggy, confused, for the simple reason that they were all trying to reach the stars, the beyond, to the far away, without ever thinking about the roots.Buddha was against women; he was not willing to initiate women. He said that his religion would have lasted five thousand years, but because he finally agreed to initiate women his religion would disappear within five hundred years. My own observation is just the opposite: without women it would not have lasted even five hundred years, because the moment Buddha died all the men started quarreling – ideological wars. Thirty-two sects were immediately born, the same day! Buddha’s body was not yet even totally burned and thirty-two philosophical schools, thirty-two interpretations arose. The war had started.When Jesus was crucified, all those twelve fools disappeared. Three women were there to take his body from the cross, but not a single man. Mary Magdalene was there, the prostitute, her sister was there, Martha, and Jesus’ mother Mary was there. All those apostles, those fanatics, where had they gone? They were preparing for the Vatican, they were preparing for the future. Jesus was finished! Now the question was of theology, philosophy, ideology. Those three women were not concerned with theology or philosophy, they were concerned with his body. They were more pragmatic; they were more true, honest, sincere. They loved the man, they risked for the man, they were ready to be condemned. All those men had disappeared.One of the most educated of Jesus’ disciples was Judas; he betrayed him for only thirty silver coins. No woman could have done that. He was the most intellectual among all of Jesus’ disciples. But intellectuals can betray very easily: they are the most renegade people in the world because their hearts are not in it, only their heads – and the head is cunning, the head is calculating. Woman lives through the heart.Hence, my commune is functioning in a totally new way: it has to be rooted first. That’s the way of all gardeners: first you have to give soil, manure, roots to the plant, and then flowers come of their own accord. Flowers will come, but they cannot come without roots. Roots and flowers are like two wings: if you have both wings then the whole sky is yours. But the most important thing, the first, the basic, the fundamental, is the roots.Woman is the root of all life; man can at the most be a branch, a flowering branch, a beautiful branch – a longing, an aspiration to touch the stars. They have to go together. That’s why I have put so many women here, and slowly, slowly they will take over the whole soil and leave you free, leave men free to grow into flowers.A real commune will have men and women in a deep synchronicity. All the past communes had to die because they depended only on men; they never took any care of the women. No woman has ever been able to create a commune because she does not aspire to the stars.A commune means an aspiration, a longing, a tremendous longing to grow, an immense urge to explore. No woman can find reasons to put down the foundation stone for a commune. Man is always interested in the far away, so he becomes the original source of communes, but no man is capable of giving roots.This has been the problem in the past: woman can provide roots but she is not interested in flowers, and man can provide flowers but he is not interested in roots. A deep synchronicity is needed, a deep harmony. That’s what I am trying to fulfill here.Obsessed with the idea of pleasing all manner of customers with girls of the very highest order, an enterprising madam set up a three-story house of sport. She had ex-secretaries, selected for their efficiency, on the first floor; ex-models, selected for their beauty, on the second; and ex-schoolteachers, selected for their intelligence, on the third. As time went on the madam noticed that almost all the play went to floor number three. She asked why, and the answer to the puzzle finally came from one of the steady customers.“Well,” said the sporting gentleman, “you know how those school teachers are. They make you do it over and over, until you get it right!”This is really the open secret: my women sannyasins are really doing perfectly well, and they will make you do it again and again until you do it right!The morning after the office Christmas party the husband woke up with an agonizing hangover. “I feel terrible,” he complained.“You should,” said his wife. “You really made a fool of yourself last night.”“What did I do?”“You got into a quarrel with your boss and he fired you.”“Well, he can go to hell!”“That’s exactly what you told him.”“I did?” he said incredulously. “Then, screw the old goat!”“That’s just what I did,” his wife replied. “You go back to work on Monday.”Very pragmatic!Sam told his wife, Becky, that because of inflation they had to cut expenses – no more dining out, theater, concerts, etcetera. Becky chided him in reply, “But, Sam, if you would just learn how to fuck, we could get rid of the chauffeur!”Man lives in a totally different world!A man returned from a convention and proudly showed his wife a gallon of bourbon he had won for having the largest sex organ of all present.“What!” she exclaimed. “Do you mean to tell me you exhibited yourself in front of all those people?”“Only enough to win, darling,” he replied. “Only enough to win!”The third question:Osho,I have begun to ask you some questions three or four times already. Every time I finished a letter, I felt that everything I wrote was nonsense and so I threw them into the wastepaper basket.Nevertheless, I want you to speak a few words to me, although I seldom listen to your words – just hearing, just being close to you.Since I arrived here I have been really irritated. I was fine in the West and have never searched for a master. Now I am here and have no desire to go back. What has happened to me?I have happened to you! Now there is no going back, and even if you go I am coming with you. I will haunt you everywhere! I can understand your irritation. That’s my whole joy – to irritate people! Once they are irritated they are caught.Of course, you are right that you were fine in the West; now you can never be fine anywhere else, but only now, here. Now no West, no East can be of any help. You have tasted something that you have not tasted before, and once you have tasted something – something alcoholic, something like LSD – you can never be the same person again. That taste will linger; it will haunt you.And this is pure LSD that is happening here! It is not chemical LSD, it is alchemical – far more refined than chemical LSDs can ever be. It is real soma! It is what has always happened between a master and a disciple.There is no need to listen to my words. Just being with me is enough, just being in tune, that’s enough. Words are only strategies to keep you attuned to me so that you don’t fall asleep, so that you remain awake.You say: “Every time I finished a letter, I felt that everything I wrote was nonsense…” It is! But there is no need to throw it away, otherwise what am I going to do here? Use me as a wastepaper basket, so whatsoever you write – sense, nonsense…it is all nonsense; as far as I am concerned it is all nonsense. So you can send it to me, and I will make some crazy thing out of it.After acquiring enough money from handouts, an inhabitant of the Bowery decided to take his refreshment at one of Wall Street’s better drinking establishments.A financial tycoon seated next to him was visibly appalled at the appearance and odor of the down-and-outer, so much so, in fact, that he turned to the man and pointedly said, “Cleanliness is next to godliness – John Wesley.” His words were ignored.A few minutes later, the financier again intoned loudly, “Cleanliness is next to godliness – John Wesley.” Still he was ignored.Finally, the visibly irritated financier shouted in the man’s face, “Cleanliness is next to godliness – John Wesley!”To which the skid-row denizen calmly replied, “Screw you! – Tennessee Williams.”You can ask me any nonsense thing, and I will give you a bigger nonsense. I am an expert at that – the only expertise I can claim! And the more nonsensical a question is the more I enjoy it, because it expects a more nonsensical answer. If you ask something crazy that means you are asking for something crazy, and I am the last one to be defeated!A man went into a restaurant and ordered his breakfast. When the waitress brought his coffee, he observed that her thumb was stuck in the coffee. When the scrambled eggs arrived, again he observed that her thumb was in the eggs.This was too much, and he said, “Lady, I didn’t say anything when I saw your thumb in my coffee, but now I see that your thumb is in my eggs, too.”“Well,” said the waitress, “I have a painful arthritis in my thumb joint, and the doctor told me to put it into something warm and this would ease the pain.”The man was angry and said, “Well, why don’t you stick it up your ass?”“Oh, I do, I do,” answered the waitress, “but only when I’m in the kitchen!”Enough for today.

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The Goose is Out 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Goose is Out 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I have got all the degrees that a university can offer. Why am I still ignorant?Knowledge has no capacity to dispel ignorance. Knowledge is a false phenomenon; it is not wisdom at all, it is just the opposite of wisdom.Knowledge is borrowed; wisdom is the flowering of your innermost being. You can borrow a plastic flower, but if you want real roses then you will have to grow them in your innermost being. No university can offer it, no scripture can offer it, no scholarship is capable of doing it. They are all impotent efforts, but they have been deceiving millions of people for thousands of years. Yes, they can make you knowledgeable. To be knowledgeable is one thing, and to know is totally different.A blind man can be knowledgeable about light, but he knows nothing of light; he has not experienced it. He can collect all kinds of information about light, he can argue, philosophize, systematize; he can write great treatises on light, but he has not tasted the joy of light – he has not seen even a single ray of light. He has not seen the rainbow, the colors of the flowers, the wings of a butterfly. He has not seen the green trees, he has not seen the stars, the sun, the moon. He has missed all that. And what he has accumulated is simply rubbish.It is better to be ignorant and have eyes than to be very knowledgeable about light and be blind.The universities exist for that purpose specifically. No society wants you to become wise – it is against the investment of all societies. If people are wise they cannot be exploited. If they are intelligent they cannot be subjugated; they cannot be forced into a mechanical life, to live like a robot. They will assert themselves – they will assert their individuality. They will have the fragrance of rebellion around them; they would like to live in freedom.Freedom comes with wisdom, intrinsically – they are inseparable – and no society wants people to be free. The communist society, the fascist society, the capitalist society, the Hindu, the Mohammedan, the Christian – no society would like people to use their own intelligence because the moment they start using their intelligence they become dangerous, dangerous to the establishment, dangerous to the people who are in power, dangerous to the “haves,” dangerous to all kinds of oppression, exploitation, suppression; dangerous to the churches, dangerous to the states, dangerous to the nations.In fact, a wise man is afire, alive, aflame. He would prefer to die than to be enslaved. Death will not matter much, but he cannot sell his life to any kind of stupidity, to any kind of stupid people. He cannot serve them. Hence, societies down the ages have been supplying you with false knowing. That’s the very function of your schools, colleges, universities.They don’t serve you. Remember, they serve the past, they serve the vested interests. Of course, they go on puffing your ego up bigger and bigger, they go on giving you more and more degrees. Your name becomes longer and longer. But just the name – you go on becoming shorter and shorter. A point comes where there are only certificates, and the man has disappeared. First the man carries the certificates, then the certificates carry the man. The man is long dead.It is not possible to become wise through the universities. Wisdom needs a totally different approach, a diametrically opposite approach. Knowledge is of the mind; wisdom is a state of no-mind. Knowledge creates the bottle around the goose – a beautiful bottle, very beautifully painted, but it is just a bottle.Inside there cannot be a real goose, alive. Inside a bottle either you can have a stuffed goose – that’s what your scholars are, stuffed tomatoes, potatoes, but all stuffed, stuffed with junk – or you can have a painted goose inside. It will look beautiful from the outside, but in fact you are carrying only a bottle.The bottle becomes heavier, because knowledge has its own way of accumulating; it goes on reproducing itself. Knowledge does not believe in birth control at all. If you know one thing, it will drive you into another, because as each question is answered ten new questions arise. Again the same will happen: ten questions are answered and you have a hundred questions ready for you. It goes on spreading. It becomes bigger and bigger and you are lost in it.You ask me: “Why I am still ignorant?”This is why you are ignorant: you have not yet come out of the illusion of knowledge, the illusion of the mind.Get out of the mind. The mind is the bottle I am talking about. The moment you drop the mind…and mind is only your idea; it is not a reality, it is fictitious, it is just a fantasy. It is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. You can simply step out of it.This is the moment, because this is a great insight, in fact, to recognize this: “Why am I still ignorant when I am carrying all the degrees of the university?” Accept the fact that all those years of acquiring knowledge have been a sheer wastage. Get out of it! The moment you are out of the mind, you are out of the bottle. See…the goose is out! And the whole freedom of the sky, and the whole freedom of insightfulness…Just the other day I was reading:What does a degree mean? I have got four: B.A., M.A., Ph.D., and LL.D. Put them all together and what have you got? – BAMAPHDLLD!A young man at college named Breeze,Weighed down by M.A.s and LL.DsCollapsed from the strain.Said his doctor, “‘Tis plain,You are killing yourself by degrees!”A very agitated professor, a father-to-be, desperate for a son, was pacing up and down in the waiting room at the maternity hospital. Eventually the midwife came out of the delivery room and said to him, “It’s all over, Dr. Jones. Congratulations!”Still in a state of total panic he replied, “Am I a father or a mother?”That’s what it means: BAMAPHDLLD.A professor-couple living in the country received an invitation from the local squire to a costume party. They decided to go as a cow, with the husband at the front and the wife at the back.The party was to be held in the squire’s mansion, which was only across a couple of fields, so they thought they might as well walk across in costume.They had only gotten half way across the field when the husband, in the front, said to his wife, “Don’t panic, darling, but there is a bull looking at us.”So they kept walking and the bull kept looking. Then the bull started pawing the ground and making his way toward them in a meaningful manner.“He’s charging us, darling, he’s charging!” said the husband.“What are we going to do?” yelled the wife.So the husband said, “I am going to bend down and eat grass – you had better brace yourself!”It was the young British professor’s first visit to the United States, and in his innocence he sought lodging in the city’s red-light district. His money, however, was as green as his outlook, and the madam gladly offered him a room for the night.When a friend questioned him about his accommodation over lunch the following day, the young Briton replied, “Well, the room was very pretentious, you know, but Gad! what maid service!”The so-called learned, the scholarly, the knowledgeable go on living in a world of their own fictions. They have no concern with reality at all; they are disconnected from the real. And it is the real which can make your life a joy, a bliss.The word God is not God, the word love is not love either. So the poor people who go on thinking about the word God or the word love are simply missing a great opportunity. They may have known what God is, they may have become acquainted with the mysteries of love, but the word is hiding the truth; the word is covering their eyes. All the eyes of the knowledgeable people are so covered with theories, theologies, dogmas, creeds, that they cannot see. They are not transparent. And wisdom is a transparency, a vision unclouded – unclouded by all thoughts, unclouded by all dust.One has to cleanse oneself every moment, because dust tends to gather on the mirror every moment. It is a natural process. While you are sitting here, the mirror in your bathroom is gathering dust. Even in the night when nothing is happening – even when the doors of the bathroom and the windows are closed – still some dust is gathering, settling on the mirror, because dust particles are there in the air itself. In the morning you have to cleanse the mirror every day.One has to be even more alert about the inner mind, the inner mirror, the inner capacity for reflection. Each moment you have to cleanse the dust. I prefer to put it in this way: each moment a sannyasin has to die to the past and be born anew. Then he remains transparent, then his mirror remains clear. Then there is nothing to obstruct his perspective. Then he is not a Christian, nor a Hindu, nor a Mohammedan, nor a Buddhist. Then he is simply a mirror, just a mirror, a mirroring – mirroring all that is, within and without. Out of that mirroring, wisdom is born.Wisdom is the flowering of your transparency, of your translucency, of your luminous being. That’s what we are doing here. In fact, the function of the master is to undo what the society has done to you. It is an anti-university, anti-school, anti-college, because it is not to impart knowledge to you but to impart something totally different, something of a different dimension. It is to create a triggering process in you so that you can get out of your so-called scriptures, words, theories, and you can become just ordinary. You can just become whatsoever you are without any pretensions.I exalt the ordinariness of consciousness. I am not teaching here you as the superman. Friedrich Nietzsche went mad simply because of the idea of the superman. In India also, Sri Aurobindo, his whole life, was feeding the Indian ego with the idea of the superman, of the supermind, of the supernatural.All this esoteric nonsense has become such a heavy burden on man that it has to be totally burned – less than that won’t do. A fire is needed so all that can be burned can be burned, and only that which remains after will be your true self.I am not esoteric, I am not occult, I am not teaching you the other world, I am not teaching you the supernatural, the superman. I am simply exalting the very ordinariness of every human being, the very ordinariness not only of human beings, but of animals, of trees, of rivers, and rocks – this very ordinariness is godliness. To me, godliness and ordinariness are equivalent, synonymous.If I have to choose I will drop the word God, because it has become really god-damned. Just pure ordinariness…and to live it moment-to-moment, joyously, dancingly, celebratingly. Then wisdom blooms. Then the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.The second question:Osho,Your compassion toward India brings, in return, anger and condemnation toward you. Every day Indian newspapers and magazines are full of third-rate criticism against you. Even so, you keep hammering this rotten culture. What is this business? Does India deserve so much compassion?It is because I am saying something which India has completely forgotten. It hurts. It has forgotten the truth. For thousands of years it has lived in a foggy state of mind – not only that, it has become very attached to that foggy state for the simple reason that it has nothing else to cling to. This was the only prop for its ego.For twenty-two centuries India has been in political slavery. Now, a country existing for twenty-two centuries in slavery cannot have any source of ego as far as the political world is concerned. It cannot brag about world conquerors like Alexander the Great.For five thousand years, India has been living in a very superstitious way. The priests have dominated India more than any country ever, and they are the most cunning people in the world. Because of their exploitation, oppression, because of their poisoning of the Indian soul, for five thousand years India has not been able to find any way into truth. They were standing like a China Wall against the truth.It is a question of life and death for the priesthood. Either the truth or the priest – both cannot survive together; there is no possibility of their co-existence. If truth wins, the priest disappears. Hence, the truth has not to be allowed to win so the priest can go on dominating. No other country has been dominated by priests like India. For five thousand years a spiritual slavery…There is nothing to support the ego of the nation – no science, no technology, no richness, no political freedom, no democracy. You can see the problem. The problem is… A nation has to depend on some props, because a nation is not a true reality, remember; it needs props.The individual can exist without the ego because an individual is a reality and that reality has no need of the ego. But the nation, the race, the church, the state – these cannot exist without egos. Without an ego they will fall apart. It is the ego that functions as a false center and keeps them together. Hence, a Buddha can exist without the ego but Buddhists cannot exist. Krishna can exist without an ego but Hindus cannot exist. Remember this always: a false entity needs a false center, otherwise it will wither away.India as a country, as a nation, as a race, was in tremendous need somehow to create a false center. There was no ordinary alternative available – money, technology, science, political power – so the only thing to rely on was a spiritual longing, the longing for other world. It is easy, because then you are dealing with invisible goods. Nobody can prove it, nobody can disprove it. It is very easy to live in the hope of the other world. But who will create that hope? Then you have to depend on the crafty priests, the brahmins – they became the mediators. They talk about the other world. They have even given you maps of the other world; they don’t know the map of the physical world, this world. If you ask them, “Where is Timbuktu?” they may not be able to answer, but they can tell you each detail of heaven – not only one heaven, but seven heavens, a seven-storied heaven. They can tell you all the details, minute details of seven hells. There is no problem with it; it is religious fiction.Hindus believe in seven hells. Mahavira believed – Jainas believe in three hells and three heavens. There was a very beautiful man in Mahavira’s time – his name was Sanjaya Vilethiputta. He said, “This is all nonsense. There are seven hundred hells and seven hundred heavens!” But people said, “Mahavira says only three, Hindus say only seven.” Sanjaya Vilethiputta said, “Because they have only gone that far. I have searched the whole terrain.”Once a follower of Radhaswami came to me. They believe in fourteen heavens, fourteen stages of paradise. Of course, the founder of their religion has reached to the fourteenth. Others are somewhere on the ladder: Rama and Krishna and Buddha are somewhere on the seventh; Jesus, Mohammed and Zarathustra somewhere on the sixth; Nanak, Kabir, Meera, somewhere on the fifth, and so on and so forth…each according to his need, and each according to his capacity…He had brought the whole map. He wanted my approval – what did I think about this map, what do I say, is it right or not?I said, “It is absolutely right!”He was a little shocked because people had told him not to go to me because I will disturb him. And I said, “It is absolutely right. I know. Your guru has reached the fourteenth – I have seen him there.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “I am on the fifteenth, and he is always begging me, ‘Pull me out of the fourteenth’!”He was shocked, he was angry. But if there are fourteen, why not fifteen? Nobody can prove it, nobody can disprove.I have heard: In New York a shopkeeper was selling invisible hairpins. And, of course, the women were immensely attracted – invisible hairpins!One woman looked in the box… Of course, when the hairpins are invisible you cannot see – the box looked empty. She said, “Are they really there?”The shopkeeper said, “They must be! Nobody has ever seen. In fact, for months we have run out of stock, but they are selling!”When something is invisible you can go on selling it; there is no problem with it.India has been selling invisible goods to the world. Visible goods are not there. Naturally they become angry with me because I insist that goods should be visible, that you are carrying an empty box, that there is no goose in your bottle. For five thousand years they have been doing such a good business and I am destroying their very foundation.It is natural that they get angry at me. But anger simply shows fear. Remember always: anger is fear standing on its head. It is always fear that hides behind anger; fear is the other side of anger. Whenever you become afraid, the only way to hide the fear is to be angry because fear will expose you. Anger will create a curtain around you; you can hide behind anger. The Indian mind is becoming really afraid of me. And it is not only the Indian mind but all other minds in the world who are doing the same kind of business, dealing in invisible goods. They all are becoming afraid.When they become angry with me I know that I have hit on the right point. I rejoice in it! They have been pretending love, compassion, sympathy, understanding, but I am exposing them to their very core. Without knowing what they are doing, they are doing what I want them to do. They are in my hands. Anybody who gets angry at me is caught by me. Now he will be in a whirlwind. I will churn him, I will haunt him. Sooner or later he will himself throw his clothes off and stand naked in the sun. That’s what is happening. When they are angry at me they are really showing that they have been exposed.The only way to defend themselves is to be aggressive. They are defending themselves, but they can defend only if they become aggressive. Their anger is showing simply their impotence.I have heard a beautiful story, an ancient story:A man came to China. When he entered the country – this must be an old, ancient story – just on the boundary he saw a crowd. Two persons were almost ready to kill each other. They were shouting, jumping, making all kinds of angry gestures, swords naked in their hands. But nothing real was happening, as if it was a movie, as if it was just a play. The man could not detect any anger on their faces. Their eyes were calm and quiet, their faces were relaxed. They looked very centered and grounded. Why all this shouting and swinging of swords, and jumping and jogging and running at each other? Nobody was being hit, and nobody was preventing them either. The crowd was simply standing there witnessing the whole scene.The man became a little tired after a while, a little bored too. One needs some excitement, something should happen. And then one of the men became angry; his face became red, his eyes became flaming. And the crowd dispersed! The fight ended there.The newcomer could not believe it; he could not understand what was happening. He asked one person, “What is the matter? I cannot follow the whole sequence. They were ready to kill one another, and when the time of real action came – a man had become really angry, had lost his cool – why did the crowd disappear?”The person said, “They are both Taoists, followers of Lao Tzu, and this is the criterion in Taoist schools: that the moment a person becomes angry he is defeated. There is no need to fight – he has shown his impotence, he has shown his fear. That’s enough! His anger shows that he is a coward. Now there is no point. The other person has won the victory, he is the conqueror – he remained cool. He could not be distracted from his center. He could not be pulled out from his grounding. He remained integrated.”I know what is happening all over India – thousands of people writing against me, shouting against me – they are losing their so-called cool, which was phony, because only a phony cool can be lost. Their whole idea of tolerance, their whole idea of accepting others, of accepting different points of view is lost. A single man, who never even moves out of his room, is enough to create a turmoil in the whole country.But it is a significant phenomenon. It shows that all those five thousand years of bogus spirituality have not done any good for India. That’s what I wanted to show the whole world. They are making my point emphatically true. I am stating the point; they are supporting the argument. They are supporting me!One man has suggested that I should be given shock treatment, electroshocks. This is real Indian culture. Another man has suggested that I should be immediately deported from the country. This is tolerance, acceptance of different points of view. The third man has suggested I should be thrown into the Arabian Sea – not even into the Indian Ocean because I might poison the Indian Ocean – into the Arabian Sea. This is a nonviolent country, the country of the seers and the sages, of the saints, mahatmas…and all kinds of dodos.Creeping around the bedroom window, the Indian private detectives saw their client’s wife in bed with another man.“Just as I suspected,” said the first Indian. “Let us go in after him.”“Great idea,” the other Indian replied. “How soon do you think he will be finished?”A traveling Indian guru, His Holiness Swami Etceterananda Paramahansa, founder of Holy Cow-Dung Ashram, Miami Beach, arrived hot, tired and thirsty at a small farm and asked the farmer, of his charity, for a drink.“Would ye fancy a drop of ale, reverend?” asked the farmer.The Indian guru blanched, “Nay, I would not, brother,” he said sternly, “for I have taken the pledge. Not a drop of the demon drink shall pass my lips. A glass of your good, fresh milk will suffice me.”So the farmer, being a bit of a wag, fetched a glass of milk and splashed a liberal lacing of rum into it. He handed it to the guru, who drank deeply, smacked his lips, raised his eyes to heaven and said, “Oh, Lord! What a cow!”Vacation time was suntan time as far as Joan, an admirably proportioned secretary, was concerned, and she spent almost all of her day on the roof of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, sopping up the warm sun’s rays. She wore a bathing suit the first day, but on the second she decided that no one could see her way up there, and she slipped out of it for an over-all tan.She had hardly begun when she heard someone running up the stairs. She was lying on her stomach, so, pulling a towel over her derriere, she continued to recline as before.“Excuse me, miss,” said the flustered little assistant manager of the hotel, out of breath from running up the stairs, “the hotel does not mind your sunning on the roof, but we would very much appreciate your wearing your bathing suit as you did yesterday.”“What difference does it make?” Joan asked rather coolly. “No one can see me up here, and besides I am covered with a towel.”“I know, I know,” said the embarrassed little Indian manager of the Taj Mahal hotel, “but unless you wear your bathing suit, the dinner cannot start. And the governor of Mumbai has given a big dinner to all the respectables of the city.”The woman could not understand. “What is the matter?” she said. “I don’t see the point. Why can't the dinner start? What does it have to do with my bathing suit?”“Right, lady,” said the embarrassed little man. “You are lying on the dining room skylight!”Now, how can the dinner start? All the Indians will be looking toward the heaven – they are always looking toward the heaven. Such a sight! They should not miss. But they will pretend – they may be kneeling on their knees with folded hands toward God. They will not look at the skylight directly; they will not say that they are enjoying the scene, they will do a long prayer, so long that they will forget completely about the dinner. Everybody will pretend that he is not looking at the woman lying naked on the roof.This country is a country of pretenders, and I am hurting them. I want to hurt them, because that is the only way to pull the pus out of their centuries-old wounds. They are angry at me; they are condemning me. That shows that I am on the right track. They cannot ignore me. Either they have to be with me, or they have to be against me – either way I am willing – but I would like it to be a decisive phenomenon.Even if a few intelligent people are with me – and they are with me – we can transform this whole rotten culture and give it a new life. It needs compassion. Five thousand years of spiritual, political, economic slavery… What else do you think is needed for me to be compassionate toward this culture?They will not easily be ready to change. Change is hard; it goes against your grain; it goes against your habits; it goes against your hangover. And the hangover of India is very long. They are suffering from the past – they have only the past.Remember one thing: a child has only the future, he has no past. Hence, a child never thinks in terms of nostalgia. There is nothing at the back. He is so fresh he has no memories. The young man lives in the present. The present is so beautiful; the past was only a childhood, a preparation at the most. And the young man does not bother about the future – one starts thinking of the future when the present starts slipping out of hand.The old man thinks only of the past; he has no future. There is only death, a dark night waiting for him. He wants to avoid it. The only way is to turn his back toward the future and look at the past. The child looks toward the future; the old man toward the past; the young man remains in the present.The same is true of cultures. When a culture is very new it looks to the future. It has a tremendous aspiration for the stars; it grows, it expands. When a culture becomes really young – which very rarely happens, in fact, it has not happened yet – then the culture remains in the present. And when the culture becomes old it starts thinking in terms of nostalgia, of the past, the golden age that is no more.A youth, individually, is also a new phenomenon. In the past a child used to go from childhood to old age; youth was not at all a stage.. In the poor countries it is still so. You can see in poor countries, aboriginal tribes, children six years old, five years old, working like old men. Seven years old, eights year old, and they are already burdened with worries. They will not have a chance to be young. Hence, in the past there was no generation gap. The generation gap is a new phenomenon, a very significant phenomenon. For the first time it has happened, for the first time we have been able to afford it. It belongs to an affluent society; it belongs to a certain richness when the generation gap appears.The child and the old man are facing each other; there is no gap. The child looks at the future; the old man looks at the past. Hence, you will always find a great friendship between children and old people. They are facing each other. That has been the case always – the children and the old people were living together. There was no gap.The youth is a new phenomenon in the world. He is neither a child nor an old man. He is breaking new ground. He is trying to live now, here. Yes, a few individuals in the past lived in that constant youthfulness, but only individuals, not whole cultures. There is a possibility now that even a culture may start living in the present. Many individuals will be needed to prepare the ground for the culture to live in the present.The Indian concept of time will show you many things. It says the best age has passed; it was the first age, the golden age; they call it satyuga, the age of truth. It was prehistoric. At that time life was the most beautiful; it was the golden peak. Time walked on four legs; it was very stable. Then the fall began.The Indian idea of time is anti-Darwinian, unscientific, totally inhuman. Then the age began, the age of fall, not of evolution, not of progress; but things started shrinking. Time started walking on three legs. Things became hazy, unbalanced – that age is called treta, three legs. Then things fell even further: time had only two legs, things became even more difficult. It is called dwapar, two-legged time. And now is the fourth and the last stage is here, the most condemned stage: it is called kaliyuga. Now three legs have disappeared. Time is standing only on one leg, ready, at any moment, to fall, to be toppled. Just a one-legged man, and the one leg is already in the grave.This is a very dark and dismal vision. This is the vision of an old, ancient, rotten country. India needs a rebirth, it needs a new childhood. It will protect its ideas because it is so accustomed to those ideas. They are its only treasure! So when I hit on those ideas I look like an enemy. The friend looks like an enemy, and the enemies are being taken as friends. But this is natural, this is logical. It can be understood.A grave digger, thoroughly absorbed in his work, dug a pit so deep one afternoon that he could not climb out when he had finished.Come nightfall and evening’s chill, his predicament became more uncomfortable. He shouted for help and at last attracted the attention of a drunk staggering by.“Get me out of here!” the digger pleaded. “I am cold!”The drunk peered into the open grave and finally spotted the shivering digger in the darkness. “Well, no wonder you are cold, buddy,” said the drunk, kicking some of the loose sod into the hole, “you don't have any dirt on you!”Now, if you ask a drunkard, he will have his own logic. He will see reality in his own drunkenness.Indians get angry because they have become accustomed to being praised continuously. Nobody has ever criticized them. Nobody has ever said to them, “You are living a death, not a life. You are shrinking and dying. You have lost the fervor, the zest, the gusto to live authentically, to live totally.”They have been praised. Their paleness has been given the halo of holiness. Their anti-life attitudes have been raised to great spiritual fantasies. Their hysterical experiences have been called samadhi. Their madness has been respected as if something of the beyond has descended in them. Their gibberish is thought to be esoteric; people go on finding meanings in them.Fools have been worshipped; masochists have been thought to be ascetics; sadists have been thought to be great saints. Perversions of all kinds have been given a spiritual connotation. Now, to expose this whole lie of thousands of years is risky.But I am willing to take the risk, because I have nothing to lose – the goose is out! I have nothing to lose. At the most they can kill me; that is not going to help them. Even my death will be of tremendous help to them. It may shock them out of their nonsense. It may bring them out of their stupor, their sleepiness.Hence I am going to continue. They can go on criticizing me. Their criticism is basically because of my life-affirmative approach. They have lived a life-negative philosophy. They are against all that gives you joy; they are suppressive, repressive; they are boiling within, but they go on carrying a blanket cover. Nobody wants to show one’s nakedness. When your blanket is so worshipped, not only in India but all over the world…There are so many fools in the world that any Indian can find disciples. It is not a problem at all. Just being Indian is enough, and you are a guru. I have seen such things happening before my eyes.One of my disciples, Srivastava, has now become a great spiritual leader. Now her name is long name: Her Holiness Jagatjanani – “The mother of the whole world” – Mataji Nirmalaji Srivastavaji.She was once traveling with me in a car, and I passed by the Muktananda ashram. The people staying in Muktananda’s ashram had invited me just to be there for five minutes, or so, just to take a cup of tea. It was a long journey, so I said, “There is no harm.” Anyway I love a cup of tea! So I stayed for five minutes.Nirmala saw Muktananda. She could not believe that this stupid-looking man – disgusting, more or less a buffoon – has become a great spiritual leader.After the tea, when we entered the car, she said, “If this man can become a spiritual leader, then why cannot I become one?”I said, “You can become one.” And she has become one.There is one man here from Australia who asked me a question, because now she is in Australia, doing great spiritual work. He asked me, “Once in a while you talk about a woman, Rabiya al-Adabiya. What do you think about Mataji Nirmala Deviji? Is she also of the same category as Rabiya al-Adabiya?” The man is here.I know her perfectly well; for ten years she was my student. There is nothing in it, no spirituality, no meditativeness…but she got the idea from Muktananda. And it is not only one case.You must have heard about the name of a great Sardar yogi in America, Yogi Bhajan. He was just a porter at the Delhi Airport. He saw Muktananda coming with seven hundred Americans…Of course at that time his name was Sardar Harbhajan Singh; a poor porter, but certainly he looked far better than Muktananda, more impressive. The idea came into his mind, “If this fool can be a paramahansa, a satguru, etcetera, etcetera, why should I waste my time in being just a porter?” He dropped the job, went to America, and is now the greatest spiritual leader of the Sikh hierarchy in the Western hemisphere.Just a few days ago he was back in Delhi with all his disciples. His old boss, who is a lover of mine, passed by. He saw him sitting in the lawn of the Delhi Taj Mahal Hotel with his disciples. He could not recognize him; he had changed so much. He thought, “A great mahatma.”Yogi Bhajan is a simple man in that manner, far simpler than Muktananda or Nirmala Devi. He sent a disciple to the boss and told him, “Come to my room. I have something to say to you.”The boss could not understand why the great yogi was calling him; he was thrilled, excited. He went to the room; Yogi Bhajan came in and he said, “Boss, can’t you recognize me? I am just that poor Sardar Harbhajan Singh, your porter. Have you forgotten me completely?”Then he recognized his face. He said, “But what has happened? You have become such a great yogi with so many disciples!”Then he told the whole story, that it is due to Muktananda. The whole credit goes to Muktananda!Indians cannot drop that garbage easily because that is the only garbage they are capable of selling to the world. They cannot get rid of that crap. It stinks! – but it sells. There are millions of people in the world who are hankering for it, and they don’t know where to go. India has become their hope…and they will be exploited.They are angry with me, all the gurus of India are angry with me, because I don’t belong to their tradition. I am not here to exploit anybody; I am not here to force any indoctrination on you: Indian culture, Indian religion, and all that nonsense. I am just here to help you to be free from Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism. I am here to help you to be yourself, just to be yourself.My sannyasins are not my followers, they are just my friends. I love them; they love me, but there is no hierarchy. I am not holier than you or higher than you. That goes against the Indian investment. They are bound to be against me. I am affirming life, and they have been denying it all long.Nirmala met her friend Vimala on the street one afternoon and noticed that Vimala was well along the road of pregnancy.“You know,” Nirmala said, “I would give anything to have a baby. But I guess it’s hopeless.”“I know just how you feel,” Vimala said. “My husband was that way too, but everything is fine now. In fact, I am eight months pregnant.”“What did you do?”“I went to Swami Etceterananda.”“Oh, we tried that,” Nirmala replied. “My husband and I went there for six months.”“Don’t be silly,” Vimala told her. “Go alone!”They will find all kinds of arguments against me. They are argumentative people. For centuries they have done nothing else but make arguments. But their arguments are not going to help them, because I am not arguing for any philosophy; otherwise they would be able to refute me. I am arguing for existence, and there they are at a loss.If it were only a philosophical argument there would be no problem.India has known many philosophies. Buddha argued against the Vedas and there was no problem. Mahavira argued against the Upanishads; there was no problem. Shankara argued against Buddha and Mahavira; there was no problem. Ramanuja argued against Shankara; there was no problem. It is an accepted fact, if you argue only for a philosophical standpoint, nobody is worried because it is just airy-fairy; it does not make any change in life.I am arguing not for a philosophy. I am not philosophical at all, I am totally existential. That’s where they are finding it difficult. They are finding it absolutely difficult to cope with me – what to do with me. Hence the anger, hence the condemnation, hence all kinds of third-rate criticism. They simply show their reality. Those third-rate criticisms that they go on making against me are simply bringing their reality to the surface. They are showing their nakedness, their ugliness. And that’s serving my purpose.The real estate salesmen in Mumbai lead lives entirely unbounded by mere prosaic fact. One of these gentlemen was showing some property to a possible rich customer, and he was pulling out all the stops.He finished up with, “Why, the climate is the best in the country! Do you know? – no one ever dies here.”And just then a funeral procession came into view, wound slowly down the street and disappeared from sight. The real estate agent was taken aback for a second, but he made a quick recovery.Removing his hat, he said solemnly, “Poor old undertaker – starved to death.”Indians are clever in argumentation. If I were arguing they would have found a thousand and one arguments. But I am not arguing, I am simply pointing to the moon. My fingers are not my arguments but only indicators. Don’t cling to my fingers, see the moon. It is time that the moon should be seen.You ask me, “Even so, you keep hammering this rotten culture…” I will go on hammering. It is so rotten that there is every hope that we may get rid of it. It is falling apart on its own; just a little hammering is needed. I am going to hit it mercilessly.You ask: “What is this business?” This is the business of people like me. It has always been the business of people like me.Socrates was told by the court in Athens, “If you stop talking about truth, we can release you. You will not be put to death.”Socrates refused, and the words he used were very beautiful. He said, “That is my business. I cannot stop talking about truth. Just as I breathe, I talk about truth. It is my business.”I am going to continue. My hammering will become harder because I have to bring more and more rubbish to the surface. My hammering will go deeper. It is a surgical hammering: many rotten parts of this god-damned country have to be removed. It needs nothing less than that. Medicines won’t help; it needs operation. And I am preparing the operating table…It is going to be a great adventure. Even if the patient dies, there is no harm. At least there must be some space, at least there must be a little less of a crowd. Anyway, the patient is dead This country is living a posthumous existence. It has died long ago: the day it started the idea that we are falling down, that the golden age is lost, that we are falling deeper and deeper into darkness and hell – it lost all qualities of life. Since then it is a posthumous existence.My effort is to give this country a real death so that a real birth becomes possible. Resurrection is possible only after crucifixion. There is no other way. Death is the way of life coming back, so don’t be afraid of death! In fact, life and death are not opposites, they are not contradictions to each other. They are like two wings: they help each other, they are complementary.I teach you to live totally, and I also teach you to die totally. Totality has to be the taste of a really religious person. When I say “really religious person” I don’t mean anything supernatural, anything higher, holier. I simply mean the innocent life, the ordinary life. I exalt the ordinary, I praise the ordinary, I worship the ordinary.Enough for today.

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The Goose is Out 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Goose is Out 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I have heard you say not to ask for anything in our prayers. Then why does Jesus say to us, “When you pray, say: Give us our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”? And also Jesus himself asked, “My father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by, yet not as I will, but as thou wilt.”Please explain.Religion has a long history. Much of it is only a hangover from the past. The real religion, the essential religion is only possible now, because man has come of age. Past humanity was very childish – not child-like, remember, but childish. It was bound to be so; it was inevitable, unavoidable. So I am not complaining about it I am simply stating the fact that whenever you think of religion, never think in terms of the past; otherwise you will have a totally wrong orientation. Think more in terms of the present.When you think of the Theory of Relativity, you don’t bring Newton in. You know he did contribute something to scientific growth, but his days are over. We are grateful for whatsoever he did, whatsoever he could, but with Albert Einstein, Newton is finished. He will remain only a footnote in the history of scientific growth.The same is true about religion, about every human endeavor. When you are going to the moon in a spaceship, certainly the man who invented the bullock cart has contributed immensely. Without the bullock cart there would have not been any possibility for the spaceship, but you don’t go on worshiping the man who invented the bullock cart. You don’t even remember his name. While you are involved with a spaceship, it is better to forget all about the bullock cart. They are not going to help; their mechanism is out of date.But about religion we are not so rational; about religion we are very emotional. About religion we are not so scientific. About religion we are very illogical, superstitious.Religion has passed through two phases. The first phase was of prayer; that is the bullock cart era of religion. The second phase is meditation, that is the spaceship age of religion. They are totally different dimensions. Their sources are different, their workings are different, their whole milieu is different. And one should not get confused between the two.There is much confusion around the world, so let me explain to you. Be very patient because we are all conditioned by the religions of prayer. Their weight is heavy; every human being is crushed under a mountainous weight. The work for a master has become more and more difficult, because it is not only a question of helping you to be meditative: before that can start much has to be negated in you, much rubbish has to be shoveled, much dirt has to be cleaned out. The whole past has to be dismantled; only then will you be able to open your wings to the essential, mature, adult dimension of religion.Prayer means fear, hence all the old religions are fear-oriented. Their God is nothing but a creation of their fear; it is not a discovery, it is imagination, it is projection. They are full of fear; they need a father figure to protect them from all kinds of fear. There are thousands of fears in life: there are anxieties, anguishes, problems to be encountered, unsolvable puzzles, unbridgeable gaps, and man is surrounded by great darkness. He needs a protective hand. He wants somebody as a security, as a safety.Each child is brought up by his parents. His first experience with his parents becomes very decisive, because he is protected, comforted, consoled. All his needs are fulfilled; he has no worries, he has no responsibilities, he is taken care of. He can rely on his parents. But he is not going to have this forever, so sooner or later he will have to stand on his own feet.The moment he stands on his own feet a great trembling arises in him: now who is going to save him? Now who is going to console him? The problems go on becoming bigger and bigger every day. As life progresses it starts coming closer to death, which is the ultimate problem to be solved. And there is great anxiety about death.Each child starts falling back; each child starts going back to the childhood state because that seems to be the only part of his life where there was not a single problem at all. This is regression.This regression has been thought as prayer; it is not prayer. Then he falls on his knees and starts praying to a god…It is not accidental that all the religions call God “the Father.” Yes, there are a few other religions which call God “the Mother” – which is the same. In matriarchal societies God is the Mother; in patriarchal societies God is the Father. One thing is certain: that God has to be the ultimate parent.Every community, society, civilization, invents its own God; they say, “God created man in his own image.” That is absolutely wrong – man has created God in his own image. And because there are so many kinds of people in the world, there are so many kinds of images of God.That image is your fabrication, and you are praying before your own invention. Prayer is really one of the most absurd things possible. It is as if you are praying before a mirror, seeing your own face, kneeling down before your own image, asking for favors, and there is nobody in the mirror except your reflection. All prayer…prayer as such is juvenile, it is regressive.This will hurt you but I cannot help it: I have to say the truth as it is.You ask me: “I heard you say not to ask for anything in our prayers.” In fact, the moment you stop asking, you will stop praying. That is a simple methodology – I have to go sometimes a little roundabout not to hurt you too much.I don’t see that there is any God who created the world. I certainly experience a quality of godliness in existence, but it is a quality, not a person. It is more like love, more like silence, more like joy – less like a person. You are never going to meet God and say hello to him – how are you going to? I have been looking for you for thousands of years; where have you been hiding?God is not a person but only a presence. When I say “presence” be very attentive, because you can go on listening according to your own conditioning. You can even make presence something objective – you have again fallen into the same trap. God is a presence at the innermost core of your being: it is your own presence. It is not a meeting with somebody else.Martin Buber, one of the great Jewish thinkers of this age, has written that prayer is a dialogue between “I” and “thou.” There is no “thou”; hence the dialogue is impossible. All prayers are monologues. Because there is no “thou” there is no “I” either; they can exist only together, they cannot exist in separation. How can you imagine the existence of “I” without “thou”? “Thou’s” are needed to delineate the line of the “I.”Martin Buber in a sense is right – he is defining the whole past of religion. He himself is burdened with the past; he could never get out of his Jewish skin. He remained encaged, he remained a Jew – a nice, beautiful person, of great intellectual capacities, but still in bondage.The Jewish idea of “I” and “thou” is a basic pattern for prayer. Without “I” you cannot pray because there is nobody to pray. Without “thou” you cannot pray, because to whom do you pray? If you are not asking for anything, then what you are praying for? Prayer means asking: it is a demand, however camouflaged, however subtly hidden behind beautiful garbs and masks. But it is an asking; you are demanding, you are saying, “Give me this! Give me that!”So when I say there is no God, remember it: I really mean that existence is enough unto itself. It needs no creator. There is creativity but no creator. The division between a creator and creativity has to be dissolved; only then you will be able to rise to the peaks of meditation. Otherwise, you will remain confined to the childish patterns of the past: kneeling down before images in temples, in synagogues, in churches, and doing all kinds of foolish things. Since those foolish things are being done by thousands of others, you never become aware that they are foolish. When the crowd is with you, when the multitudes are with you, you feel on safe ground. You feel shaky only when you are alone.Meditation is the experience of aloneness. Only very courageous people can enter into that dimension. Prayer is a crowd phenomenon, it is part of the collective mind. When you are in a crowd, certainly a great confidence arises in you. It is infectious, because so many people cannot be wrong.I would like to tell you: it is always the case that the multitudes are bound to be wrong. Only rarely an individual is right, because truth is such a pinnacle, such a peak, like Everest. You cannot go to Everest with a multitude; there is not space enough. Only one person can stand on the highest peak, alone.Meditation is the experience of being totally alone, utterly alone. Prayer is a crowd phenomenon; it is mob psychology. Hence Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, all have remained religions of prayer. Two religions which tried to become religions of meditation fell back. Buddhism and Jainism, two religions tried to be religions of meditation – but only Buddha and Mahavira, two individuals, could manage it. The moment they died their religions started falling back to the old, regressive pattern; they all became religions of prayer.Now Jainas are praying before Mahavira. That is even worse, because Christians can have some support from Jesus; Jainas have no support from Mahavira. Buddhists, millions of Buddhists, are praying before the statue of Buddha. That is ridiculous, unbelievable, because Buddha’s last words were, “Be a light unto yourself.” And it is a strange phenomenon that the Buddha’s statues were the first to be made in the world; his statues were the first to be installed in temples.There are temples of Buddha with thousands of statues. One temple in China is called Ten Thousand Buddhas Temple – ten thousand statues of Buddha in one temple! The whole mountain has been carved into a temple. If Buddha comes back he will start beating his head, he will commit suicide.The first thing to be remembered: I believe in an organismic universe. There are no divisions as the creator and the created, as the higher and the lower, as the sacred and the profane, as this and that. I believe in one organism.Existence cannot be thought of in terms of a painter and his painting, because the moment the painting is finished, the painter and painting become two separate entities. Existence has to be thought of only in terms of a dancer and his dance. You cannot separate them; the dancer and the dance are one. At the highest peak of dancing, the dancer disappears into the dance – there is no dancer but only dance.That is the experience of meditation: when you dissolve yourself into existence, when the dewdrop slips into the ocean and becomes the ocean. And vice versa is also true: the ocean slips into the dewdrop and becomes the dewdrop. They cannot be conceived as two entities any more.So when I say God is not a presence, I mean he’s not anything outside you – neither a person nor a presence, as thought of in the language of objectivity. When I say God is a presence, I simply mean he is the innermost core of your being – that silent core, that space where nobody else can enter into you; that private, that absolute, intimate, virgin space, your interiority, is godliness.The word God can create trouble for you. Words are very troublesome because words carry the past; they are made by the past, they are overburdened by the past. Any word is dangerous, because its meaning comes from the past. And for me the problem is: to use the words which come from the past – because there are no other words – but to give them such a twist and turn that they can give you a little insight into a new meaning. The words are old, the bottles are old, but the wine is new.An old lady who was walking her dog decided to go into the local supermarket, which did not allow dogs. She tied the animal to a fire hydrant. No sooner was the dog tied than every dog in the neighborhood that was loose, started sniffing this defenseless animal. The cop on the corner, observing what was happening, called to the old woman and told her that she could not leave her dog there alone.She asked him why and he replied, “Lady, your dog is in heat.”She answered, “Eat? She’ll eat anything.”He countered, “The dog should be bred.”The old lady replied, “She’ll eat bread, cake – anything you give her she will eat.”In complete frustration he said, “That dog should be laid!”The old woman stared directly into his eyes and answered, “So lay her! I always wanted a police dog.”Words are dangerous…every possibility of being misunderstood.You say: “I heard you say not to ask for anything in our prayers.” In fact, that is my way to prevent you from praying. If you have nothing to ask for, why should you pray? Then what is the rationale of it?Even a man like Jesus is in many ways childish. It cannot be helped: he belonged to the bullock cart age of religion; he belonged to the Judaic tradition. He lived as a Jew, he talked as a Jew, he died as a Jew. His whole way of thinking, looking, observing, was purely Jewish.He is not really in rebellion, he is not a rebel in the true sense of the word. On the contrary, he was trying to prove that he belongs to the tradition; he was trying to prove that he is the person who has been predicted by the old prophets, that he has come to fulfill all their prophecies. Now this is sheer nonsense! Nobody can predict for anybody else; the past is absolutely impotent to know anything of the future. The future is that which remains open. If it can be predicted it becomes closed, it is no more the future; if you can predict the future it is already past. You have already canceled its opening, it has become closed.He was trying to convince the Jews: “I am the messiah you have been waiting for.” He was trying in every way to fulfill their expectations: doing all kinds of miracles, trying in every possible way to argue for his case. This is not the way of a revolutionary. The revolutionary simply disconnects himself from the past; he has nothing to do with the past.He was still trying to be a prophet in the Jewish sense. A prophet is a religious man with political tendencies. Religion and politics are un-mixable. If you mix them you will create a hodgepodge. That’s what Jesus did: on the one hand he was trying to be religious; on the other hand he was trying to prove that he is a prophet like the old prophets. This political tendency and the religious leaning became a very confused phenomenon. He was utterly confused.I don’t see much clarity in him; he’s not transparent, he’s very clouded. You can see it in his own statement. He says, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by…” That is his innermost desire. Otherwise, why should he say, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by, yet not as I will, but as thou wilt”? This is a contradiction, a clear-cut contradiction. This is not said by a truly surrendered person. A truly surrendered person has nothing to say – whatsoever is happening is happening.Whence comes this “if” – “if it is possible”? This desire is there that “if you can manage, please…but if you cannot manage then it is okay; then whatsoever happens I will accept.” But there is reluctance, there is contradiction. His own desire is that this cup should pass by – this agony, this crucifixion, this death, should pass by. He was really deep down waiting for a miracle; he was hoping for a miracle. He was not very different from the crowd that had gathered there to observe the crucifixion. He was not very different from the rabbis and the priests and the government who were all conspiring to kill him; their philosophical background was the same.The rabbis and the high priests of the temple of Jerusalem were trying to prove “this man is a fake.” And he was trying to prove that “No, I am the true messiah – and at the last moment you will see, when God himself will descend to save his only begotten son.” Time started passing: he is nailed, he is crucified, he is waiting for the miracle. Nothing is happening, all expectations are turning sour. In that moment of agony he screams, “Why have you forsaken me?”There is nobody to whom he is calling. There is nobody who has forsaken him. It was his own idea; it was his own projection, it was his own hallucination. This state is hysterical! He was waiting to the last moment. And when he said, “If it is not possible, then let thy will be done,” that is surrender, but not true: with reluctance, just a face-saving device.Nothing is happening, all is finished. The crowd is jeering and laughing at the whole scene, people are throwing stones, insulting him, hurting him. People are returning home very frustrated because nothing has happened, convinced that he was a fake. Even his own disciples escaped, seeing that, now it was dangerous to be there. If they were caught…if Jesus was not saved by God, who was going to save them? Poor fellows – they escaped. And it is logical.Jesus saying, “Let thy will be done,” is just making a last effort to save his face. This is not the way of a surrendered man. How can you surrender to your own projection?Hence, I don’t teach you prayer; prayer is bound to be diametrically opposite to what I teach. Its expectation is basically contradictory: it requires you to surrender, only can it then be fulfilled. And when you surrender, then what is there left to be fulfilled? If there is some demand still to be fulfilled, you are not surrendered. Please see the contradiction.Prayer is asking of you something impossible. You can ask God anything, but first you surrender totally. If you are surrendered totally then there is no point in asking. Whence comes the asking? Who will demand? And if you are still demanding, the surrender is missing, so prayer cannot be fulfilled.You see the simple mechanism of it? A prayer can be fulfilled only if you don’t ask anything. But then what is there to be fulfilled? You had not asked in the first place.I teach you a totally different kind of religiousness. It is of meditation. You are not to worship, you are not to pray; you have to go deep within your own self – a journey of self-discovery. It is not a question of discovering God. Why you are after God? What wrong has he done to you? Forgive him; forget him!The first and the only inquiry worth anything is to know: “Who am I within this body-mind mechanism? What is this consciousness, this miracle of consciousness?” This miracle of awareness has to be discovered. You have to peel your being as one peels an onion. Go on peeling…you will find layers within layers. And finally, when all layers are discarded, eliminated, you will find in your hands pure nothingness, emptiness, shunyata. That is your essential core, the center of the cyclone.Discarding the layers of the onion you have discarded the bottle that was created by you, by the society, by the culture, by the past, by tradition, and when you have discarded the bottle, the goose is out. Then you are as infinite as the universe itself, as eternal as timelessness itself.You can call it godliness – it is godliness. It is the highest, the greatest flowering of being. But it is not a God somewhere outside you. You cannot pray to it. You can be it, but you cannot pray to it, because it is not separate.You ask me: “Then why does Jesus say to us, ‘When you pray, say…’?” Jesus has never said this to you. He was talking to other kinds of people. If Jesus comes to you, remember one thing: there will be no possibility of any communication between you and him. There will be a gap of two thousand years. And you know very well even the small gap between you and your father is almost unbridgeable. Talk to your father and you are talking to a wall. Your father feels the same: talking to a child is impossible; there seems to be no communication.Two thousand years is a big gap. If Jesus comes right now he will look like a pygmy to you. You will not be able to understand why this man has been worshipped for two thousand years…for what? You will not be able at all to appreciate him. You will find a thousand and one faults in him, very easily. Even the most stupid of you will be able to see that: “Is this the man we have been worshiping in thousands of churches, millions of people praying to him? Is this the man?”Two thousand years of continuous painting…and that is the work of the church, theologians, philosophers, priests – they go on making it up to date, as far as they can, they go on putting new layers of paint. If you dig deep into these thick layers of paint you will be really at a loss. When you discover Jesus you will be very frustrated. You will find a very ordinary man. Yes, in those days he was extraordinary – it is a question of time. In those days he was extraordinary because the people were even far more backward than he was.But now you are two thousand years ahead of him. The way he speaks and the things he says he is not saying to you.You say “he says to us.” No, he has no idea of you. What I am saying I am saying to you, but what Jesus said he was saying to the people of his time. He is not contemporary to you, how can he say anything to you?This is one of the problems that I encounter every day, because the people who come to me are living with the hangover of Jesus or of Buddha or of Mahavira or of Krishna or of Zarathustra. They have their past hangovers, and I am a contemporary man! I am simply talking to the twentieth century, and not only to the twentieth century crowd, but to the twentieth century elite – the people of the highest intelligence. Hence, it is difficult to understand what I am saying.You live thousands of years in the past. It is very rare to find a contemporary man. Somebody is one thousand years old, somebody two thousand, somebody three thousand… And the older they are, they think the more valuable they are. Hindus try to prove that their Vedas are the oldest scriptures, as if this is something creditable. The oldest scripture simply means that you have not moved since then, that you're still carrying the burden. Historians say that the scriptures of the Hindus, the Vedas, are five thousand years old. Hindus are not ready to accept that – they say they are at least ninety thousand years old. The older they are the better.The same is true about other religions, as if all that is old is gold. In fact, life is always new, fresh, as fresh as dewdrops in the early morning sun on the lotus leaf, as fresh as the stars, as fresh as the eyes of a newly-born baby, as fresh as the song birds right now.Life knows only one time, that is now.Jesus was not talking to you, he could not – he had no idea about you; he could not conceive of you. But he was talking to his own people, and his people lived with these ideas. He was paraphrasing the Jewish concept of religion. He was saying: “Give us our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”Now, to me all that is just sheer rubbish – “Give us our daily bread.”In the past, humanity has been very poor. The whole past has been of long starvation, hunger, illness, famine, floods – all kinds of diseases. It is a miracle how man has survived somehow.In countries like India, that is still the case. Hence, you will see one thing happening: the intelligent core of Western youth is turning more and more toward meditation, but the Eastern masses are turning more and more toward Christianity. Indians would like more Mother Teresas in India than me. Naturally, because bread is needed. If you look around India you will find only the poor people being converted to Christianity; not a single rich man is converted to Christianity. Beggars, orphans, widows, aboriginals, who cannot manage even one meal every day, they are being converted to Christianity. It appeals to them because bread is their problem.Jesus says, “Give us our daily bread.” We have to create it; there is nobody to give it. That is the work of science; religion has nothing to do with it. We should start marking lines: what can be done by science should be done by science; what can be done by technology should be done by technology. If your car has stopped and you have run out of gas, you don’t just kneel down by the car and start praying, “Give us our daily gas.” That will be as stupid as this prayer. You know you have to search for a gas pump! This is not the way – it is not going to happen.But priests have been trying all along to make religion dominate your whole life – from bread to God. They are very much afraid of dividing; hence, they were against science, against technology.Bertrand Russell is right when he says that “If the whole of humanity is well fed, well nourished, prayers like this – ‘Give us our daily bread’ – will become absolutely futile.” There will be no need at all! And with that your churches, your temples, your priests, will start losing their power. They have possessed humanity for the simple reason that they have not allowed science and technology to improve your lot.In India, Mahatma Gandhi was against science, against very necessary science too. He was against the railway train, telegraph, post office, electricity. He wanted this country to live at least as primitively as ten thousand years ago people used to live. The only thing that he accepted as the greatest scientific invention was the spinning wheel. And he was worshipped as a mahatma.To me, he is doing a crime, a far bigger crime than Adolf Hitler. But his crime is very subtle. You cannot detect it because he is talking in religious garbage: “One should trust God – why should one trust science?”My emphasis is this: life is a multidimensional phenomenon, and we should be very clear cut about divisions. Music should be taken care of by musicians, not by mathematicians. Dancing should be taken care of by dancers, not by chemists. Poetry should be taken care of by poets, not by physiologists. Science has its own contribution – it is man’s intelligence. There is no need for any prayer; we can provide this earth with a paradise, but we will not be able unless we stop all kinds of nonsense that we are stuffed with.This has been a strategy of the priest. He can dominate you only if you are poor; he can dominate you only if you are starving – because when you are poor and starving and miserable, you are bound to fall at his feet because he is the mediator between God and you. You don’t know the address where God lives, what language he speaks. That is the expertise of the priest. He knows God speaks Sanskrit, and he does not allow you to learn Sanskrit either, because if you learn Sanskrit then he will not be needed. He knows God speaks Aramaic, Hebrew; he will not allow you to learn Aramaic and Hebrew. If you learn them then he will be exposed, because there is nothing in Aramaic or Hebrew or Sanskrit, nothing of any value.If you don’t know those languages you remain ignorant, and he goes on pretending to be the wise man. He can go on leading you – blind people are leading other blind people. His power depends on you, and he has become very cunning. Centuries of exploitation have given him the craft, the art, the knack of exploiting you.Sigmund Steinberg, the well-known importer of ladies’ gloves, paid an unexpected call on the rabbi of his temple. That worthy was more than pleased to see his fabulously wealthy congregate, who more than made up in contributions what he lacked in attendance and religious zeal. This time, however, the trip to temple was for a completely religious, if rather unusual, reason.“Rabbi,” Steinberg commenced after the usual amenities, “I am here to see you about someone most near and dear to me. My own, my darling, my three-times-a-champion, Westminster Abbey the Third, mine little poodle is this coming Tisha B’Av thirteen years old, and I want, Rabbi, you should bar mitzvah him.”The rabbi was completely taken aback. “But my dear Mr. Steinberg, that is impossible. There has never been in the history of the Jewish religion such a thing. It would be a scandal. The temple would be a laughingstock. My orders would be revoked. The sisterhood would be disbanded. The building campaign would be halted. The gentiles would be hysterical. And the board of directors would have my neck.”Steinberg was unmoved. Without so much as the bat of an eyelash, he addressed the rabbi again. “For the occasion, I am donating to the temple the amount, in cash, of five thousand dollars.”“Mr. Steinberg,” the rabbi beamed, “why didn’t you tell me in the first place that the dog is Jewish?”These people have become really cunning. Their whole effort is how to remain in power, and the most necessary thing to remain in power, to remain rich, to remain in domination, is to keep humanity suffering. That is a simple strategy; anybody who has eyes can see it. Just think of a world where people are blissful, ecstatic, where people are living moment-to-moment with a dance and with a song… How many of your old religions will remain? How many of your temples and churches and synagogues will be able to survive? They will start disappearing like smoke.As your suffering disappears, your so-called religions will disappear. They are opium for the people; they have been keeping you in a subtle unconscious state. They are giving you great hopes. Those hopes are nothing but drugs, far more dangerous than any chemical drug can be. They have drugged the whole of humanity.Jesus says, “Give us our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses.” What trespasses? The whole of religion has lived with the idea of sin.What was the sin of Adam and Eve? – they disobeyed. Disobedience is not a sin; disobedience is part of growth. Each child has to disobey his parents, sooner or later – and the sooner the better, because life is short. You should not waste your time. One has to learn to say no definitively; only then can a point arise where one can say yes. Without being able to say no, nobody is capable of saying yes. Disobedience is the background in which real obedience blossoms.If anybody was responsible for original sin it was God, not the poor serpent – he is the greatest benefactor of humanity, the first true messiah, because he seduced Adam and Eve and told them to disobey. He was the first master. Without him there would have been no humanity, no Jesus, no Buddha, no Confucius, no Lao Tzu. The whole credit goes to the poor serpent. And the whole cause of sin is God himself: he prohibited…The Garden of Eden is a big garden. There were only two trees which he was afraid that Adam and Eve might start eating from their fruits. One was the tree of knowledge and the other was the tree of life. Now, why should God be afraid of knowing and living?You can see the whole strategy of the priest. He is afraid of two things: knowing and living. He prevents you from knowing so that he remains the knower, and he prevents you from living so that you are always falling at his feet, begging: “Give us our daily bread.” He does not allow you to live totally, intensely. He hinders you in every possible way; he cripples you; he paralyzes you. And the whole story begins in the Garden of Eden.God seems to be the first priest. Why should he be afraid of knowing? He really should have blessed them; he should have told Adam and Eve, “The first thing you have to do is go to these two trees; they are the most valuable. Know – know life in its totality, know its mysteries, explore. Go from the known to the unknown, from the unknown to the unknowable – go on a long pilgrimage. Nothing should be left unknown. You should become part of the whole mystery of the universe.” That should have been his first advice if he was really loving and compassionate.He should have told them, “Live – and live passionately, and live totally! Live intensely; live ecstatically! These are the two trees you should not miss.”If I had been in his place, this would have been my advice to you: “Live under these trees. You can enjoy other trees whenever you want – just for a change you can go anywhere, but these two trees should not be forgotten.” Instead of saying this, God says, “Don’t eat from the tree of knowledge.” Why? Is he afraid that if Adam and Eve become knowers then they will become equal to him? Is he afraid of Adam and Eve becoming buddhas, awakened?Knowing comes through meditation, remember. The tree of knowing is the tree of meditation, and God prohibits meditation. Knowing comes as you enter deeper into your being; when you have reached to the very core, knowing explodes. You become flooded with infinite light.The same is true about living: the more you know, the more you live; the more you live, the more you know. They go together, hand in hand, dancing. Knowing and living are two aspects of the same coin; both happen to the meditator. But a religion which is based on fear is afraid of both.This is my whole teaching here: know and live. Live without fear; know without hesitation.The serpent seems to be absolutely right because he says to Adam and Eve, “God is afraid. If you eat from this tree of knowledge you will become like gods – then there will be no superiority, you will be equal to God. If you eat from the tree of life you will become immortals, just as gods are immortals. And God is afraid. He wants to keep you in subjugation.”Now who has committed the sin? Who has trespassed – God, or Adam and Eve? But Jesus still thinks in terms of a rotten past. He is still thinking that man has trespassed.I don’t see…whatsoever you are doing is natural. What trespasses are you doing? The instincts that you are living are given by nature. Your sex is a gift from nature, your joy for nourishing food is part of your nature. You would like to live beautifully, you would love to live comfortably. You would like to have a beautiful garden around your house, you would like a warm swimming pool. You would like to love a man or a woman. I don’t see that there is any trespassing. You are not committing any sin, you are simply following your nature, your spontaneous tendencies.Religions have condemned you, utterly condemned you. They have condemned everything that is natural, and through that condemnation they have created great guilt in you. Your whole heart is full of guilt. That guilt pulls you back; it does not allow you to live totally in anything. It does not allow your dance to reach to its peak, to its crescendo. It does not allow you to sing and shout and rejoice. It represses you.I cannot support any such ideas.Jesus says, “Lead us not into temptation.” What temptation is he talking about? What temptations are there? Life is so simple! But you can label things as temptations, then they become temptations.For example, I was born in a Jaina family, unfortunately, but nothing can be done about it. One has to choose one unfortunate state or another. Up to my eighteenth year I had not tasted a poor tomato, because Jainas are absolutely vegetarian, and the poor tomato has the color of meat – just the color! There is nothing in it, but the very color is enough for Jainas to feel repulsion. Tomatoes were not brought into my house; I had not tasted them.When I was eighteen years old I went for a picnic with a few of my Hindu friends. I was the only Jaina, and they were all Hindus. I had not eaten in the night up to that time either, because Jainas don’t eat in the night – that is a great sin, because in the night a mosquito may fall into your food, some insect may crawl in, and unknowingly you may have eaten something alive. That will drag you to hell. So one has to eat in the day when the light is absolutely clear. One may not even drink in the night, even water, because in the night – who knows? – something without any conscious effort on your part may be killed.So I had not eaten in the night, and I had not tasted tomatoes up to my eighteenth year. They were great temptations. I had seen tomatoes in the market, and they were really tempting – sitting so meditatively, so centered, so grounded. Potatoes are also not allowed in Jaina families because they grow underneath the ground, and anything that grows in darkness is dangerous to eat because it will bring darkness to your soul.When I went for this picnic to a hill station, all my friends were enjoying the mountains and the beauty and the castles, and nobody was in a hurry to prepare food. I am a lazy man – from the very beginning – I cannot cook food. I can cook many other things…but I cannot cook food, not even my tea. So I had to wait until they decided to eat.I was feeling hungry – the journey, the traveling, and the mountains’ fresh air. I was feeling hungry, and the night was coming closer, and I was feeling afraid also: “What is going to happen? If they cook food in the night, then I have to sleep without food.” And my stomach was hurting.Then they started cooking food. Great temptations: tomatoes, potatoes, and the beautiful smell of the food. I was wavering between temptation and virtue. One moment I thought, “It is better to sleep one night without food – one cannot die – rather than suffer in hell and hellfire just for a few tomatoes and a few potatoes.”But then the hunger was too much. Then the argument came to me: “If all my friends are going to hell, what am I going to do in heaven? It is better to be with my friends in hell than to be with those foolish Jaina saints in heaven. At least in hell you can cook tomatoes, potatoes, you can eat well, there is enough fire. Even I can cook.”They all tried to persuade me: “There is nobody else here, and we are not going to tell your family either. Nobody will ever come to know that you have eaten in the night, and that you have eaten tomatoes or potatoes.”Reluctantly, hesitatingly, I agreed. I could not sleep until I had vomited in the middle of the night. Nobody else vomited – they were all fast asleep and snoring – only I vomited. It was my psychology, because I was suffering from the idea that I had committed a sin. It was not the tomatoes that I vomited, it was my attitude. And that day it became clear, absolutely clear, that you can only live life totally if you drop all attitudes. Otherwise you will live partially, and to live partially is not to live at all.I cannot support this prayer.Jesus says, “Lead us not into temptation.” One thing is certain: that Jesus is feeling temptation, otherwise why this prayer? He is feeling that God is leading him into temptation. If God is leading, why not surrender? Then the real prayer should have been: “Lead us really into total temptation. When you are leading, why do it half-heartedly? When you have decided to lead, then lead us totally!”He is tempted; his prayer is an absolute confirmation of his temptation. It is natural – he was a human being just like you, as alive as you are. And he must have felt all natural likings, dislikings. He must have loved things, he must have preferred things. But he was afraid – the past was heavy on him.“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” There is no evil, hence there is no need to be delivered from anything. There is only one thing, and that is a state of unconsciousness, unknowing, unawareness. I will not call it evil – it is a situation, a challenge, an adventure. It is not evil. Existence is not evil, existence is an opportunity to grow. And, of course, the opportunity to grow is possible only if you are tempted into thousands of ways, if you are called forth by unknown aspirations, if a tremendous desire in you arises to explore… And the only thing that can prevent you is unconsciousness, unawareness. That too is a great challenge – to conquer it.Become more conscious, become more aware, become more alive. Let all your juices flow. Don’t hold yourself back. Respect your nature, love yourself and don’t be worried about unnecessary things. Unworried, move into the thickness of life, explore it. Yes, you will commit many mistakes – so what? One learns through committing mistakes. Yes, you will make many errors – so what? It is only by going into errors that one comes to the right door. Before one knocks at the right door, one has to knock on thousands of wrong doors. That is part of the game, part of the play.Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg had scrimped and saved to put their eldest son through college. At last, they had the money and decided to send him to a fine highbrow Eastern boarding school. They saw him off on the train, and tearfully bade him farewell.A few months later he returned home for the Christmas holidays. The parents were overjoyed to have their son Sammy back with them. The mother greeted him with, “Samelah, oh, it’s so good to see you.”“Mother,” he replied, “stop calling me Samelah. After all, I’m a grown man now, and I do wish you would refer to me as Samuel.”She apologized and asked, “I hope you only ate kosher foods while you were away?”“Mother, we are living in the modern age, and it’s preposterous to hang on to old-world traditions. I indulged in all types of food, kosher and non-kosher, and believe me, you would be better off if you did.”“Well, tell me, did you at least go to the synagogue to offer a prayer of thanks occasionally?”The son replied, “Really, do you honestly feel going to a synagogue, when you are associating with a large percentage of non-Jews, is the proper thing to do? Honestly, Mother, it is unfair to ask it of me, really.”At this point, Mrs. Goldberg, fighting back anger, looked at her eldest son and said, “Tell me, Samuel, are you still circumcised?”The past goes on hanging around you. It is an imprisonment. If you are a Jew or a Christian or a Hindu or a Jaina or a Buddhist, you are not really a man. You are dead, you are a corpse – circumcised or not circumcised.One becomes alive only when one is totally free from the past. To be in the present is the only way to be alive.These prayers are nothing but fear-oriented people’s projections and desires. I teach you love, not fear.In all the languages of the world, the religious person is called God-fearing. That is an ugly expression; it should be dropped. For the religious person it is impossible to be God-fearing, because he cannot have fear. A religious person simply lives lovingly, not out of fear. These are all prayers out of fear: “Give us our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”Drop all this. Be a little more alive, a little more contemporary.Henry went on his first hunting trip. When he got back to his office, his partner Morris could not wait to hear all about the trip. Henry told him, “Well, I went into the woods with the guide. You know me, two minutes in the woods, I get lost. I am walking extra quiet, when all of a sudden the biggest bear you ever did see is standing right in front of me. I turn around and run just as fast as I can and that bear, he is running even faster.“Just when I feel his hot breath on my neck, he slipped and fell. I jumped over a brook and kept running, but I was losing my breath and sure enough there was that bear getting close to me again. He was almost on top of me when he slipped again and fell. I kept on running and finally I found myself in the clearing of the woods. The bear was running as fast as he could and I knew I did not stand a chance. I saw the other hunters and shouted for help and just then the bear slipped and fell again. My guide was able to take aim and he shot the bear and killed him.”Morris said, “Henry, that was quite a story. You are a very brave man. If that would have happened to me, I would have made in my pants.”Henry looked at him and shrugged, “Morris, what do you think the bear was slipping on?”Man has lived in fear; it is time to put a full stop to it. Humanity needs a new dawn, a totally new vision.Jesus says God is love. I would like to change that. I would like to say, “Love is God.” When you say God is love, love is only one of the qualities of God; he may have other qualities: wisdom, justice, etcetera. To me, love is God; godliness is only one of the qualities of love. There is no other God than the fragrance of love. But the fragrance can arise only in deep meditation, not in prayer. Prayer stinks of fear.I know perfectly well that to say anything against Jesus or Buddha or Krishna hurts you, but I cannot help it. If it hurts, it hurts. Rather than feeling sour about what I say, ponder over it, meditate over it. Because I am not interested in arguing with anybody. I have tremendous love for Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna. They were beautiful people, but their days are finished.We need new insights, new pastures, new dimensions. These new dimensions are bound to go against our old, rotten mind. So when it hurts, remember: it is not the truth that is hurting you – it is your own lie that you have been clinging to which hurts. Whenever you have to choose between a truth and a lie, be courageous and choose the truth, because that is the only way to live, the only way to know, the only way to be.Enough for today.

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The Goose is Out 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Goose is Out 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,According to a very recent theory in astronomic physics, every atom which exists in the body or which builds up all material things around us comes out of a cosmic circle through which it must go at least twice. However, this fact doesn't help me to feel part of the cosmos. As a scientist, do I ever stand a chance of experiencing mystery?Science is a demystification of existence. Hence, it is absolutely impossible to feel any sense of the mysterious through science; the very method of science prohibits it. It is just like somebody who is blind trying to see through the ears, or somebody who is deaf trying to listen to music through the eyes: the very method becomes the barrier.Science has a definite methodology to it, and that makes it limited; it gives a demarcation, a definition. It is absolutely necessary for science to be defined, otherwise there would be no difference at all between science and meditation, between science and religious consciousness.Science means being definite, being absolutely definite, about facts. If you are very definite about facts then you cannot feel mysterious – the more you are definite then the more mystery evaporates. Mystery needs a certain vagueness; mystery needs something undefined, undemarcated. Science is factual. Mystery is not factual; it is existential.A fact is only a part of existence, a very small part, and science deals with the parts because it is easier to deal with the parts. They are small; you can analyze them. You are not overwhelmed by them; you can possess them in your hands. You can dissect them; you can label them, you can be absolutely certain about their qualities, quantities, possibilities – but in that very process mystery is being killed. Science murders mystery.If you want to experience the mysterious you will have to enter from another door, from a totally different dimension. The dimension of the mind is the dimension of science, and the dimension of meditation is the dimension of the miraculous, the mysterious.Meditation makes everything undefined. Meditation takes you into the unknown, uncharted. Meditation takes you slowly, slowly into a kind of dissolution where the observer and the observed become one. Now, that is not possible in science. The observer has to be the observer, and the observed has to be the observed, and a clear-cut distinction has to be maintained continuously. Not even for a single moment should you forget yourself, not even for a single moment should you become interested, dissolved, overwhelmed, passionate, loving toward the object of your inquiry. You have to be detached, you have to be very cold – cold, absolutely indifferent. And indifference kills mystery.Between the world of meditation and the mind there is a bridge: that bridge is called the heart. The heart is just exactly between the two. Hence, the poet lives in a twilight land: something of him can be scientific and something of him can be mystic. That is the anxiety of the poet also, because he lives in two dimensions, diametrically opposite. Hence, poets tend to go mad, tend to commit suicide, are always known as a little bit crazy, outlandish. Something about them remains berserk for the simple reason that they are not settled anywhere. They are neither in the world of facts nor in the world of the existentials; they are in a limbo.The poet can have a certain taste of the mysterious, but that too only rarely; it comes and goes. The mystic lives there; the poet only jumps once in a while and feels the joy of jumping beyond gravitation. But within a minute or within seconds he is back, crushed against the forces of gravitation.Poetry is a kind of hopping. Once in awhile you are in the sky, for a moment you feel as if you have got wings, but only for a moment. Hence, the despair of the poet, because he falls again and again from his peaks. He gathers a few glimpses. The greatest poets, too, have been able to gather only a few glimpses of the beyond.The mystic lives in the world of mystery. His approach is absolutely transcendental to science. He is neither in the mind nor in the heart, but in the beyond – he has transcended both.If you really want the experience of the mysterious then you will have to open a new door in your being. I am not saying stop being a scientist; I am simply saying that science can remain a peripheral activity to you. When in the lab be a scientist, but when you come out of the lab forget all about science. Then listen to the birds, but not in a scientific way! Look at the flowers, but not in a scientific way, because when you look at a rose in a scientific way it is a totally different kind of thing that you are looking at. It is not the same rose that a poet experiences.The experience does not depend on the object; the experience depends on the experiencer, on the quality of experiencing. When the scientist looks at the rose he thinks of colors, chemistry, physics, atoms, electrons, neutrons and whatnot…except beauty. Beauty does not come into his vision, and that’s what the rose is.To the poet, to the painter, it is a totally different experience: the rose is a manifestation of the unknown, of the transcendental, of the secret of life itself. It represents something of the divine; it brings into existence something of the sky, something of faraway stars. It grows on the earth; it is rooted in the earth, but it is not just part of the earth; it contains far more than that. It is greater than the sum total of its constituent parts. The scientist only comes to know it as a sum total of its constituent parts – there is nothing more to it – but the poet starts feeling something plus.The moment you dissect the rose, the beauty disappears. The rose was only an opportunity for beauty to descend, a receptivity of the earth for the sky, a receptivity of the gross for the subtle. The poet feels that, but it is a feeling – it is not a thought.So when you come out of your lab, forget all about atoms, forget all about the cosmos. Rather, start looking afresh, with a different vision – the vision of a child, the vision of a poet, the vision of a lover. When you look at the woman you love never think of her in terms of biology, otherwise you will miss the whole point. She is not biology, she has a being far greater than any biology can contain. When you kiss your woman don’t think in terms of what is being transferred from lips to lips chemically, otherwise you will be disgusted! You won’t see any poetry, you will be puzzled by what all these poets have been talking about. It is only an exchange of bacteria, germs, millions of germs, dangerous too. It can be a matter of life and death – beware!When you are making love to your woman don’t think in terms of hormones. Avoid that nonsense; otherwise the whole love act will be simply a mechanical phenomenon. You will be there and yet not there. You will be just an observer, not a participant. And the poet’s whole secret is participation.Looking at a flower, become the flower, dance around the flower, sing a song. The wind is cool and crisp; the sun is warm, and the flower is having its prime; the flower is dancing in the wind, rejoicing, singing a song, singing alleluia! Participate with it! Drop indifference, objectivity, detachment. Drop all your scientific attitudes. Become a little more fluid, more melting, more merging. Let the flower speak to your heart, let the flower enter your being. Invite him – he is a guest! And then you will have some taste of mystery.This is the first step toward the mysterious, and the ultimate step is: if you can be a participant for a moment, you have known the key, the secret. Then become a participant in everything that you are doing. Walking, don’t just do it mechanically, don’t just go on watching it, be it. Dancing, don’t do it technically; technique is irrelevant. You may be technically correct, and yet you will miss the whole joy of it. Dissolve yourself in the dance; become the dance; forget about the dancer.When such deep unity starts happening in many, many phases of your life; when all around you, you start having such tremendous experiences of disappearance, egolessness, nothingness; when the flower is there and you are not, the rainbow is there and you are not; when the clouds are roaming in the sky within and without both, and you are not; when there is utter silence as far as you are concerned; when there is nobody in you, just a pure silence, a virgin silence, undistracted, undisturbed by logic, thought, emotion, feeling, that is the moment of meditation. Mind is gone, and when mind is gone mystery enters.Mystery and mind cannot exist together; they are not, by their very nature, co-existent. Just like darkness and light: you cannot have both in your room. If you want darkness you have to extinguish the light; if you want light then you have to lose darkness. You can only have one, for the simple reason that the presence of light is the absence of darkness, the presence of darkness is the absence of light; they are not two things, in fact. The same phenomenon, present, is light; absent, is dark. Now you cannot manage both, to be together present and absent both.Mind is the presence of the non-mysterious, the logical, and meditation is the presence of the mysterious, the miraculous.Hence, move from the mind. Let art, poetry, painting, dancing become more important – they will bring you closer to meditation – and finally take the plunge. If you have tasted something of poetry you will gather courage enough to take the ultimate plunge.To me religion consists of three layers; the first layer is of science. Just as your body consists of material, atomic constituents, religion consists first, the most peripheral part, of science. I am not against science; science is an absolute need, but it is only the peripheral phenomenon, the most superficial, the first concentric circle around your center. Then comes the second concentric circle which is deeper than science, that is of art, aesthetics. And then the third, that is meditation. And if you have entered these three concentric circles, slowly, slowly you will attain to the fourth.The fourth in the East is called the turiya. We have not given it any name; we have simply given it a number, the fourth. Nothing can be said about it, that’s why no word has been given to it. It is even beyond mystery. Meditation will take you into the mysterious, but there is still something more than that; that is inexpressible. Nothing can be said about it; nothing has ever been said about it; nothing will ever be said about it – but it has been experienced.Only at that ultimate peak of experience, that ultimate ecstasy you will know what it is to be.You ask me: “According to a very recent theory in astronomic physics, every atom which exists in the body or which builds up all material things around us comes out of a cosmic circle through which it must go at least twice.” Whether it goes twice or thrice, how can it help you to feel that you are part of the cosmos? It may go thousands of times – it is irrelevant!You say: “However, this fact doesn’t help me to feel part of the cosmos.” No fact can help you. You will have to travel the whole terrain from a totally different dimension.You also ask: “Osho, as a scientist, do I ever stand a chance of experiencing mystery?” Not as a scientist; there is no chance. I cannot give you a wrong hope. As a scientist you have no chance of knowing the mysterious; but that does not mean that you have to stop being a scientist. That simply means that you let science be one of the aspects of your life. Why make it your whole life? Why become synonymous with it? It is perfectly good to use your logical mind, analytical mind – it is perfectly good, it is beneficial. The world needs technology, the world needs science, and you can be of immense service to humanity – but that is a totally different matter.You should not think that this can be your whole life. Otherwise you will live only in the porch of the palace: and you will think that this is the palace, and you will suffer all kinds of things on the porch. Sometimes it will be too cold, and sometimes it will be too hot, and sometimes the rain will start coming in – it is only an open porch! And the palace is there, available; you could have entered the palace. I am not against the porch, remember, I am not telling you to demolish it. The porch is a necessity, but a porch is a porch. Pass through it, use it, but you have a beautiful palace – why not explore the whole palace of your being?Explore poetry, explore music, explore dance, explore meditation, and finally and ultimately disappear into the fourth. Then, and only then, the goose is out!The second question:Osho,When serious, sad people become enlightened, do they remain serious and sad or do they become funny like you?Who has ever heard of serious people becoming enlightened? The serious person cannot become enlightened. Seriousness is a disease; it is the cancer of the soul. Seriousness is a wrong, utterly wrong approach to life. How can you come to truth through a wrong approach? The serious person is simply ill, pathological. Of course, for thousands of years serious people have dominated us because that is their only joy in life, there is no other joy for them – the joy of dominating.There is a beautiful parable of Kahlil Gibran: Every day he goes for a morning walk, and he comes across a field where a false man, a scarecrow, has been placed. The false man has a purpose: he drives wild animals away, drives birds away from the crops.One day Kahlil Gibran asks the false man, “You have been standing here year in, year out – you must be getting very tired, very bored?”And the false man says, “No, I may look bored, I may look very serious, but I am enjoying my job.”Kahlil Gibran says, “What kind of enjoyment must you be having? I don’t see anything here to enjoy for you”He says, “The very joy of making people afraid gives such a thrill. Day in and day out, I am driving animals and birds crazy! They run away from me. I am the supreme being around here. I am the most powerful person. Everybody is afraid of me. Don’t you think that’s more than one can expect from life?”The serious person has been doing that for centuries. In the name of politics, in the name of religion, in the name of education, in the name of morality, he has been torturing people; that is his only joy. He is basically a sadomasochist.No sadomasochist can become enlightened; out of a hundred people that you thought became enlightened, ninety-nine point nine percent were not enlightened. It is just a traditional idea, and you go on carrying it. You have been told that this man is “enlightened.” No criterion exists for you – how to judge him? Jesus is enlightened to the Christians; to the Jainas he is not; they have a different criterion. You will be surprised: to the Christians, Mahavira may not look enlightened at all; they have a different criterion.Christians say Jesus never laughed in his whole life. This must be an absolute lie. I cannot believe it, that he never laughed; his whole life shows a different flavor. It is impossible to think that he never laughed, but Christians say that he never laughed. Why? – because an enlightened person has to be serious, very serious, burdened with all the problems of the world. He has come to solve all the problems, he has to come to save humanity. He is the savior, the messiah; he has to save you from your past sins, and future ones too. Naturally – he is carrying on his shoulders an Himalayan weight – how can he laugh? It is impossible.The whole idea that somebody has to save you is ugly; the whole idea destroys your freedom. You are not even allowed to suffer for your own sins, somebody else has to suffer for them. Your whole responsibility for yourself is taken away.That is not the vision of other traditions. For example, Buddha did not agree with it. He said, “Be a light unto yourself. Nobody else can save you.” Hence, Buddha is not so serious; there is no need, there is no reason to be serious. He is freed from all his own problems, he is released. There is a subtle joy in him.Christians will think that Buddha is selfish, that he is only thinking of himself. How can an enlightened person be selfish? Jesus is enlightened because he is thinking of all humanity.Mahavira lived naked. That is the Jainas’ concept of an enlightened man: that the enlightened person will renounce everything, he will live naked, and because he is completely free from all sins he cannot suffer. Jesus suffers much on the cross. Now, according to Jaina philosophy you suffer only because of your past bad karma. If Jesus had to suffer on the cross that simply shows that his past karma is still there – he has to pay for it; each act has to be paid for.For Mahavira, they say that when Mahavira walks – and he walks naked, barefooted – if on the path there is a thorn, the thorn will immediately turn upside down, seeing that Mahavira is coming. Because Mahavira has no more sins left, the thorn cannot give any pain to Mahavira; what to say about crucifixion? But Mahavira is serious.Krishna is not serious. Krishna is dancing, singing, playing on his flute.When Bodhidharma became enlightened, for seven days he could not stop laughing. Asked why again and again, he only said this much: “I am laughing because the whole thing was ridiculous. The goose has always been out, and I was trying to bring it out of the bottle, and the bottle has never existed. The whole effort was sheer absurdity, ridiculous! I am laughing at myself and I am laughing at the whole world, because people are trying to do something which need not be done at all. People are trying hard, and the harder they try the more difficult it becomes. Their very effort is the barrier!”How you are going to decide who is enlightened and who is not?Just the other day I received a letter that said: “If you are really enlightened then you should hide yourself in the Himalayas, because the enlightened person always remains in hiding. They remain unknown, they remain unsung.”Now, if this man is right, then Mahavira, Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, Rama, Zarathustra, Mohammed – nobody is enlightened, because they are all well-known, world-known. They were not hiding in the Himalayas, they did not live anonymously; they did not die unsung.Then one more question arises: how has this man come upon a few people who have lived hiding in the Himalayas, unsung, unknown, whom he thinks are the real enlightened people? How has he come to know about them? And if he knows, then they are not unknown – unless he is the only one who is allowed to know the secret! But these fools abound; they go on parading their own prejudices.I will not tell you who is enlightened, who is not enlightened, but I will tell you of a simple phenomenon which you can understand and which can become a light for you. One thing is absolutely certain: that the sado-masochist cannot be enlightened. One who tortures himself and tortures others, enjoys torturing, cannot be enlightened.Enlightenment is blissfulness; it cannot be serious. It can be sincere but not serious. It will be sheer joy! It will be pure ecstasy!You ask me: “Osho, when serious, sad people become enlightened…” I have never heard of such a thing! And if you have heard about any sad and serious people becoming enlightened, then either they were not sad and serious or you have heard wrong. Serious and sad people become something else, they don’t become enlightened. They become popes, Mother Teresas, Mahatma Gandhis, Morarji Desais, shankaracharyas, Ayatollah Khomaniacs, imams, priests. The churches, the synagogues, the temples, the mosques, the gurdwaras – they are full of these people; they are serious people. They gather around an enlightened person and they start destroying all that he has brought into being. They start creating a dead tradition – and the tradition has to be serious; the tradition cannot be nonserious.The enlightened person is always joyous, but the tradition, the convention cannot be joyous. The whole structure of a tradition is basically political; it is to dominate, it is to oppress, it is to exploit. And you cannot exploit people playfully, you have to be very serious. You have to make them so sad, so afraid of life itself; you have to create in their being so much trembling, that out of that fear they fall into your hands; they become objects of your manipulation.A man like me cannot exploit you, because this whole place is more like a tavern than like a temple. It is more playful than serious. We are engaged in a beautiful game! The moment you think of it as a game, all seriousness disappears, things become lighter. You can walk in a dancing way; there is no weight on you.The priests cannot do it; their whole prestige depends on their seriousness. The more serious they are, the more somber-looking, the more “holier-than-thou” they can pretend. They will do everything – they will fast…naturally when a person fasts he becomes serious, he cannot laugh. When you are hungry, starving, you cannot laugh – and you cannot allow anybody else to laugh either. It is not a laughing matter! You are starving, sacrificing, crucifying yourself, and people are laughing! It cannot be pardoned; it cannot be forgiven.Naturally, when you go to a fasting person you become serious – you have to be serious. That is simply a mannerism. Now, a person who is distorting his body in every possible way, who is torturing his body in every possible way – how can you laugh around him? The very scene is sad; you feel burdened. It is very difficult to be with these so-called saints. That’s why people just go to pay their respects and escape immediately, because to sit with them means they will burden you; they will create guilt in you.For example, if they are fasting and you are well-fed, guilt is bound to be created. If they are standing on their heads and you are simply standing on your feet, you are doing something wrong. Naturally, you will think, “I am not yet a perfect man – this is the perfect man who is standing on his head.” You see the sheer stupidity of it all? If God wanted you to stand on your head he would have managed!If God had wanted homosexuality in the world, he would have created Adam and Bruce – it is so simple! Why bring Eve in? Unnecessary trouble! But these stupid people go on doing the unnatural, and their very unnatural approach to life naturally makes them serious. They are going against the current, they are exhausted, tired, bored, but their only joy is that they can bore you.Moishe cannot decide about his son’s future, so he goes to the rabbi and asks his advice.The rabbi says, “That’s very easy. We put the Talmud, the Torah and some money on the table, and let him choose. If he takes the Talmud he will become a rabbi. If he takes the Torah he will become a lawyer. If he takes the money he will become a shopkeeper.”Moishe agrees and they call his son. The son looks at all the things on the table and then takes them all.Moishe is perplexed. “What will happen now?” he asks the rabbi.“He will become a Catholic priest,” replied the rabbi.These sad people become Catholic priests, Hindu shankaracharyas, Mohammedan imams, and what-not. These serious people lose their humanity; they become parrots. But it pays. You need not have much intelligence to be a parrot; you need not have much courage to be a parrot; if you just have a little bit of memory, you can recite the Vedas, the Gita, the Koran, and you will be respected and honored. You are not doing anything creative, you are not adding to the beauty of the world, you are not contributing to the earth and its joys. On the contrary, you are destroying. But people are conditioned for thousands of years, and they go on doing things according to their conditioning. Parrots are worshipped.A farmer owns a parrot who always screams, “Heil Hitler!”One day the farmer gets fed up with the parrot and locks it in the hen house. The cock walks over to the parrot and asks, “Tell me, why did the farmer lock you in here?” The parrot remains silent.“I will give you four of my hens if you tell me,” continues the cock, but the parrot remains silent.“Listen, if you tell me why he locked you in here, I’ll give you ten of my hens.”The parrot turns around and screams, “Can’t you leave me alone? I’m a political prisoner!”These sad people, they either become priests or become politicians or become great pedagogues, professors, philosophers, theologians, but they never become enlightened. That much is absolutely certain – that cannot happen in the very nature of things.To become enlightened one needs the lightness of the flower, the lightness of the feather, the multidimensional colors of the rainbow. One needs the joy of the birds in the morning; one needs the freedom of the clouds. One needs only one thing: a heart full of ecstasy – not ecstasy for something ultimate, not ecstasy for something in paradise, but ecstasy here and now, ecstasy this very moment. When your eyes are full of this very moment, when there is nothing else, no past, no future, when this moment pervades you so totally, so intensely, so passionately that nothing is left behind. Only these few people have become enlightened.Hence I say, if you live in joyous ordinariness you are enlightened. There is no need for any spiritual nonsense, for any esoteric nonsense.The toilet seat in the Rabinowitz's home was chipped. On his day off, Sidney promised to paint it. He had some nice bright green enamel in the garage and applied a fresh shiny coat.Ethel went in with a magazine, sat down to meditate and read. When she tried to get up she found she was stuck! She yelled for Sid.He tugged and tugged but could not pry her loose. Ethel, in desperation, cried, “So what are you standing there for! Call me a doctor! If plaster gets stuck, he at least knows how to remove it without tearing off the skin!”Sidney dashed to the telephone and pleaded with the doctor to come right over. This was a real emergency! The doctor explained that he had an office full of patients and that he could not possibly get there for at least two hours.Sid had a bright idea. He would unscrew the hinges and she could lie on the bed on her stomach and wait for the doctor. The two hours seemed like four but the doctor finally arrived.Sidney directed him into the bedroom and pointing to his wife said, “Doc, ain’t that something? What d’ya think of that?”The doctor looked thoughtfully and declared, “Very nice…but why such a cheap frame?”Life has to be taken hilariously! Life is so full of laughter; it is so ridiculous, it is so funny that unless your juices have gone completely dry you cannot be serious. I have looked around life in every possible way and it is always funny, whatever way you look at it! It gets funnier and funnier! It is such a beautiful gift of the beyond.I am against all seriousness. My whole approach is that of humor, and the greatest religious quality is a sense of humor – not truth, not God, not virtue, but a sense of humor. If we can fill the whole earth with laughter, with dancing and singing – people singing and swinging! – if we can make the earth a carnival of joy, a festival of lights, we will have brought for the first time a true sense of religiousness to the earth.The third question:Osho,Spiegel, the biggest news magazine in Germany, has finally started a series on you, your sannyasins and the ashram. The writer says many nice and incredible things about you and even compares you with the Pollack Pope. He says: “The masses who surrender to the charisma of John Paul II do nothing different than that which the Pune pilgrims do in their surrender to Osho. Only the churches and their sect experts cannot agree with that.”Do you feel offended or pleased by this statement?I am amused! The Pollacks I have always loved. The Pope is secondary, the Pollack is the real thing. The Pollack is the elephant and the Pope is just the last part of the elephant, the tail part!I am certainly not a pope, I cannot be – I am not that serious a man. I am not that religious either. I am very ordinary! To be a pope one needs to be very extraordinary. As far as charisma is concerned, I have none. I am just as ordinary as anybody else in the world. The whole idea of charisma is anti-human; it divides people. The whole strategy of creating charisma is nothing but the process of conditioning.If you go to see a naked Jaina monk you will not see any charisma because you are not conditioned for that. You will simply see an ugly, disgusting-looking person, pale, ill, ill at ease, eyes almost dead, no intelligence on the face, the whole body shrunken. Yes, one thing will be big – the belly – because the Jaina monk eats only once a day so he has to eat too much. If you are not conditioned by Jaina ideas, the whole figure of a Jaina monk will appear like a caricature to you, a cartoon, but to the Jainas themselves there is charisma, great charisma.Jaina monks, particularly the digambara Jaina monks who live naked, every year tear out their hair with their own hands. If you look at it, it will look insane, ugly, violent, but the Jainas watch with great respect – “Something of immense value is happening.” The man is simply tearing out his hair! You must have seen your wife sometimes in anger, or if you go to a mad asylum you will find people tearing out their hair – just angry at themselves, violent anger at themselves, repressed anger and nothing else. But to the Jaina mind it is charismatic: “What sacrifice!”If you go to a Christian church and see the cross, if you are conditioned by Christianity then you will not see that death is being worshipped – the cross represents death. There is every possibility if Jesus had not been crucified there would have been no Christianity at all. It is not Jesus who has dominated the Christian mind, it is the cross. Hence, I don’t call Christianity, Christianity. I call it Crossianity! The cross simply symbolizes death, suicide; it is not a life-affirmative symbol. But to the Christian it symbolizes the great sacrifice of Jesus for the whole of humanity.Charisma is created by a certain conditioning. The same Pope was not charismatic two years ago – suddenly he has become charismatic. What miracle has happened? Just because he is chosen to be the pope, he has been voted to be the pope, he has become charismatic. Now millions of people are impressed by him; nobody would have cared… The same man has been there for more than sixty years, and nobody had ever bothered about him. This is just a created illusion.The same man, if he becomes the president of a country, starts having a charisma, and once he is no more a president he loses all charisma; then he is nobody.When the revolution in Russia happened there was a very charismatic leader, Kerensky; he was the prime minister of Russia. In the revolution he escaped, and for fifty years nothing was heard about that charismatic leader. People had completely forgotten about him, and he was the most important man before Lenin in Russia; he had dominated the whole scene. After fifty years he died in New York as a grocer! When he died it was found that he is Kerensky and nobody else. For fifty years he was tending a grocery store and nobody ever thought of him as charismatic.I am not charismatic, and I don’t believe in all such nonsensical things. I exalt the simple, the unconditioned, the innocent, the ordinary, and I want all categories to be dissolved: the category of the sinner and the saint, the unholy and the holy, the profane and the sacred, the moral and the immoral. I want to dissolve all categories! Man is simply man.So I would not like to be compared with the Pope. In fact, I don’t like any comparison at all because comparison is basically a wrong approach. I am myself! I don’t want to be compared even with Jesus; so what to say about the Pope. I don’t want to be compared with Buddha, with Zarathustra, with Lao Tzu, because all comparison is basically wrong. Lao Tzu is Lao Tzu, I am who I am; there is no question of comparison.How can you compare a rose bush with a cedar of Lebanon? There is no question of comparison. How can you compare the lotus with the marigold? In fact, two lotus flowers cannot even be compared with each other; they have their own uniqueness.We have been living with this idea of comparison for centuries. We always compare, we always put people into categories, we always put people into boxes – who is who, what category one belongs in.My whole effort here is to dissolve all categories and to declare the uniqueness of the individual. Never compare me with anybody else. I am simply myself. Good, bad, holy, unholy, whatsoever I am, I am simply myself. The very idea is disgusting, to be compared with anybody else. Existence never creates carbon copies, it always creates originals, and everybody comes with his own original face.But Pollacks I love – that much I have to concede!A Pollack walks into the office of a circus and offers to jump to the ground from ten meters up, head first, without a net. The manager does not believe this, so they go to the stage. The Pollack gets up to about ten meters, takes a deep breath and jumps head first. He crashes down on his head, lies still for a few moments and then gets up.The manager is fascinated. “That’s incredible!” he exclaims. “I will pay you one hundred dollars a night.”The Pollack shakes his head.“Okay, okay, I will pay you three hundred dollars a night.”“No,” replies the Pollack.“I will pay you a thousand dollars!” says the manager.“No,” says the Pollack, “I’ve changed my mind – I don’t want to jump anymore. I didn’t know it would hurt so much.”A Pollack discovered that he had three balls. He was so anxious to tell it to someone that he stopped the first man he met on the road and asked him, “Do you want to bet that together we have five balls?”He lost his bet…the other guy had only one ball!The Pollack woman was dying. With her last breath she turned to her husband and asked, “Before I die, make love to me just one more time.”The Pollack husband answered, “How could you ask me to do such a thing? It will kill you!”The wife pleaded, “Everyone is entitled to one last request before they die, you should grant me this last wish.”The Pollack replied, “Okay.” He got into bed and made love to her. No sooner did he finish than she hopped out of bed, completely cured, ran downstairs and started to pluck a chicken, and yelled into the living room, where her children were sitting, that dinner would be ready in an hour.The children were astounded and ran up the stairs to their father who was sitting in a chair and crying. They said, “Papa, why are you crying? It is a miracle! Mama is completely cured!”He replied, “I know, but then I think what I could have done for Eleanor Roosevelt!”The Pollack mind has its own way of working! It is the most intriguing mind in the world!Spiegel has done one thing good : it has reminded me of the Pollack Pope.The old Pollack general lived with his young wife in a lonely villa. They kept two guards in front of the house to protect them against intruders.One night the guards saw that the lights in the general’s bedroom were on for a very long time. Suspicious, they snuck up to the window and peeped in. The general’s wife was lying on the bed naked, looking quite bored. The Pollack general, also naked, was anxiously walking around the room with a pistol in his hand.Suddenly he stopped, looked down at his groin and shouted, “Stand up like a man or I will shoot!”Do you remember the famous proverb: “The bread never falls but on its buttered side”?However, there is a story of a Pollack man whose bread fell and landed buttered side up. He ran straightaway to the Pollack Pope to report this deviance from one of the basic rules of the universe.At first the Pope would not believe him, but finally became convinced that it had happened. However, he did not feel immediately ready to deal with the question and asked for time. He studied hard the old scriptures about it, prayed to God and did all kinds of things to find an infallible answer.After months of waiting he finally came up with an answer. He said to the Pollack man, “The bread must have been buttered on the wrong side.”You said, “Spiegel, the biggest news magazine in Germany, has finally started a series on you, your sannyasins and the ashram. The writer says many nice and incredible things about you and even compares you with the Pollack Pope. He says: ‘The masses who surrender to the charisma of John Paul II do nothing different than that which the Pune pilgrims do in their surrender to Osho.’”That is absolutely wrong. Because I am not here to help you to surrender to me. I don’t want to stand between you and the whole. It is not a question of surrender. It is a question of surrender when you go to the Pope; here it is a love affair. There you surrender to the Pope because he represents God, represents the only begotten son of God, Jesus Christ. I don’t represent anybody!When you are with me you are living in a love affair; there is no question of surrender. You are simply learning ways of how to relate with existence. I am only an opportunity, a device, a catalytic agent at the most.My sannyasins are not my followers. I’m not creating a church, I’m simply imparting what I have seen. I’m simply sharing my love, my joy, my experience. Those who are here are fellow travelers. You are not surrendered to me, but living with me. Slowly, slowly you will start enjoying a deep surrender with existence. That is a totally different matter; I have nothing to do with it. The credit will go to you, not to me. My presence can help only in one thing: to see the pattern of stupidity in which you are caught.The Pope is simply enforcing the same stupid pattern in you. For thousands of years people have been surrendering to these popes and priests and nothing has happened.I am not a priest, and I am not interested in gathering crowds. I am not interested in creating a tradition; I am simply enjoying myself! Those who want to enjoy themselves, they are welcome. It is a place of joy. The very word surrender is irrelevant here! Nobody is surrendering to anybody else. You have to be yourself, authentically yourself, sincerely yourself, and then a miracle starts happening: the moment you discover your original face you enter into a communion with the whole.Spiegel is not right in saying that the same thing is happening to Pune pilgrims; but when people come and just watch from the outside, these misunderstandings are bound to happen. They are just onlookers.To understand what is going on here one has to be a participant, not just an observer. Only then will some taste on your tongue reveal the secret.I have heard that every year as part of the splendid Easter ceremonials at St. Peter’s in Rome, the Chief Rabbi of the city would enter the Basilica in solemn procession during High Mass and present the Pope with an ancient scroll. And every year the Pope would take this scroll, bow to the Rabbi and hand it back, whereupon the Rabbi would return the bow, turn and leave.This mysterious rite had been going on for so many hundreds of years that no one could remember the origins of it nor what it symbolized. But the first Eastertide of Pope the Pollack’s reign he decided to put an end to what had become a totally meaningless ritual, and so when the Chief Rabbi duly presented the scroll, His Holiness, to the consternation of the entire Curia, opened it up. It was a bill for the Last Supper.The last question:Osho,I am going nuts! I keep laughing at a joke. I even woke up once laughing at it. And I don't even know what the joke is!Then I will have to tell it again! In fact, there are four jokes. Three I will tell you today and the fourth you have to discover – the turiya! I will give you forty-eight hours to discover it. If you cannot discover it then I will tell it too.The first joke that I have been telling you in your sushupti, the dreamless sleep… Naturally, it is difficult to remember it. Yoga Lalita is my librarian, so I have to remind her continuously of jokes so she goes on collecting jokes for me. I never see her, I never go to the library, so the only way to convey the message is while she is asleep.The first joke:A minister, a priest and a rabbi were discussing how they divined what part of the collection money each retained for personal needs and what part was turned in to their respective institutions.“I draw a line,” said the minister, “on the floor. I toss all the money in the air – what lands to the right of the line I keep, to the left of the line is the Lord’s.”The priest nodded, saying, “My system is essentially the same, only I use a circle. What lands inside is mine, outside is his.”The rabbi smiled and said, “I do the same thing. I toss all the money into the air and whatever God grabs is his!”The second joke has been told to you in the state of swapna, the dream state. You may remember something of it – just a few fragments here and there.The distraught young man was perched on the fortieth-floor ledge of a midtown hotel and threatening to jump. The closest the police could get was the roof of an adjacent building a few feet below. However, all pleas to the man to return to safety were of no avail. A priest from the nearest parish was summoned, and he hastened to the scene.“Think, my son,” he intoned to the would-be suicide. “Think of your mother and father who love you.”“Aw, they don’t love me,” the man replied. “I’m jumping!”“No! Stop!” cried the priest. “Think of the woman who loves you!”“Nobody loves me! I’m jumping!” came the response.“But think,” the priest implored, “think of Jesus and Mary and Joseph who love you!”“Jesus, Mary and Joseph?” the man queried, “Who are they?”At which point the cleric yelled back, “Jump, you Jew bastard, jump!”The third has been told to you in jagruti, the so-called awakening state – which is not much of an awakening state. Maybe that’s what goes on keeping you laughing.You say: “I am going nuts! I keep laughing at a joke. I even woke up once laughing at it. And I don’t even know what the joke is!”This may be the joke:The family managed to bring the patriarchal grandfather from Hungary, and he came to live with his daughter and her family. The old man was fascinated by New York and all it had to offer. One day, his grandson Yankel took him to the zoo in Central Park. Most of the animals were familiar to the old man. However, they came to the cage where the laughing hyena was confined and the old man became curious. “Yankel, in the old country I never heard of an animal that laughed.”Yankel noticed the keeper standing nearby and approached him. “My grandfather recently came here from Europe. He says they don’t have laughing hyenas there. Could you tell me something about it so that I can, in turn, tell him about it?”The keeper said, “Well, he eats once a day.”Yankel turned to his grandfather and in Yiddish translated, “Zayda, he eats once a day.”The keeper continued, “He takes a bath once a week.”“Zayda, he bathes once a week.”The old man listened intently.The keeper added, “He mates once a year.”“Zayda, he mates once a year.”The old man nodded his head up and down and said thoughtfully, “All right, he eats once a day, he bathes once a week, but if he mates only once a year, why is he laughing?”Enough for today.

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The Goose is Out 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Goose is Out 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Is it important to have some kind of attitude toward life?The best way to miss life is to have a certain attitude toward it. Attitudes originate in the mind, and life is beyond mind. Attitudes are our fabrications, our prejudices, our inventions. Life is not our fabrication; on the contrary, we are just ripples in the lake of life.What attitude can a ripple in the ocean have toward the ocean? What attitude can a grass blade have toward the earth, the moon, the sun, the stars? All attitudes are egoistic; all attitudes are stupid.Life is not a philosophy; it is not a problem; it is a mystery. You have to live it not according to a certain pattern, not according to a conditioning – not what you have been told about it – you have to start afresh, from the very scratch.Each human individual should think as if he is the first on the earth; he is the Adam or the Eve. Then you can open, you can open to infinite possibilities; then you will be vulnerable, available. The more vulnerable you are, the more available you are, the more is the possibility of life happening to you. Your attitudes function like barriers; then life never reaches you as it is – it has to fit your philosophy, religion, ideology; and in that very fitting, something dies in it. What you get out is a corpse: it may look like life but it is not.That’s what people have been doing down the ages. Hindus are living according to the Hindu attitude, Mohammedans according to the Mohammedan attitude, and Communists according to the Communist attitude. But remember a basic, fundamental truth: an attitude does not allow you to come into contact with life as it is; it distorts it, it interprets it.There is an old Greek story:A fanatic king had a beautiful golden bed, very precious, studded with thousands of diamonds, and whenever a guest would be in the palace he would offer the bed to the guest. But he had a certain attitude: the guest has to fit within the bed. If the guest was a little longer then the king would cut him to size. Of course, the bed was so valuable the bed could not be changed, but the guest was to be adjusted to the bed – as if the bed did not exist for the guests, but the guests exist for the bed!It is very rare, almost impossible, to find a man to fit with a ready-made bed. The average person does not exist, remember; the average person is a fiction, and the bed was made for an average person. The king was a mathematician – great calculations had gone into it. He had counted the height of all the citizens of his capital, and then the heights were divided by the number of all the citizens; he had come up with a fixed average. Now, there were small children in the capital, young people, old people, pygmies, giants, but the average was a totally different phenomenon. There was not a single person in his whole capital who was really average. I have never come across the average person – the average person is a fiction.So whosoever was going to be a guest was in trouble. If he was shorter than the bed, then the king had great wrestlers who would pull the man to size. That must have been the beginning of Rolfing! Ida Rolf must have learned it from that king. Of course, each guest died, but that was not the king’s fault – he was doing everything with the best of intentions in the world!When you have a certain attitude toward life, you will miss life itself. Life is vast, uncontainable in any attitude; impossible to put into a certain definition. Your attitude may cover a certain aspect, but it will be only an aspect. The tendency of the mind is to proclaim its aspect as the whole, and the moment an aspect is claimed as the whole you have missed the very connection with life. Then you will live surrounded by your attitude in a kind of cocoon, encapsulated, and you will be miserable. Then all your so-called religions will be very happy because that’s what they have been telling to you: that life is misery.Buddha says birth is misery, youth is misery, old age is misery, death is misery – the whole of life is nothing but a long, long tragedy. If you start with attitudes you will find Buddha absolutely correct; you will be a proof.But I want to tell you that life is not misery; I don’t agree with Buddha at all. Life becomes a misery, but that is your doing; otherwise life is eternal joy. To know that eternal joy you have to come open-hearted, open-handed.Don’t approach life with your fists closed, clenched. Open your hands. Go into life with immense innocence. Attitudes are cunning: you have already decided without tasting, without experiencing, without living. You have already arrived at certain conclusions, and of course if those conclusions are there already in you a priori, you will find them confirmed by life. Not that life confirms them, but your whole mind will try to find ways and means, arguments, data to support them.Mind is like a sponge: it goes on sucking. It is a parasite. Once there is the center of a certain a priori conclusion, then that center starts becoming crystallized.A man came to me who had been working for years from a certain hypothesis. In many countries of the world: particularly in the West, and more particularly in America, the number thirteen is not thought to be good. There are hotels in America where the thirteenth floor does not exist; from the twelfth floor you come to the fourteenth. The number thirteen is avoided; no room has the number thirteen; from the twelfth you immediately come to the fourteenth, because nobody wants to live in the thirteenth room or on the thirteenth floor. A great fear – the idea that the number thirteen has something evil in it.This man had worked and collected all kinds of data, and he had collected a really huge, mountainous support – how many accidents happen on the thirteenth of every month, how many people die on the thirteenth, how many people commit suicide, how many people murder, how many people go mad.He showed his great thesis to me, and he said, “What do you say?”I said, “You do one more thing. You have put so much energy into this, now try one more thing. Now find out what happens on the twelfth! You will come to the same data, because on the twelfth people also go mad, commit suicide, murder, rob. Everything happens every day, but if you have a certain attitude, fixed, then you will choose your data according to that attitude. Of course when you have so much information and such an argument you feel certain that your attitude is right.”I teach you a life without any attitudes. This is one of the fundamentals of my experience: if you really want to know that which is, then drop all philosophy, all “ism.” Then go open-handed, utterly naked into the sun to see what it is.In the past it was thought that our senses are doors; reality reaches through our senses into our innermost being. Now the latest research shows something else: our senses are not just doors, they are guards also. Only two percent of outside information is allowed to pass in, ninety-eight percent stays outside. Anything that goes against your idea of life is prevented from entering, and only two percent filters in.To live a life of only two percent is not to live at all. When one can live a hundred percent, why decide to live for only two percent?You ask me: “Is it important to have some kind of attitude toward life?” Not only is it not important, it is dangerous to have any attitude toward life. Why not allow life to have its dance, its song, without any expectations? Why can’t we live without expectations? Why can’t we see that which is, in its purity? Why should we impose ourselves upon it? And nobody is going to be the loser. If you impose expectations upon life you are the only loser.From London comes the story of the three professors of literature who, while returning from lunch, encountered several ladies of pleasure who were patrolling the street, en masse.“What might one call such a congregation?” mused the first professor, a Shakespearean specialist. “A flourish of strumpets?”The second professor, being an authority on the novels of Anthony Trollope, naturally contributed, “A chapter of trollops.”But the best description came from the youngest and the least specialized of the professors. He called the ladies “an anthology of pros.”It is better not to label life, it is better not to give it a structure, it is better to leave it open-ended, it is better not to categorize it, not to label it. You will have a more beautiful experience of things; you will have a more cosmic experience of things, because things are not really divided. Existence is one orgasmic whole; it is one organic unity. The smallest blade of grass, the smallest leaf in a poor tree is as significant as the biggest star. The smallest thing is also the biggest because it is all oneness; it is one spectrum. The moment you start dividing you start creating arbitrary lines, definitions, and that’s the way one goes on missing life and the mystery of it.We all have attitudes, that is our anguish; we all look from certain standpoints. Hence our life becomes poor, because every aspect at the most can be only one-dimensional, and life is multi-dimensional. You have to be more liquid, more fluid, more melting and merging; you are not to be an observer. There is nothing to be solved! Don’t take life as a problem, it is a tremendously beautiful mystery. Drink of it – it is pure wine! Be a drunkard with it!A successful couturier had finally found the girl of his dreams and he made preparations for a wedding the garment district would never forget. His own designers prepared a wedding gown for the bride, of the finest imported silks and satins, and his own marital raiment was truly a sight to behold.The affair was nothing less than breathtaking; no expense had been spared. Then, as the newlyweds were about to embark on their honeymoon trip to Canada, an urgent message arrived in the form of a telegram.“It is from my partner,” the groom explained. “Urgent business. I will have to attend to it immediately.”“But what about our honeymoon?” the bride asked tearfully.“Business comes first,” he said. “But you go ahead. I will catch a later plane and be there by tonight.”“But what if you can’t make it by tonight?” she moaned.“Then,” he blustered, “start without me.”A businessman has his own philosophy, his own attitudes. The scientist has his own attitudes. Everybody is living in a small prison of his own attitudes.My effort here is to bring you out of your imprisonment. Hence I don’t teach you any doctrine, I don’t give you any dogma, I don’t give you any creed to live by. I am simply trying to help you to be unburdened of all the nonsense which has been imposed upon you for centuries. If you can put aside the mountainous weight of the past, if you can start living as if you are the first man, only then there is a possibility that you may come to know what godliness is, what freedom is, what joy is. Otherwise, misery is going to be your lot, and naturally, sooner or later, you will agree with the pessimist attitude of Buddha: that all is suffering, all is pain.I absolutely deny it, because my own experience is just the opposite: all is bliss, all is benediction. But it depends on you, how you approach life: guarded, with certain spectacles on your eyes, or unguarded, in deep trust, in love.The second question:Osho,In the past all famous artists have been well-known for their bohemian style of life. Please can you say something about creativity and discipline?The bohemian life is the only life worth living! All other kinds of lives are only lukewarm; they are more ways of committing slow suicide than ways of living life passionately and intensely. In the past it was inevitable that the artist has to live in rebellion, because creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence. If you want to create you have to get rid of all conditioning, otherwise your creativity will be nothing but copying – it will be just a carbon copy. You can be creative only if you are an individual; you cannot create as part of the mob psychology. The mob psychology is uncreative: one lives a life of drag – one knows no dance, no song, no joy, it is mechanical.Of course, there are a few things you will get from the society if you are only mechanical: you will get respectability, you will get honors. Universities will confer D.Litt's on you; countries will give you gold medals; you may finally become a Nobel laureate – but this whole thing is ugly.A real man of genius will discard all this nonsense, because this is bribery. Giving a Nobel Prize to a person simply means that your services to the establishment have been respected, that you are honored because you have been a good slave, obedient, that you have not gone astray, that you have followed the well-trodden path.A creator cannot follow the well-trodden path; he has to search his own way; he has to inquire into the jungles of life, he has to go alone, he has to be a dropout from the mob mind, from the collective psychology. The collective mind is the lowest mind in the world; even the so-called idiots are a little bit superior to the collective idiocy. And the collectivity has its own bribes: it respects people, honors people, if they go on insisting that the way of the collective mind is the only right way.It was out of sheer necessity that in the past the creators of all kinds – the painters, the dancers, the musicians, the poets, the sculptors – had to renounce respectability. They had to live a kind of bohemian life, the life of a vagabond; that was the only possibility for them to be creative. This need not be so in the future. If you understand me, if you feel what I am saying has a truth in it, then in the future everybody should live individually, and there will be no need for a bohemian life. The bohemian life is a by-product of a fixed, orthodox, conventional, respectable life.My effort is to destroy the collective mind and to make each individual free to be himself or herself. Then there is no problem; then you can live as you want to live. In fact, humanity will be really born only the day the individual is respected in his rebellion. Humanity is still not born; it is still in the womb. What you see as humanity is only a very hocus-pocus phenomenon. Unless we give individual freedom to each person, absolute freedom to each person to be himself, to exist in his own way… Of course, he has to not interfere with anybody else – that is part of freedom. Nobody should interfere with anybody else.In the past everybody was poking his nose into everybody else’s affairs – even into things which are absolutely private, which have nothing to do with the society. For example, you fall in love with a woman – what has that got to do with the society? It is purely a personal phenomenon; it is not of the marketplace. If two persons are agreeing to commune in love, the society should not come into it, but the society comes in with all its paraphernalia, in direct ways, in indirect ways. The policeman will stand between the lovers; the magistrate will stand between the lovers; and if that is not enough then the societies have created a super-policeman, a God, who will take care of you.The idea of the God is that of a peeping tom who does not even allow you privacy in your bathroom, who goes on looking through the keyhole, watching what you are doing. This is ugly. All the religions of the world say God continuously watches you – this is ugly. What kind of God is this? Has he got no other business than watching everybody, following everybody? Seems to be the supreme-most detective!Humanity needs a new soil – the soil of freedom. Bohemianism was a reaction, a necessary reaction, but if my vision succeeds then there will be no bohemianism because there will be no so-called collective mind trying to dominate people. Then everybody will be at ease with himself. Of course, you are not to interfere with anybody else, but as far as your life is concerned you have to live it on your own terms. Only then there is creativity. Creativity is the fragrance of individual freedom.You ask me, “Please can you say something about creativity and discipline?” Discipline is a beautiful word, but it has been misused as all other beautiful words have been misused in the past. The word discipline comes from the same root as the word disciple; the root meaning of the word is “a process of learning.” One who is ready to learn is a disciple, and the process of being ready to learn is discipline.The knowledgeable person is never ready to learn, because he already thinks he knows; he is very much centered in his so-called knowledge. His knowledge is nothing but nourishment for his ego. He cannot be a disciple; he cannot be in true discipline.Socrates says, “I know only one thing – that I know nothing.” That is the beginning of discipline. When you don’t know anything, of course, a great longing to inquire, explore, investigate arises. The moment you start learning, another factor follows inevitably: whatsoever you have learned has to be dropped continuously, otherwise it will become knowledge and knowledge will prevent further learning.The real man of discipline never accumulates; each moment he dies to whatsoever he has come to know and again becomes ignorant. That ignorance is really luminous. I agree with Dionysus when he calls ignorance luminous. It is one of the most beautiful experiences in existence to be in a state of luminous not-knowing. When you are in that state of not-knowing you are open; there is no barrier, you are ready to explore. The Hindus cannot do it – they are already knowledgeable. The Mohammedans cannot do it, the Christians cannot do it. My sannyasins can do it, for the simple reason that I am not imparting knowledge; on the contrary, I am destroying your knowledge.Hence it happens every day…every day I receive many letters, many questions. One friend has come from the West. He says, for three, four years he has been reading my books, and he was so excited. He was in such love with me that he wanted to come somehow as quickly as possible. Now he has managed to come, but here he feels frustrated. He was four years in deep love with me, and now he says, “I cannot say the same, because you are so shocking to me. You irritate me, you annoy me; you go on hammering on my cherished ideas.”It is easy to read a book because the book is in your hands, I am not in your hands! You can interpret the book according to your ideas, you cannot interpret me according to your ideas – I will make so much trouble for you! He was not in love with me, he was in love with his own ideas, but because he was finding support from my books he lived in an illusion.With me illusions are bound to be shattered. I am here to shatter all illusions. Yes, it will irritate you, it will annoy you – that’s my very way of functioning and working. I will sabotage you from your very roots! Unless you are totally destroyed as a mind, there is no hope for you.Discipline has been misinterpreted. People have been telling others to discipline their life, to do this, not to do that. Thousands of should’s and should-not’s have been imposed on man, and when a man lives with thousands of should’s and should-not’s he cannot be creative. He is a prisoner; everywhere he will come across a wall.The creative person has to dissolve all should’s and should-not’s. He needs freedom and space, vast space. He needs the whole sky and all the stars – only then his innermost spontaneity can start growing.So remember, my meaning of discipline is not that of the Ten Commandments. I am not giving you any discipline; I am simply giving you an insight of how to remain in learning and never become knowledgeable. Your discipline has to come from your very heart, it has to be yours – and there is a great difference. When somebody else gives you the discipline it can never fit you; it will be wearing somebody else’s clothes. Either they will be too loose or too tight, and you will always feel a little bit silly within them.Mohammed has given a discipline to the Mohammedans: it may have been good for him, himself, but it cannot be good for anybody else. Buddha has given a discipline to millions of Buddhists: it may have been good for him, himself, but it cannot be good for everybody else. A discipline is an individual phenomenon; whenever you borrow it you start living according to set principles, dead principles. And life is never dead, life is constantly changing each moment. Life is a flux.Heraclitus is right: you cannot step in the same river twice. In fact, I myself would like to say you cannot step in the same river even once – the river is so fast moving! One has to be alert, watchful, to each situation and its nuances, and one has to respond to the situation according to the moment, not according to any ready-made answers given by others.Do you see the stupidity of humanity? Five thousand years ago, Manu gave a discipline for the Hindus, and they are still following it. Three thousand years ago Moses gave a discipline to the Jews, and they are still following it. Five thousand years ago Adinatha gave his discipline to the Jainas, and they are still following it. The whole world is being driven crazy by these disciplines! They are out of date, they should have been buried long, long ago. You are carrying corpses, and those corpses are stinking. And when you live surrounded by corpses, what kind of life can you have?I teach you the moment, and the freedom of the moment, and the responsibility of the moment. One thing may be right this moment and may become wrong the next moment. Don’t try to be consistent, otherwise you will be dead. Only dead people are consistent. Try to be alive, with all its inconsistencies, and live each moment without any reference to the past, without any reference to the future either. Live the moment in the context of the moment, and your response will be total. And that totality has beauty, and that totality is creativity. Then whatsoever you do will have a beauty of its own.The third question:Osho,I have discovered that I am just bored with myself and I feel no juice. You have said to accept ourselves, whatever we are. I am not able to accept life – knowing that I am missing something of joy inside. What to do?We hear there is a new type of tranquilizer that does not relax you – just makes you dig being tense.You try it! Try it and try it and try it again – be an American! – but not more than three times. Try it, try it, and try it again, and then stop because there is no point in being silly.You say: “I have discovered that I am just bored with myself…”This is a great discovery. Yes, I mean it! Very few people are aware that they are bored, and they are bored, utterly bored. Everybody else knows except themselves. To know that one is bored is a great beginning; now a few implications have to be understood.Man is the only animal who feels boredom; it is a great prerogative, it is part of the dignity of human beings. Have you seen any buffalo bored, any donkey bored? They are not bored. Boredom simply means that the way you are living is wrong; hence it can become a great event, the understanding that “I am bored and something has to be done, some transformation is needed.” So don’t think that it is bad that you are feeling bored – it is a good sign, a good beginning, a very auspicious beginning. But don’t stop there.Why does one feel bored? One feels bored because one has been living in dead patterns given to you by others. Renounce those patterns, come out of those patterns! Start living on your own.Only the authentic person is not bored, the pseudo person is bound to be bored. The Christian will be bored, the Jaina will be bored, the Parsi will be bored, the Communist will be bored, because they are dividing their life into two parts. Their real life remains repressed, and they start pretending an unreal life. It is unreal life that creates boredom. If you are doing the thing you are meant to do you will never be bored.The day I left my home for the university my parents – my father, my family people – all wanted me to become a scientist. There was much more future for a scientist – or at least a doctor, or an engineer. I refused absolutely. I said, “I’m going to do what I want to do, because I don’t want to live a bored life. As a scientist I may succeed – I may have respectability, money, power, prestige – but deep down I will remain bored because that is not what I ever wanted to do.”They were shocked because they could not see any prospects in studying philosophy; philosophy is the poorest subject in the universities. Reluctantly they agreed, knowing that I was wasting my future, but finally they recognized that they were wrong.It is not a question of money, power and prestige; it is a question of what intrinsically you want to do. Do it, irrespective of the results, and your boredom will disappear. You must be following others’ ideas, you must be doing things in a right way, you must be doing things as they should be done. These are the foundation-stones of boredom.The whole of humanity is bored because the person who would have been a mystic is a mathematician, the person who would have been a mathematician is a politician, the person who would have been a poet is a businessman. Everybody is somewhere else; nobody is where he should be. One has to risk. Boredom can disappear in a single moment if you are ready to risk.You ask me: “I have discovered that I am just bored with myself…” You are bored with yourself because you have not been sincere with yourself, you have not been honest with yourself. You have not been respectful of your own being.You say: “I feel no juice.” Where can you feel juice from? Juice flows only when you are doing the thing that you wanted to do, whatsoever it is.Vincent van Gogh was immensely happy just painting. Not a single painting was sold; nobody ever appreciated him, and he was dying. He was hungry because his brother was giving him only a small amount of money so that he could at least manage to survive. Four days he fasted and three days in the week he would eat. He had to fast for those four days because where was he going to get his canvases and paints and brushes from? But he was immensely happy – juices were flowing.He died when he was only thirty-three. He committed suicide – but his suicide is far better than your so-called life, because he committed suicide only when he had painted the thing that he wanted to paint.The day he finished a painting of a sunset, which was his longest desire, he wrote a letter saying, “My work is done, I am fulfilled. I am leaving this world immensely contented.” He committed suicide, but I will not call it suicide. He lived totally, he burned his life’s candle from both ends together, in tremendous intensity.You may live a hundred years, but your life will be just a dry bone, a weight, a dead weight.You say: “Osho, you have said to accept ourselves, whatever we are. I am not able to accept life – knowing that I am missing something of joy inside.” When I say accept yourself, I am not saying accept your pattern of life – don’t misunderstand me. When I say accept yourself, I am saying reject everything else – accept yourself. But you must have interpreted this in your own way. That’s how things go…The Martian landed his saucer in Manhattan and, immediately upon emerging, was approached by a panhandler. “Mister,” said the man, “can I have a dime?”The Martian asked, “What is a dime?”The panhandler thought a minute, then said, “You’re right. Can I have a quarter?”I have not said what you have understood. Reject all that has been imposed on you – I am not saying to accept it. Accept your innermost core which you have brought from the beyond, and then you will not feel that you are missing something. The moment you accept yourself without any conditions, suddenly an outburst of joy happens. Juices start flowing, life really becomes ecstatic.A certain young man’s friends thought he was dead, but he was only in a state of coma. When, just in time to avoid being buried, he showed signs of life, he was asked how it felt to be dead.“Dead!” he exclaimed. “I was not dead. I knew all the time what was going on. And I knew I was not dead, too, because my feet were cold and I was hungry.”“But how did that fact make you think you were still alive?” asked one of the curious.“Well, I knew that if I was in heaven I would not be hungry, and if I was in the other place my feet would not be cold.”One thing is certain – that you are still not dead: you are hungry, your feet are cold. Just get up and do a little jogging!A poor man, lacking education and all the social graces, fell in love with the daughter of a millionaire. She invited him home to meet her parents at their elegant mansion. The man was intimidated by the rich furnishings, the servants and all the other signs of wealth, but somehow he managed to appear relaxed – until it came to dinner time. Seated at the massive dinner table, mellow with the effects of wine, he farted loudly.The girl’s father looked up and stared at his dog which was lying at the poor man’s feet. “Rover!” he said in a menacing tone.The poor man was relieved that the blame had been put on the dog, and so a few minutes later he farted again.His host looked at the dog and again said, “Rover!” in a louder voice.A few minutes later he farted a third time. The rich man’s face wrinkled in rage. He bellowed, “Rover, get the hell out of here before he shits all over you!”There is still time – get out of the imprisonment in which you have lived up to now! It needs only a little courage, just a little courage of the gambler. There is nothing to lose, remember. You can only lose your chains – you can lose your boredom, you can lose this constant feeling inside you that something is missing. What else there is to lose? Get out of the rut, and accept your own being – against Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna. Accept yourself. Your responsibility is not toward Buddha or Zarathustra or Kabir or Nanak; your responsibility is only toward you.Be responsible – and when I use the word responsible, please remember, don’t misinterpret. I am not talking about duties, responsibilities, I am simply using the word in the literal sense: respond to reality, be response-able.You must have lived an irresponsible life, fulfilling all kinds of responsibilities which others are expecting you to. What is there to lose? You are bored – this is a good situation – you are missing the juice; what more do you need to get out of the prison? Jump out of it, don’t look back!They say: Think twice before you jump. I say: Jump first and then think as much as you want!The fourth question:Osho,Can a madman become a buddha?Only a madman can become a buddha! The so-called sane people at the most can become Buddhists but not buddhas, they can become Christians but not Christs. Only a madman…My invitation is for the mad people of the world. I am a madman’s guide to enlightenment!A group of philosophers from the Russian prison decided to escape. They had a duplicate key, so they waited for night to make their escape. At midnight one of them went to open the door, but came back after a few minutes with a long sad face.“What happened?” asked all the others.“Well, our plan is useless. We can’t escape – the crazy night-watchman has forgotten to close the door and I can’t use the key!”Philosophers cannot become buddhas! It needs guts to become a buddha.Jesus was hanging on the cross when a philosopher passed by. He stopped, looked at Jesus and asked, “What are you doing up there?”Jesus nodded his head to the left and right and said, “I’m hanging out with friends!”The philosopher continued, “Well, if you want, I could get a ladder and take you down.”“I would appreciate that,” Jesus replied.Half an hour later the philosopher came back with a ladder, climbed up to the cross, screwed the nails out of the right hand, then out of the left hand.Jesus fell headlong, screaming, “You idiot! Next time start with the feet!”The last question:Osho,I want to get lost utterly and ultimately into absolute love. What should I do?The very idea of getting lost utterly, ultimately, absolutely, is demanding too much. Be a little more human, don’t aspire to the impossible. The impossible has been driving people to unnecessary hysteria, and we have been burdened with impossible values for centuries. We have learned these words and we go on repeating these words, parrot-like, without even taking in the significance.Be human, don’t aspire for perfection in any way because all perfectionism is neurosis. Be human and accept all the frailties and limitations of human beings. Why should you want to be lost utterly? For what? What you are going to gain out of it? If it can be managed – it is good that it cannot be managed… For argument’s sake I am saying if it can be managed, you will come again saying, “Now I am feeling very lonely, utterly lost, absolutely lost, ultimately lost!” You will start hankering to go back, to have a little more spice of life.It is good to meet and merge, but why make it something ultimate? Why bring such meaningless words? Is it not enough to melt for a moment and then be back home? Then there is a rhythm: you melt, you enjoy the melting, then again you are back. It creates a rhythm, and rhythm is always richer. If you are simply dissolved forever there will be no rhythm, no music, no dance. It will be really death, not life.My whole approach is to teach you to be human. For centuries you have been told to be super-human. I rejoice in your humanness. To me, humanness is synonymous with godliness.It is perfectly beautiful to be lost once in a while and found again, so that you can lose yourself again. Create a rhythm of getting lost, of finding oneself again. Life is a music, and the music is possible only if both things continue, otherwise it will be monotonous.I cannot help you in getting lost absolutely, ultimately, utterly. I love the moment, I love the immediacy of the moment. I am very averse to words like ultimate; they are faraway words, they don’t have much meaning in them; they are pretentious words.The absolute is not of any significance; a rose flower is of far more significance. It is not absolute: in the morning it grows, by the evening it is gone. That’s its beauty – it is momentary. It is a miracle! The ultimate rose will be synthetic, plastic, it will be there forever – but because it will not be able to die it will not be alive either.In life, you have to learn this synchronicity of losing and then coming back to yourself and losing again – the closeness of love and the distance. Each distance in love again creates a longing to be close. If you are stuck together and you cannot separate, your love-life will become a nightmare.Meditate over this story; it is a beautiful parable. Only I can say it is a parable.Rosalie Mazzolli, nee Adelstein, had married a midget. For a while they were getting along all right, but one day Rosalie showed up in domestic relations court and demanded she be granted divorce from little Harry.“Surely, Mrs. Mazolli, you knew your husband was a midget when you married him?” questioned the judge. “Why are you now desirous of leaving him? Didn’t you anticipate the problems this marriage would encounter?”“Oh, Your Honor,” sobbed Rosalie, “how was I to know? Everything is wonderful, except for sex.”“Sex?” repeated the judge. “What has his being a midget got to do with sex?”“Well,” she continued tearfully, “when we’re nose to nose his toes are in it; when we’re toes to nose, his nose is in it, and when he’s in it he disappears altogether. And oh, Your Honor, I get so lonely!”There is no need to be utterly, ultimately, absolutely lost. Be relaxed – once in a while get lost and that is good. Lose yourself and find yourself again and again. This is a beautiful drama, this existence, of losing and finding. And drop all these words ultimate, absolute, perfect; these are all just words, inventions of the philosophers. Life is immediate; life is always now and here. Live it with all the frailty of a human being, with all the frailty of a rose flower, and you will come to know the greatest splendor in the moment – not in eternity. It is always now and it is always here! Don’t condemn the momentary – rejoice in it, rejoice to abandon.Enough for today.

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The Goose is Out 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Goose is Out 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I frequently hear a question being asked about the ashram…there is so much vitality here now and so much creativity with all these shows and music and fashions and crafts, as well as events happening abroad, that people are wondering what will happen when you are gone.When you leave your body will the ashram become a dead institution, and will you just become deified and forgotten?My concern is the immediate, this moment. Beyond this moment nothing exists. The only time that is existential is now, and the only space that matters is here. So I don’t care what happens in the future – neither the past nor the future have any validity.But that is the way of the mind: the mind can only think in terms of past and future; the mind cannot experience the present; it deviates from the present continuously. The mind is like a pendulum: it moves to the left, far left, or to the right, far right. Either it is leftist or rightist – and my whole approach is to be exactly in the middle.The word for the middle which Gautama the Buddha used is very beautiful: he called it majjim nikaya, “the way of the exact middle.” If you can keep the pendulum in the middle, the clock stops. The clock represents the mind – not only literally, not only as a metaphor; mind is time. Time consists of two tenses, not three. The present is not part of time; past is time, future is time. The present is the penetration of the beyond into the world of time.You can think of time as a horizontal line. A is being followed by b, b is followed by c, c is followed by d, so on and so forth: it is a linear procession. Existence is not horizontal, existence is vertical. Existence does not move in a line – from a to b, from b to c – existence moves in intensity: from a to a deeper a, from the deeper a to even deeper a. It is diving into the moment.Time conceived as past and future is the language of the mind – and the mind can only create problems – it knows no solutions. All the problems that humanity is burdened with are mind inventions. Existence is a mystery, not a problem. It has not to be solved, it has to be lived.I am living my moment. I don’t care a bit what happens later on. It may look to you very irresponsible because my criterion of responsibility is diametrically opposite to the so-called people’s idea of responsibility. I am responsible to the moment, to existence – and responsible not in the sense of being dutiful to it, but responsible in the sense that I respond totally, spontaneously. Whatsoever the situation is, I am utterly in tune with it. While I am alive I am alive, when I am dead I am dead. I don’t see any question at all.But I can understand your question. You say: “I frequently hear a question being asked about the ashram…”The people who are asking you are dead, otherwise why should they be worried about the future? They don’t come to the ashram, they don’t come to me, they have no participation with all that is going on here. They are concerned about the future! They are showing much worry about the future – what will happen? The question is: what is happening?The people who are asking such questions are stupid, too. Are they going to live forever? They are worried about me and my work as if they are going to be here forever. I am here for the moment; you are here for the moment. If a meeting is possible, something of tremendous beauty can happen. But these fools go on thinking in such cunning ways that they not only deceive others, they manage even to deceive themselves. Right now they are condemning me, right now they are criticizing me, and still they are showing great love – what will happen when I am no longer here?The moment I die, the whole world dies for me; then whatsoever happens, happens. I have not taken the responsibility for the whole of existence. Who can take it? There have been people who have tried it and they have all utterly failed.For example, Gautama the Buddha – one of the most beautiful men who has ever walked on the earth – was very much concerned that no religion should arise when he has left the world, that he should not be worshipped, that his statues should not be made. He emphasized again and again his whole life, forty-two years of constant sermonizing to people, saying, “There is no need to worship me,” and it brought just the opposite result. The more he emphasized “Don’t worship me,” the more people felt “This is the man to be worshipped.”This is the law of reverse effect. More statues of Buddha have been made in the world than of anybody else, and he was against statues. So many statues have been made of Buddha that in Urdu, Arabic, and other Mohammedan languages, the very word buddha has become synonymous with statue, with a little change: budh. Budh means the statue, but budh comes from buddha. Thousands of statues…and the man was emphasizing “Don’t make statues of me!”In fact, there was no need to emphasize it. The very emphasis was wrong. Why should he be concerned about the future? When you are no more there, the very desire to control the future according to your ideas is political. People are trying to control humanity when they are alive and they go on insisting that they would like to control humanity even when they are gone.I am not controlling anybody; I am not a politician. I am not interested at all that anybody should be controlled by me today or tomorrow.Now, the same kind of thing is being done by J. Krishnamurti: continuously emphasizing for fifty years: “I am not your guru.” But for fifty years if you are not the guru, why go on emphasizing it? There must be something in it. He is afraid; there is the fear: he knows that he will be worshipped; he knows that there are already people who think of him as their real guru. The more he freaks out, the more those fools think, “This is the real guru! Look how humble he is – no pretensions, no desire, no ambition to be holier-than-thou.” Ponder over it.Krishnamurti is doing again the same thing that Buddha did. He is not original at all about it; it is an old game. In fact, people’s minds work in a strange way. God said to Adam and Eve, “Don’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge,” and they ate it. The moment you say no, something deep in the heart of man starts becoming interested; a great curiosity arises. So I am not saying to anybody, “Please don’t worship me.”When I am not there, what can I do? Fools are fools. Whether they worship me or somebody else will not make much difference. If they want to worship me they will worship me.Have you pondered over the question: who are these people who ask you this question? They must be Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Jainas, Buddhists, Krishnamurti-ites. Who are these people? If they are so concerned about me, have they dropped Krishna? Have they dropped Mohammed? Have they dropped Buddha? If they are honest and sincere they would have dropped all the religions. But they go on carrying their Bibles, their Zendavestas, their Vedas, their Mahaviras, their Zarathustras, and still they are concerned only about me. What are their institutions? What is Hinduism? or Islam? or Jainism? or Communism for that matter?Every institution is bound to be dead, only a man is alive. No institutions are ever alive. How can an institution be alive? By its very nature, it is going to be dead.So next time these people ask you the question, you ask them: who are you? Do you belong to any institution, to any religion, to any theology, to any philosophy? If you belong, then you don’t have the right to ask the question. And if you don’t belong, then you will not need to ask the question: you will see the point that intelligent people will never fall for dead institutions. The unintelligent are bound to live in institutions – there is no way you can change the label. You are living in a thousand and one kinds of institutions.What is marriage? – an institution. Only insane people live in institutions. Marriage is dead. What is your family, and what is your nation, and what is your race? – all institutions. This is a strange thing: people go on asking these questions without ever thinking that those questions are pointing toward themselves.As far as I am concerned, I am not at all interested in the next moment. Even if this sentence remains incomplete, I will not make any effort to complete it. I will not even put a full point to it. I have no desire to dominate, but I cannot go on saying to people, “Don’t worship me,” because that is the way to create worship.People are to be understood in their whole insane mechanisms. For example, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor…for theirs is the Kingdom of God.” Now, many, down these two thousand years have tried to be poor for the simple reason and motive so that they can attain to the Kingdom of God. Do you see the contradiction? “Blessed are the poor…for theirs is the Kingdom of God.” What kind of poverty is this if it brings the Kingdom of God to you? Then this is a good incentive, a great motivation for greed. If Jesus was really right, he should have only said this, “Blessed are the poor because they are poor.” Why make this statement: “…for theirs is the Kingdom of God”? Everybody wants to be of the Kingdom of God; everybody wants to possess eternal treasures. If one has to be poor and sacrifice for that, it is worth it.People have been doing this all along. It is time that man start looking more clearly, more transparently – what has been told to him and what he has done.People always misunderstand. When the master is alive they will not come to him, because when the master is alive they cannot be allowed to misunderstand. They will come to him only when he is no longer there, because a dead master can be controlled, manipulated.Just a few days ago a so-called Jaina saint, Kanjiswami, died. He was worshipped by the Jainas so much that Jainas have been declaring that in the next circle of existence, in the next creation, he will be the first teerthankara, the first founder of Jainism, again.When he died – I have seen the pictures, somebody sent me the pictures – the Jainas were trying to fix his posture, because a teerthankara, or a would-be teerthankara, should die in the lotus posture. They must have broken some of his bones. At least a dozen people were forcing his dead body into a certain yoga posture. Now, you cannot do this when a man is alive – he will go through a primal scream!While he was alive he used to wear clothes. Now according to the Jainas, one attains to the ultimate freedom only when he dies naked. So they removed the clothes. Now, the corpse cannot prevent this. Clothes were removed, a lotus posture was fixed, and the followers are happy. This goes on happening.A maid who seemed to enjoy her work gave notice one day without warning.“Why do you wish to leave?” the lady of the house asked her. “Is anything wrong?”“I just can’t stand the suspense in this house a minute more,” the maid replied.“Suspense? What do you mean?”“It's the sign over my bed. It says: ‘Watch ye, for ye know not when the master cometh.’”The moment the master is gone, you have only his words. Words can be manipulated, words can be interpreted, words can be colored and painted according to your prejudices. As far as I am concerned, it will be impossible – for many reasons it will be impossible.First, I am a man who is consistently inconsistent. It will not be possible to make a dogma out of my words; anybody trying to make a creed or dogma out of my words will go nuts! You can make a dogma out of Mahavira – he is a very consistent man, very logical. You can make a philosophy out of Buddha – he is very mathematical. You can make a philosophy out of Krishnamurti – for fifty years he has been simply repeating the same thing again and again; you cannot find a single inconsistency in him. On the one hand he says “I am not your master, your guru. Don’t depend on me.” But in a subtle way he is creating the whole philosophy – which is so consistent, so utterly consistent – that anybody would like to be imprisoned in it, it is so sane.It is impossible with me: I live in the moment, and whatsoever I am saying right now is true only for this moment. I have no reference with my past, and I don’t think of the future at all. So my statements are atomic; they are not part of a system. You can make a dead institution only when a philosophy is very systematic, when there are no flaws, when no fault can be found in it, when all doubts are solved, all questions dissolved and you are given a ready-made answer to everything in life.I am so inconsistent that it is impossible to create a dead institution around me, because a dead institution will need an infrastructure of a dead philosophy. I am not teaching you any doctrine, I am not giving you any principles. On the contrary, I am trying to take away all the philosophies that you have carried all along. I am destroying your ideologies, creeds, cults, dogmas – I am not replacing them with anything else. My process is of pure deconditioning. I am not trying to recondition you. I will leave you open.Hence, you can see here, all my sannyasins are unique individuals. There is no certain pattern into which they have to fit themselves. There is no “should,” no “should not”; there is no rigid structure, but only a liquidity. I am not giving you Ten Commandments; I am not giving you detailed information about how to live, because I believe in the individual and the individual’s dignity and his freedom. I am sharing my vision – that is my joy – but it is not being shared in order that you should try to live up to it.Krishnamurti goes on saying, “Don’t follow me. Don’t imitate me.” On the other hand, when people don’t follow him he becomes very irritated, annoyed. It is a little subtle. For example, he says, “Don’t follow me,” and people follow him. Then he becomes annoyed. If he is truly sincere, then you can say “Don’t follow me,” but if people want to follow you, who are you to prevent them? You have said your thing, now it is up to them to do or not to do. You are not their master; if they want to follow you, you cannot prevent them. If you prevent them, that means you are forcing them to follow your idea of not following.He becomes very annoyed…Just a few days ago he was in Mumbai, and I told my sannyasins, “Wherever he is, go there, and sit in the front rows.” And the moment he saw the orange people he became unenlightened immediately, he started shouting!Now, why this annoyance? There must be some deep desire to control. Now who are you to tell somebody not to wear orange? If somebody wants to wear orange, then it is his choice. A subtle strategy, a very indirect strategy to manipulate, to dominate, to possess…I am simply sharing my vision, my joy. I am enjoying it, and whosoever wants to enjoy with me is welcome. Naturally, when I am gone there may be a few fools who will try to figure it out, to make a system, although I am making it almost impossible. But fools are fools. They can try to do the impossible.Bertrand Russell has said that it is a strange fact of history that not a single religion has been founded by a man who had a sense of humor. In fact, to have a sense of humor and to create a religion is contradictory. Religions are created by sad people – very long faces, almost dead. Bertrand Russell is no longer alive, otherwise I would have told him, “Then come and see.”It may not have been so in the past, and I agree with him because Mahavira was serious, Jesus was serious, Mohammed was serious, Shankaracharya was serious… And Russell seems to be right that these sad people have created the dead institutions of all the religions.But here something totally new is happening. I am not trying to create a religion; I cannot do it, because the very idea of creating a religion is ugly. I am releasing a sense of humor in you, a deep laughter in you. To me laughter is more sacred than prayer, dancing more spiritual than chanting mantras, loving existence far more cosmic than going to a church or to a temple. Becoming utterly nobody, a pure nothingness, is far more significant than becoming a saint. Innocence, a sense of humor, a joyous participation in life…you cannot create a dead institution around such tremendously alive experiences. A dead institution needs something dead to be made of. It is made out of the corpses of your saints. My whole approach is nonserious – sincere, but nonserious.A salesman stopped at a small-town hotel and had difficulty getting a room.He was about to leave when the clerk said, “I think I may be able to put you up. There are two beds up in room ten and one is occupied by a woman. But there is a screen around her bed and she is sleeping soundly. Just go to your bed quietly and everything will be fine.”The offer was quickly accepted. About twenty minutes later the salesman returned, greatly excited.“Good heavens!” he cried. “The woman in the other bed is dead!”“I know that,” said the clerk, “but how the hell did you find out?”People are curious, very curious.You say: “I frequently hear a question being asked about the ashram… there is so much vitality here now and so much creativity with all these shows and music and fashions and crafts, as well as events happening abroad, that people are wondering what will happen when you are gone.”Tell those fools to come here when the thing is alive. When you see a beautiful rose flower you don’t start thinking, “What will happen when the rose flower will wither away by evening? Its petals will fall and go back to the earth, to their original source – what will happen then?” You don’t bother about it. You rejoice in the flower, you dance with the flower in the wind, in the rain, in the sun. You see a bird on the wing, soaring high toward the sky, toward the stars. You don’t think, “What will happen when the bird is dead?” You enjoy it.And, strangely, these are the people who create dead institutions, because when the bird is alive and singing and soaring high they are afraid to come close. When the bird is dead then they can make a beautiful golden cage – a temple, a synagogue, a church – and then they can worship. The dead bird is not dangerous.These are the same people who are wondering what will happen who will create a dead institution. My people cannot create a dead institution – it is impossible. Those who have been in communion with me will have learned one thing absolutely, categorically: that life cannot be confined into institutions, and the moment you try to confine it into institutions you destroy it. So while I am alive they will celebrate. When I am gone they will still celebrate. They will celebrate my life, they will celebrate my death, and they will remain alive.Remember, religions are created by guilty people, and I am not creating any guilt here.There are certain mechanisms… If Jesus was not crucified, there would have been no Christianity at all. The real founder of Christianity is not Jesus Christ but the high priest of Jerusalem, the rabbi, and Pontius Pilate. These two persons, in conspiracy with Judas, created Christianity. This is the real “holy trinity”; Jesus Christ is just an excuse.Crucify a man like Jesus and then you will never be able to forgive yourself, you will feel guilty. Your hands will look red with the blood of Jesus. Now, what should be done to remove those wounds, those guilt feelings? The only way is to move to the opposite: worship.I am not sacrificing, hence there is no possibility of worshiping me. I am living joyously. Nobody need feel guilty for me, there is no reason at all. If I start living naked, if I start fasting, if I start moving barefoot on the roads, if I start begging for my food then I will create guilt, then I will create in you a subtle mechanism. Something will be triggered in you and finally you will find consolation only in worshiping me.Mahavira is worshipped because he moved naked; tortured himself, fasted. Buddha is worshipped because he was a king, renounced all his pleasures. I have not renounced anything. In fact, I was born a poor man and I live like a king. There is no need to worship me, because there is no need to compensate me. I am not creating any guilt in anybody. I am not torturing myself.You can easily forgive yourself. There is no point in going on carrying guilt.The whole idea of what will happen in the future is political. The politician is always concerned with the future.A great politician had been bitten by a dog but did not give it much thought until he noticed that the wound was taking a remarkably long time to heal. Finally he consulted a doctor who took one look at it and ordered the dog brought in. Just as he had suspected, the dog had rabies. Since it was too late to give the patient serum, the doctor felt he had to prepare him for the worst.The politician sat down at the doctor’s desk and began to write. His physician tried to comfort him. “Perhaps it won’t be so bad,” he said. “You need not make out your will right now.”“I’m not making any will,” replied the politician. “I’m just writing out a list of people I’m going to bite!”I am not interested in the future at all. This moment is too much, too overwhelming. I am rejoicing in it. This is my way of life: to live moment to moment. I am not a prophet, I have not come here to determine the whole course of humanity in the future – that kind of bullshit does not appeal to me at all. Who am I to decide the whole course of humanity in the future? I am living my moment joyously; that’s enough. And the people who will be coming, they will find their own ways to live. To suffer or to rejoice – it all depends on their intelligence.I cannot determine anything, but my way of working is such that it is impossible to create a philosophy, a dogma, a creed, a church, absolutely impossible.Eighty-five-year-old Will Jones hobbled down to the local bar to have a cold one and shoot the breeze with his friends. Mr. Jones was the talk of the town as he had recently married a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl. Several of the boys bought the old man a drink in an effort to get him to tell of his wedding night. Sure enough the old rascal fell right into their plans.“My youngest son carried me in and lifted me on the bed with my young bride. We spent the night together and then my three other sons carried me off the bed.”The small circle of men scratched their heads and asked the old boy why it took his three other sons to take him off, when it only took his youngest boy to put him on.Proudly he replied, “I fought them.”Live each moment totally.You say to me, : “There is so much vitality here now…” The vitality is because we are living herenow, our whole vision is of herenow. We don’t look beyond that because beyond that nothing exists; whatsoever comes is always now.Time is an invention, now is a reality. So much creativity is happening for the simple reason that we have withdrawn from past and future.Your whole energy remains blocked either in the past or in the future. When you withdraw all your energy from the past and the future a tremendous explosion happens. That explosion is creativity. This is only the beginning – every day, every moment, things are becoming intenser, more passionate. But we are not trying in any way to control the future.I am not a prophet, neither I am a messiah. To me, the claims of Jesus Christ and people like that look childish: that they have come to deliver the whole of humanity from their sins. Krishna says in Gita, “Whenever religion will be lost, I will come back.” To me, this is all crap. There is no need for anybody to come back; the people who will be here will take care of themselves.I am preparing my people to live joyously, ecstatically. So when I am not here it won’t make any difference to them. They will still live in the same way – maybe my death will bring them more intensity.Death is always a beautiful background to make your life more intense. My ashram is never going to become a dead institution. And if it becomes so, it won’t be my ashram.You ask me, “When you leave your body will the ashram become a dead institution, and will you just become deified and forgotten?”I am not leaving anything to anybody. I have declared myself bhagwan. I am not leaving anything to anybody. Why should I leave it to anybody? I know I am the Blessed One – and only I can know that, how can anybody else know it? I am trying to seduce my people to understand this immensity: that they are also the Blessed Ones. It is impossible to deify me – I have already done it! What else is there left for you? I don’t depend on anybody.Before I leave the world, one thing certainly I am going to do – it is private, so please don’t tell it to anybody else… Before I leave the world, I am going to declare all of my sannyasins the Blessed Ones. Thousands of bhagwans all over the world! There will be no need to make any special nook and corner for me: I will be dissolved in my people. Just as you can taste the sea from any place and it is salty, you will taste any of my sannyasins and you will find the same taste: the taste of bhagwan, the taste of the Blessed One.I am waiting for the right moment.Once the new commune is established, all my sannyasins will be called bhagwans. Then it will be really a “bhagwan movement”!The second question:Osho,If life is so beautiful, then what is the point of being enlightened and not being reborn?There is no point at all. That’s what I have been telling to you, but you don’t listen. Your question shows that you have not listened.The question begins: “If life is so beautiful…” If’s and but’s won’t do. If life is beautiful then you need not be enlightened. Life is beautiful, then there is no need to be enlightened.Are you a Pollack or something?A lady was looking in a bookstall for a gift for a sick Pollack friend.When asked if she would like something religious, she replied, “Oh, no. My Pollack friend is well on the way to recovery!”If you can drop that if, you will be on the way to recovery. But that if is there…I can see it sitting on you like a huge mountain.I don’t see any point in being enlightened. Things are perfectly beautiful as they are. But if you start with a hypothetical question then you have not tasted life. Drop the if and you are enlightened. There is not much in enlightenment. It is a simple recognition that “I have been unnecessarily chasing my own tail.” The day you get it you stop chasing your tail. You just simply sit in the sun and take a sunbath.A Pollack landowner had been wondering for quite a while about the quietness of his barnyard during the mid-day breaks. One day he decided to find out what was behind it all, and he stepped out discreetly and saw his farmhand crossing the yard with open pants and disappearing into the barn. The landowner called his servant back and asked him what was going on inside the barn.“Well, sir, we’ve got quite a jolly game going on in there. The girls hide their heads in the hay and then have to guess who did it!”“That sounds like fun,” replies the Pollack landowner. “Can I join you?”“I guess so,” says the farmhand. “Your wife has been at it for six weeks already!”You can join, but drop the if. Those who have dropped the if, they have already joined the game. The Buddhas and the Krishnas and the Zarathustras – they have joined the game just by dropping the if.It is very difficult to drop if’s and but’s – the mind consists of them; these are the bricks of the mind. And all minds are Polack, remember.The Pollack Pope was finally persuaded by his Cardinals to find a woman, so that he could better understand the problems of mankind.“Well-a, okay,” said the Pollack Pope, “but-a she’s-a gotta have certain qualifications. First-a, she’s-a gotta be blind, so she cannot see-a what-a I am-a doing to her. Second-a, she’s-a gotta be deaf, so she cannot hear-a what I say-a. And third-a, she’s-a gotta have-a the biggest tits-a in Italy!”People are trying to play the game of life but with many conditions, and those conditions prevent them.Life is a beautiful game if you don’t have any conditions for it. If you can simply plunge into it with no if’s, with no but’s; then there is no need for enlightenment.What is actually meant by enlightenment? – a relaxed, restful approach to life, a deep synchronicity with existence, an egoless communion with the whole.A Pollack stripper goes to a theater manager for an audition. Before beginning her performance, she puts a big red apple in the middle of the stage and to the accompaniment of soft sexy music, she begins her number.The music comes to a crescendo…she is almost naked. With a crash of cymbals and a roll of drums, to the gaping eyes of the theater manager, she leaps across the stage, does three impressive pirouettes and with one final crash of the drums dives down in the splits and lands on top of the big red apple.When she gets up to bow, the apple has disappeared.After a moment of deathly hush, the theater manager applauds her ecstatically.“You will become famous all over the world. I will book you for the best theaters in Tokyo, London, Hamburg, New York and Paris.”“No! Paris no!” replies the stripper in a worried tone.“Why not Paris?” asks the manager. “It’s one of the best cities in the world for your number.”“No, not Paris! In Paris my mother does this number with a watermelon!”The third question:Osho,What makes the fish jump out of the water?Stephen Lyons, it is a strange question…it is fishy! Have you been a fish in your past life, or are you planning to be born as a fish in the future?I don’t know much about the fish and their minds, but I guess that they must be just like you: getting tired of the same ocean, the same water, the obvious. They must be jumping out of the water just to see what is beyond. They must be in search of enlightenment, nirvana. Or perhaps, trying to get out of the known, to have some taste of the unknown.The Indian mythology is that the first incarnation of God happened in the form of a fish. That seems to be very relevant, because that’s what biologists say: that life must have started in the ocean as a fish.Then compare… Even the fish is curious, inquiring. And there are millions of men who are not curious at all, not inquiring at all, who are living with stuffed ideas – borrowed rubbish from others – who are not explorers. The fish jumping out of the water shows you that you have fallen even below that.A Christian remains a Christian, a Hindu remains a Hindu, a Mohammedan remains a Mohammedan – not only that, they brag. They are far worse than the most primitive form of life, the fish. One should inquire, one should explore. It is accidental that you are born a Hindu or a Mohammedan; it is not your destiny. Explore, jump out of the water, look around. There are millions of possibilities available, and the more you explore the more you are. The more you go into the unknown the more integrated you become. The challenge of the unknown is the most centering phenomenon in life.Perhaps the fishes are jumping out of water just to listen to a few of my jokes.Mrs. Cantor suspected her husband of playing around with the maid.Having to spend a few days with her sick mother, she told her small son, Harvey, to keep an eye on Poppa and the maid.As soon as she returned she asked, “Harvey, did anything happen?”“Well,” said the boy, “Poppa and the maid went into the bedroom and took off their clothes and…”“Stop! Stop!” shouted Mrs. Cantor. “We will wait until Poppa comes home.”Poppa was met at the door by his irate wife, cringing maid and confused son. “Harvey, tell me what happened with Poppa and the maid,” stormed Mrs. Cantor.“As I told you, Ma,” said Harvey, “Poppa and the maid went into the bedroom and took off their clothes.”“Yes! Yes! Go on, Harvey,” said Mrs. Cantor impatiently, “what did they do then?”Replied Harvey, “Why, Mother, they did the same thing you and Uncle Bernie did when Poppa was in Chicago.”So, when you see again a fish jumping out of the water, please tell a joke.A pretty girl walked up to a tall handsome man.“Ohhh,” she sighed, “you have such big muscular arms!”“Yes,” he responded, making a fist with one hand. He then pointed with the other hand to his muscles and said, “Eight inches! I measured them this morning.”“Ohhh,” said the girl with admiration, “and you have such a big beautiful chest!”The man laughed, stretched his arms in the air, and said, “Thirty-five inches! I measured it this morning.”The girl was amazed. She looked down at him, pointed her finger at his cock and asked, “How long?”“Two inches,” he replied.“Only?” the girl asked disappointed.The he-man took a deep breath, looked at the girl and said, “Measured from the floor, of course!”Can you make a religion out of my jokes? Can you make a dead institution out of my jokes? It is impossible.The last question:Osho,There is no more bottle, no more you, no more I, only this drunken joy that makes my toes curl in ecstasy. But, Osho, what was the joke?The ultimate joke, the only joke…The official, Riko, once asked Nansen to explain to him the old problem of the goose in the bottle.“If a man puts a gosling into a bottle,” said Riko, “and feeds him until he is full-grown, how can the man get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle?”Nansen gave a clap with his hands and shouted, “Riko!”“Yes, Master,” said the official with a start.“See,” said Nansen, “the goose is out.”This is the only ultimate joke in existence. You are enlightened! You are buddhas, pretending not to be, pretending to be somebody else. And my whole work here is to expose you.The goose is out! You will make every effort to put it back into the bottle, because once the goose is out then you don’t have any problems. Man knows only how to live with problems, he does not know how to live without problems, so he goes on putting the goose back into the bottle.There is a beautiful poem of Rabindranath Tagore.He says: I was searching for God for thousands of lives. I saw him…sometimes far away, close to a distant star. I rushed on. By the time I reached that place he had gone further ahead. It went on and on. Finally I arrived at a door, and on the door there was a signboard: “This is the house where God lives” – Lao Tzu House!Rabindranath says, “I became very worried for the first time. I became very troubled. Trembling, I went up the stairs. I was just going to knock on the door and suddenly, like a flash, I saw the whole point. If I knock on the door and God opens the door, then what? Then everything is finished – my journeys, my pilgrimages, my great adventures, my philosophy, my poetry, all my longings of the heart – all is finished! It will be suicide.“Seeing the point so crystal clear,” Rabindranath says, “I removed my shoes from my feet, because getting back down the stairs may create some noise – he may open the door! Then what? And since the moment I reached the bottom of the steps I have not looked back. I have been running and running for thousands of years. I am still searching for God, although now I know where he lives. So I only have to avoid Lao Tzu House, and I can go on searching everywhere else for him. There is no fear…but I have to avoid that house. That house haunts me; I remember it perfectly. If by chance accidentally I enter into that house, then all is finished.”It is a beautiful insight.Man lives in problems; man lives in misery. To live without problems, to live without misery, needs real courage.I have lived without any problems for twenty-five years, and I know it is a kind of suicide. I simply go on sitting in my room doing nothing. There is nothing to do!If you can allow so much silence to penetrate your very being, only then you will be able to leave the goose out of the bottle. Otherwise, for a moment maybe…again you will push the goose back into the bottle. That gives you an occupation; keeps you occupied, keeps you concerned, worried, anxious. The moment there are no problems, there is no mind. The moment there are no problems, there is no ego. The ego and the mind can exist only in the turmoil of problems.As I see it, man creates problems to nourish his ego. If there are no real problems he will invent them. He is bound to invent them, otherwise his mind cannot function anymore.This is my simple declaration: that all is divine. The trees and the rocks and the stones and the mountains and the stars – all are divine. The goose has never been in the bottle. It is only man who cannot live without problems who forces the goose into the bottle; and then he starts asking how to get it out. Then he makes impossible conditions: first, the bottle should not be broken, then the goose should not be killed.Now the goose is big, it is filling the whole bottle. It is impossible to fulfill the conditions. Either the bottle has to be broken – that is not allowed; or the goose has to be killed – that is not allowed. You have to bring the goose out without killing it and without destroying the bottle. That is not possible, in the very nature of things. Aes dhammo sanantano: this is how life’s law is, it is not possible. So man remains happy because it is not possible, so he can go on carrying the bottle.I see you carrying the bottle with the goose… But the truth is that the bottle is only your imagination, fantasy, just made of the same stuff dreams are made of.This is the most difficult thing for humanity to accept. Hence, so much opposition to me – because I am telling you that you are gods, that you are buddhas, that there is no other god than you. That is the most difficult thing to accept. You would like to be a sinner, you would like to be guilty, you would like to be thrown into hell; but you cannot accept that you are a buddha, the awakened one, because then all problems are solved. And when problems are solved, you start disappearing. And to disappear into the whole is the only thing worth doing, is the only thing of any significance.What I am telling to you is not a teaching. This place is a device – this is a buddhafield. I have to take away things which you don’t have, and I have to give you things which you already have. You need not be grateful to me at all, because I am not giving you anything new. I am simply helping you to remember. You have forgotten the language of your being.I have come to recognize it: I have remembered myself. And since the day I remembered myself I have been in a strange situation: I feel compassion for you, and deep down I also giggle at you, because you are not really in trouble. You don’t need compassion, you need hammering! You need to be hit hard on the head! Your suffering is bogus. Ecstasy is your very nature.You are truth, you are love; you are bliss, you are freedom.Enough for today.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why am I such a beggar for attention? What can I do about it?It is one of the human weaknesses, one of the deep-rooted frailties, to seek attention.The reason one seeks attention is because one does not know oneself. It is only in other people’s eyes one can see his face, in their opinions he can find his personality. What they say matters immensely. If they neglect him, ignore him, he feels lost. If you pass by and nobody takes any attention, you will start losing what you have put together – your personality. It is something that you have put together. You have not discovered it, it is not natural. It is very artificial and very arbitrary.It is not only you who is a beggar for attention; almost everybody is. And the situation cannot change until you discover your authentic self – which does not depend on anybody’s opinion, attention, criticism, indifference, which does not have anything to do with anybody else. Because very few people have been able to discover their reality, the whole world is full of beggars.Deep down you are all trying to find attention; it is nourishment for your personality. Even if people condemn you, criticize you, are against you, that is acceptable, at least they are paying attention to you; if they are friendly, respectful, of course that is far better, but you cannot survive as a personality without some kind of attention. It can be negative, it can be positive, it doesn’t matter. People must say something about you; respectful or disrespectful, both fulfill the same purpose.I would like you to think about the word respect. It does not mean honor, as it is said in all the dictionaries without exception. Respect simply means looking again, re-spect. When you are passing by on the road, somebody looks back again, you have caught his eye – you are somebody. Because respect gives you the idea of being somebody special, you can do anything stupid just to get attention.In all the ages people have tried in a thousand and one ways to get attention. Those ways are not necessarily rational – for example, the punks in the West. What are they really wanting by cutting their hair in strange and weird ways, and then painting it with different psychedelic colors? What are they wanting? They are beggars. You should not be angry with them because that is what they want. You should not condemn them because that is what they want. Their parents should not criticize them because that is what they want. They cannot survive without people paying attention to them.People have done all kinds of things you may not believe in the past. People have remained naked…. What was the need for Mahavira or Diogenes to be naked? It is no longer natural for man to be naked in all the seasons; he lost that capacity long ago. All animals are naked, but they have a natural immunity. When it is winter their hair grows, when it is hot summer their hair falls. Nature has given them a protection.The same protection was available to man too, but man is intelligent and can improve on nature. He found ways to cover his body according to the seasons. Naturally his body lost the natural growth of hairs. Now, to be naked…suddenly your body cannot create the mechanism to protect you.I know Mahavira or Diogenes are unique individuals, but I think they were a little uncertain of their uniqueness. They fulfilled that suspicion, that missing gap, by being naked, because you cannot avoid giving attention to a naked person in a world where everybody is wearing clothes. The naked person stands aloof. You cannot avoid…it is almost irresistible to look at him, to ask, “What is the matter?”But their nakedness became something spiritual; people started being respectful just because they were naked. Now, nakedness is not a quality or any qualification or any creativity; all the animals, all the birds, all the trees are naked.There are still Jaina monks in India, not more than twenty. They used to be in thousands, but now to find that many stupid people is a little difficult. One Jaina monk dies and is not replaced, so their number goes on falling. Only twenty people all over India are still naked – and I have seen many of them; they don’t show any sign of intelligence, they don’t show any quality of silence, they don’t show any joy. Their faces are sad, dull, sleepy. They are suffering, they are torturing themselves, just for the simple reason that it brings the attention of the people.Anything, howsoever stupid, is possible for man if it can bring attention to him.In Russia before the revolution there was a Christian sect which used to cut their genitals publicly on a particular day each year – and they had thousands of followers. Their only qualification for being spiritual was that they had cut their genitals. When the day arrived, they would gather in a church courtyard and they would cut their genitals and pile them up. And thousands of people would come to see this stupidity.The women were not left behind…of course they were in a difficulty because they don’t have hanging genitals to cut; their genitals are inwards. They started cutting their breasts – they were not ready to be left behind. It was such a messy and bloody affair, but people were touching their feet, worshipping them, and all that they have done is just an ugly act against nature and against themselves.What is significant if a man goes on a fast? Mahatma Gandhi used the strategy his whole life: It was nothing but catching the attention of the whole nation. And if he was going to fast unto death, the whole world’s attention was immediately caught. Otherwise there is no spirituality in fasting: millions die starving. Millions are going to die in the coming ten, twelve years from starvation. Nobody will give any honor or respect to them. Why? Because their starvation is inevitable. They are not starving willfully but because they don’t have food; they are simply poor and starving people.But Mahatma Gandhi had everything available to him, although he lived like a poor man. One of his intimate followers, a very intelligent woman, Sarojini Naidu – has a statement on record that to keep Mahatma Gandhi poor they had to spend treasures on him. It was not a simple poverty, it was a managed show.He would not drink the milk from a buffalo because it is rich, rich with vitamin A and other vitamins. He would not drink the milk of a cow because that too is rich, and poor people cannot afford it. He would drink only the milk of a goat, because that is the cheapest animal and poor people can afford it. But you will be surprised: his goat was being washed twice a day with Lux toilet soap! His goat’s food consisted of the richest nourishment that any rich man may feel jealous of. It is such an insane world! The goat was given the milk of a cow to drink. Cashew nuts, apples and other nourishing fruits were her only food; she was not living on grass. Her daily food in those old days cost ten rupees per day; that ten rupees per day in those days was enough for a man to live for a whole month.And Gandhi was traveling third class. Naturally, he was attracting attention – a great man is traveling third class! But nobody saw that the third class compartment, which could have carried sixty people at least, was carrying only a single man; it is far more costly than the air-conditioned compartment. But it attracted attention.He started using clothes just like the farmers of India – they are eighty percent of the people in the country. Because he was using farmer’s clothes – the upper body is naked, only the lower body has a small piece of cloth to wrap around – the poor people of this country became immensely respectful and started calling him Mahatma, the great soul.But I have been looking into his life as deeply as possible. I don’t find any great soul; I have not found even a little soul – just pure politics in the name of religion. Knowing perfectly well that India can be impressed only by religion, he was doing devotional songs every day in the morning and in the evening, but it was all to attract attention.Attention gives you tremendous nourishment for the ego. And there are instances…his secretary – private secretary, Mahadeo Desai – has written a whole diary of the many years that he spent with Mahatma Gandhi as his secretary. Many times there are mentions about J. Krishnamurti, with such sarcastic remarks that one cannot believe that Mahatma Gandhi had any insight into meditation or awareness: otherwise he cannot be sarcastic.You can criticize, but criticism needs understanding. You can say Krishnamurti is not right, but then you have to give evidence – on what grounds? But just to laugh and giggle when Krishnamurti’s name was mentioned…Krishnamurti was saying, “I am the awakened one; you also have the capacity to be an awakened one,” and that was making Mahatma Gandhi laugh sarcastically.Meher Baba, another man of the same caliber as J. Krishnamurti, gave a telegram to Mahatma Gandhi saying, “You have been in search of God, you have written your autobiography and titled it Experiments with Truth, but you don’t know anything of meditation, of silence. If you are really interested I can come to you and I can make you aware of the dimension of meditation.” And the whole gang that was around Mahatma Gandhi laughed – “This fellow thinks that he is God himself.” And Mahatma Gandhi replied, “I will do my own search; you need not trouble to come here.”A third time it happened. One man of the name Kedarnath was of the same caliber as J. Krishnamurti, but was not world known. He was not a man of words but a man of silence, peace. He stayed in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, and soon the pendulum started moving towards him. The disciples of Mahatma Gandhi by and by started deserting him. In his morning devotional songs, the number of people was declining: they were going to sit in silence with Kedernath.Finally it became such a situation: the ashram was Mahatma Gandhi’s, Kedarnath was just a guest, but he captured almost all Gandhi’s disciples. Gandhi was left alone, but his ego would not allow him to go and sit where all his disciples were sitting – in silence with Kedarnath. It was with great humanity and compassion that Kedarnath left the ashram in the middle of the night just to avoid a clash, because now it was becoming clear that Mahatma Gandhi had lost control of his own disciples. Kedarnath did not want to create any conflict.Sri Aurobindo had a certain clarity. He was not an enlightened man of the category of J. Krishnamurti or Meher Baba, but he was very close. Perhaps one life more and he will be enlightened; he was just on the border line. He declared, “India will become free, will attain freedom on my birthday” – and it actually happened. The fifteenth of August is Sri Aurobindo’s birthday, and he had declared it thirty years before. People had completely forgotten about his declaration, but India became free on the fifteenth of August.Sri Aurobindo sent a message to Mahatma Gandhi, “Now that the country is free, you need a complete program for its progress, because it is one thing to fight for freedom and it is another thing after attaining the freedom to create a nation; tremendous responsibility falls on your shoulders.”And the reply that Mahatma Gandhi gave was again simply sarcastic: “You have left the world; you live in your ashram. You don’t have to worry about what happens to freedom and what we are going to do; that is our business. You have left it, you don’t have to interfere.”Now a man like Sri Aurobindo could have given insight, but that insight was not accepted – and it shows. In those forty years that have passed since freedom, India has become worse every day. It has no program; its population has doubled, more than doubled. Its poverty has doubled – the poverty grows according to the population. By the end of this century, India will be for the first time in the whole history of mankind, of millions of years, the most densely populated country. Up to now, China has been the first. So only one achievement seems to have come out of forty years of freedom: people have produced more and more children.By the end of this century, just thirteen years away, India will have one billion people in the country. When it became free it had only four hundred million people. It seems that each year there is an increase of one million people – but no technology is growing, no science is growing, no new methods are being used. And this population growth goes on making the country poorer and poorer. India is living on loans from the rich countries like America, and that is a new kind of slavery, economic slavery.The days of political slavery are past, because it was unnecessary…. It is a similar case: the days of slaves are past, and the days of servants have come in because the slave was a great responsibility to the slave owner. He had to take care of the slave’s health, he had to take care of his body, food, clothes, his medicine, because he was an investment. He has purchased the man, and if he dies his whole investment is gone.Slavery disappeared not because slaves revolted against it; there is no instance of slaves revolting. Slavery died because the people who were enslaving other people found better ways – servants. You are not purchased; hence it is not an investment. If you die, you die; it is not a loss to the owner. He pays you, but he has no concern for your body, for your health, for your family. This was far better.The same has happened in the world of freedom. The British Empire disappeared, all other empires have disappeared, because political slavery became costly, very costly. It was the responsibility of the rulers to feed people, at least.The moment Britain saw that India is growing so fast in population that it will be impossible to feed the people, and the whole responsibility will be on the head of Britain, Atlee sent to Mountbatten an urgent message: “You finish the whole thing before 1948, and if you can do it earlier I will praise you. Whatever way has to be found, be quick, and let them be free. Because then the whole responsibility will be on their own heads. They cannot complain, ‘Britain is exploiting us; that’s why we are poor.’”Now nobody is exploiting you, and your poverty has grown much greater than it has ever been under slavery.Politicians can pretend to be religious if religion is attractive. Because they need attention their whole personality is false. It depends on how many people are following them; it depends on the number of people who are attentive to them. It is a politics of numbers.The Catholic pope is against birth control, against abortion, not because he is compassionate, saying, “This is absolute cruelty and violence,” not because he is life-affirmative – the whole Catholic attitude is life-negative, it is against life. Then why this insistence that there should be no birth control and no abortion? Because this is the only way to increase the number of Catholics, and this is the only way to make other people so poor that they have to come under the fold of the Catholic empire.Now that there are so many orphans in India, Catholics have a good opportunity. And one wonders…a woman like Mother Teresa is awarded a Nobel prize, is awarded many doctorates in India by Indian universities, is awarded prizes by the Indian government, all because she is taking care of orphans. But nobody thinks that that care simply means converting those orphans into Catholics. Naturally Mother Teresa cannot be in favor of birth control – from where will she get the orphans?Christianity cannot be in favor of a world which is rich. The scientists are declaring continually that we have come to such a point of technological progress that now there is no need for anybody to be hungry, to be starving or dying because of shortage of food. It has never before been possible, but now scientists are saying that we can feed five billion people very easily, we can feed even more – but those voices are silenced. No politician pays any attention, because politicians are also interested in having a big following.In India Mohammedans will not be ready to accept that you should not marry four women…which is simply a human matter. But they have made it a point that it is a religious matter. I cannot understand how it is religious to marry four women. And if it is religious to marry four, then it will be doubly religious to marry eight. Perhaps that’s why Mohammed himself married nine women. The reality is that four women can produce four children in the year; vice-versa will not help. One woman marrying four men will still produce one child, not four children. But one man marrying a number of women can produce more children.You will be surprised to know that India has already been divided in the name of religion, and Mohammedans have taken Pakistan on one side, and Bangladesh on another side; the country has been cut into three parts. Now again Mohammedans are growing so much that India is the greatest Mohammedan country in the world. No Mohammedan country has so many Mohammedans as India has. Any day they can start demanding a separate country, because they are second in number to Hindus, and Hindus are not a converting religion. Mohammedans are a converting religion, forcibly too. There is no need of any argument; the sword is the argument!Your so-called religious leaders, your so-called political leaders, all need attention, all need their names and their photos continually in the newspapers, because if newspapers forget anybody’s name for a few months, people forget that man also. Now what do you know about Richard Nixon? Where is that poor fellow? One day he was the greatest, most powerful man on the earth, and now you will only hear about him the day he dies, and that too will be on the third, fourth page of the newspapers in a small column. What happens to these powerful people? When they lose people’s attention, their personality starts disappearing.I have known many political leaders in this country. Perhaps this country has more ex-ministers, chief ministers, governors than any other country. Once they become “ex” they are finished. Then nobody pays any attention to them, nobody asks them to inaugurate bridges, railway lines, hospitals, schools. No paper even bothers where they are, whether they are alive or dead. And there was a time when they were in the newspapers every day, on the radios, on television.One of my sannyasins works in the Indian television. She wanted to bring a small piece from my talks every day to the television. The director said, “We can accept the material, but we cannot mention Osho’s name.”She said, “But this is absolutely illegal, and it is stealing.”But the director said, “You should not mention his name at all” – because that’s what the Indian politicians want, and that’s what the politicians of the whole world want.The Attorney General of America has emphatically declared in a press conference, “Our whole effort will be to silence Osho’s voice completely.”One reporter asked, “What does it mean? Do you want to assassinate him?”And the Attorney General laughed. He said, “No, we will find some roundabout ways so he is not heard any more.”The American government is pressurizing the Indian government so that no foreign news media will be allowed to reach me. And I am receiving letters from Germany, from America, from Greece, from England, from Australia, “What is the matter? Why is the Indian government absolutely stubborn that they don’t want any news media, newspapers, radio, or television people to come to Pune?”This is the way, in their eyes, to silence me. They are wrong. I have my own ways: I have my own people who are enough…just person to person. If a man like Gautam Buddha, without any television, without any newspapers, without any radio, could convert the whole of Asia, what is the problem? I am not dependent on their news media.But the fear of the politicians is…the whole media attention should be focused on them – and why are people asking to go to Pune? Why don’t they ask to come to Delhi? That hurts them very badly.It is not only your problem, that you are a beggar for attention; it is a human reality. And the reason is that you depend on your personality – which is false, which has been created by the society, and which can be taken away by society. Don’t depend on it. It is not in your power.That which is in your power is your own individuality. Discover it! And the name of the science to discover it is meditation.Once you know yourself, you don’t care about others. Even if the whole world forgets you it does not matter, it does not even make the slightest difference to you; or the whole world can know – that too does not give you any ego. You know ego is false, and to depend on the false is to make houses on the sand, without foundation. Your personalities are almost signatures on water. You have not even signed, and they disappear.A group of Jewish mothers were drinking coffee together, and bragging about their children. One had a four-year-old who could read already. Another had a five-year-old who had already appeared on television. Then Becky Goldberg spoke up and said, “That’s nothing. You should see my little Hymie. He is only five years old, but the other day he went to the psychiatrist all by himself!”A middle-aged woman confessed to her priest that she was becoming vain.“Why do you think so?” asked the priest.“Because,” replied the woman, “every time I look in the mirror I am inspired by my beauty.”“Don’t worry,” said the priest, “that’s not a sin, that’s only a mistake!”It was a big meeting of the medical society in honor of an ear specialist who was retiring after more than fifty years of service. As a gift, they presented him with a golden ear. He stood up to make a speech, and after the applause had died down, he looked at his gift and said, “Thank God I was not a gynecologist!”Don’t depend on others!Be independent in your being.Just listen to your inner voice.You can listen the moment you start being still and silencing your mind – and it is not difficult. And when I say it is not difficult, I say it with absolute authority: It is not difficult! If it has happened to me, it can happen to you – there is no difference. All human beings are potentially capable to know themselves. And the moment you know yourself, then nobody can take away your individuality. Even if they kill you, they can only kill your body, not you.When Socrates was poisoned, the chief judge said to him, “I feel sorry that I had to agree with the majority. They all wanted to kill you. And you are such a strange fellow…I gave you three alternatives, but you did not accept.”The chief judge had tremendous respect, but what to do? The majority was shouting, “He should be killed because he is corrupting our youth. He is giving them ideas which are against our tradition, against our religion. He is making them skeptical of the old and the ancient. He is making them explore the reality on their own, and not just believe in knowledge and ancient scriptures. He is destroying our tradition. We don’t want this man; this man should be destroyed.”But the chief judge understood the whole situation. He said to Socrates…because in those days in Greece there were city states; Athens was a city state and the Athenian law was not applicable outside Athens. So he said, “The first simple choice is, you just move out of Athens, just outside the boundary line, and there you can make your school, your academy. Those who want to learn will come there.”Socrates said, “That will show my fear of death…and some day I am going to die, I am old enough. These people are too impatient; I will die by myself. So to escape from Athens just for a few years…my being does not support such an idea. I cannot act out of fear. I would rather accept death, because you can only kill my body but not my spirit. And the body is going to die anyway, any moment!”The chief judge said, “The second alternative is if you promise not to talk about truth, to stop teaching, you can live in Athens.”He said, “Then what will be the point of living? To me, truth is higher than life. Life comes and goes; truth remains. No, I cannot accept that.”The chief judge said, “Then the last thing is that you can say, ‘I am sorry that I have hurt people’s feelings.’ Just a simple apology will make me stand in your favor, and you can be saved from this ugly act of poisoning you to death.”Socrates said, “That is not possible, because I have not done anything wrong. I cannot say I am sorry. I can only say I am immensely happy, and the question of an apology does not arise. For centuries you all will be condemned because you poisoned me. And one thing I would like you to know is that your name will be remembered only because you gave the judgment for my death; otherwise, nobody will remember you.”This is the man of individuality, who does not care for his life, for his body, who has no fear. He accepted death with joy.An individual is the only person who can get rid of this state of begging; otherwise you are going to remain a beggar your whole life. And in subtle ways you are continuously begging. Every young man falling in love with a woman will ask the woman, “Am I the first man you have fallen in love with?” It is almost inevitable. And every woman will ask, “Am I the first woman you have fallen in love with?” Why such questions? The woman wants you never to have paid attention to anybody: “I am the first, the most beautiful woman in your eyes.”Man all through history has insisted that he will marry only a virgin – for what? It is such a stupid idea, because a virgin is absolutely inexperienced. You should insist, “I should marry someone who has some experience.” This is simple, logical, rational and scientific. But all the societies have insisted that they will accept in marriage only a virgin girl.In the middle ages there were doctors in Europe…because the woman’s virginity can be judged, checked. There is a very thin layer of skin – if she has not been in a sexual relationship, that skin remains intact; if she has been in a sexual relationship, that skin is broken. That broken skin proves that she is not a virgin. Now sometimes it can be broken just by riding on a bicycle, it can be broken by riding on a horse, it can be broken by any accident – falling from the staircase. It is not something that can be broken only by making love. But every young man was alert on his first night as to whether the woman was virgin or not, so there were doctors in Europe who used to fix a false skin to make anybody virgin! Their profession was flourishing greatly.I was in Greece, and I asked one of my sannyasins, “In Greece is virginity immensely valued by the orthodox church of Greece?” And the sannyasin I was asking had been one of the most beautiful women, one time chosen as Miss Greece.She laughed. She said, “The church goes on saying that virginity is our fundamental principle, but it is very difficult to find a virgin in Greece!” But before getting married, they become virgin. It is just a very small thing for a gynecologist to fix a thin layer of skin.I have heard one priest was asking and thundering and threatening the people of his congregation, “If you are not virgin, you will suffer hellfire. So all women who are virgin, or who have been virgin before their marriage, stand up!” Nobody stood up. He said, “I say again…” One woman with a little baby stood up. He said, “I am happy at least one woman has followed the religious principle of the Greek orthodox church.”The woman said, “Forgive me Father, I am not standing for myself; I am standing for the baby. You cannot expect a six-month-old baby to stand by herself! She is certainly a virgin, I can guarantee it!”All kinds of stupid notions have prevailed in humanity. And you have to follow these notions if you want attention. In India, if you want to have attention…There was a man in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, and he was an intelligent man. He had been a professor, a retired professor, Professor Ranga. He lived for six months only on cow dung and cow urine – just these two things for six months – and he became more of an attraction than Mahatma Gandhi himself. Everybody who was coming to the ashram was going to see Professor Ranga. Even Mahatma Gandhi called him a great man, a great spiritual man! I don’t see how cow dung can make a man spiritual. It simply can prove that he is stupid. But in Hindu society where the cow is accepted as the mother, the holy mother, this is a great spiritual attainment.All over the world you will find the same kind of superstitions in different ways. And if you want the attention of people, you have to follow their ideas. You have always to be a follower, you have always to be a believer, you have always to be stupid and idiotic.But if you want to get rid of this begging, you will have to get rid of your ego and your personality. You will have to learn that there is nothing in respect, there is nothing in reputation, there is nothing in respectability. They are all bogus words, meaningless, contentless. The reality belongs to you, but unless you discover it, you will have to depend on others.You are emperors, but you have to discover yourself.And this discovery is not difficult:Your kingdom is within you.You just have to learn to close your eyes and look inwards. A little discipline, a little learning not to remain focused on the outside continuously, but to turn inwards at least once or twice a day, whenever you can find time…slowly, slowly you start becoming aware of your eternal being. Then the idea of attention simply disappears.And the miracle is: the day you don’t need anybody’s attention, people start feeling your charisma, because charisma is the radiation of your individuality. They start feeling that you are somebody special, unique – although they cannot pinpoint where your uniqueness is, what it is that attracts like a magnet.People who have discovered themselves have found thousands of people attracted towards them, but they are not asking for it.Osho,How can hypnosis and meditation come together?Hypnosis has been condemned by all kinds of ignorant people. They don’t understand anything about it, but you will find people everywhere condemning it. The word is used without knowing even the meaning of it. People will say to you, “You are hypnotized, that’s why you go to Osho!” But just ask them what hypnosis is. They cannot even tell you the literal meaning of it, nor can they tell you what is the technique of it. Just the word is enough to condemn anybody, “You are hypnotized.”Hypnosis is a tremendously beautiful art, and there is nothing wrong in it. But everything can be used in a wrong way or in a right way. You can have a sword and cut somebody’s head. That is not the fault of the sword; the sword is neutral. With your sword you can prevent somebody from raping a woman. But the sword is absolutely neutral, neither good nor bad; every energy is neutral.Hypnosis is a tremendous source of energy. The word itself means deliberate sleep. You know ordinary sleep, you sleep every day; because it is ordinary sleep, it does not go deep enough. Its function is to help your body to recover its energy lost in the day-to-day work, so tomorrow morning you can get up fresh, again able to work. The ordinary sleep only goes so deep that it can help your body to recover, rejuvenate.Deliberate sleep is the meaning of hypnosis. It is a simple thing, but it goes as deep as you are ready to go. It refreshes your body, it silences your mind, it cleanses your heart, it can reach to your very being. It all depends on your willingness – nobody can hypnotize you against your will. That also is a greatly fallacious idea prevalent in the world, that somebody can hypnotize you against your will. That is impossible. Nobody can hypnotize you against your will.Simple methods are used by the hypnotist. He will tell you to relax and concentrate on something shiny, without moving your eyelids; just keep your eyes open as long as you can, and only when it is almost impossible for you, when the eyelids close by themselves – you cannot do anything, you cannot stop – only then…You are relaxed, lying down in a silent place, looking at a very strong light which tires the eyes, staring at it. The hypnotist is repeating, “Your eyelids are becoming very heavy, the light is too strong and you are going to fall asleep soon.” And he will go on repeating it.It takes not more than three to five minutes before you will start feeling your eyelids have become heavier, and heavier, and heavier. And a moment comes when you cannot keep them open, they simply close. Then the hypnotist starts telling you, “You are going deeper, deeper. And you will hear only my voice and nothing else.” Your total willingness is needed. If you are reluctant, if you don’t want it, then the hypnotist is absolutely helpless. It is not a power of the hypnotist as it is understood in the world, it is the willingness of the hypnotized that brings that deep kind of deliberate sleep.If you follow, cooperate with the hypnotist, he can take you deeper, deeper, deeper…the mind has become silent. And the moment he says anything, it simply sinks into your being. Your heart is dancing with harmony – no tension, no thought. You have entered into the innermost shrine of your being; now relax there.But this is possible only, and I am saying categorically only, if you are willing to go into it. But it is tremendously helpful, because you find it very difficult on your own to go into that deep silence where the world is left far behind. And if the hypnosis is going to be used for meditative purposes…It can be used for many kinds of purposes, it can be used for healing.Seventy percent of your diseases are just mind diseases, they are not really there. You simply believe they are there, and because you believe, they are there. It is because of this there are so many “pathies”: allopathy, homeopathy, naturopathy, ayurveda, unani. There are so many “pathies,” Chinese, Japanese…and all function perfectly well, but only for seventy percent.Only allopathy is a scientific methodology; it functions on one hundred percent of your diseases. But every pathy…homeopathy is nothing but sugar pills, but it works, and the work is not small – seventy percent. For seventy percent of sicknesses it is perfectly good. Naturopathy works, and naturopathy is very simple, for example, having a mud bath. Fill your bathtub with mud and lie down in the mud, and it cures many things. It has been found that seventy percent of diseases are in your own hands.I had a doctor who was a fake doctor. He was my friend. He had no degrees, but his board was full of degrees – all kinds of degrees, from inside India, from outside India. And he made a lab. As you entered into his clinic, first you would pass through a tremendous lab, which was all just bogus – great machines that you have never seen, which have nothing to do with medicine – and he would impress you in this way.When you reached his office you would be surprised. He never used an ordinary stethoscope; he had a very special arrangement. He was a genius although he was a fake. But he was a genius! You would have to lie down on the table, and above your head there were many big bottles with colored water, joined with a tube. That tube he would attach to the stethoscope, and the water would jump. You would see the water jumping – whether red water is jumping or green water is jumping. You have never seen such a thing!It created great trust in the man: “That man is not ordinary.” And he was just watching the water…! That could have been done by anybody, by an ordinary stethoscope; it was nothing…your heart is jumping, so the water is jumping. Everything was special! He had almost cured the person by the time he was out of his clinic, and he was simply giving water, colored water, to people.He was caught by the police. As I heard that he had been caught, I went immediately to the police station and I told those people, “He is fake, but he has helped hundreds of people – you should also consider that. It is absolutely unjust to harass him. It is true that those degrees are false, but those degrees are not given by any university, any medical college; so what is wrong if he has used the alphabet and he has made his degrees himself? Your concern should be how many people he has helped. And those are the people whom nobody could help.”People used to go to him only as a last resort, because his fees were very high. Naturally, he had such a great establishment, his fees were almost eight times more than any qualified doctor. And he said to me, “Even taking eight times the fees helps the patient. When he pays so much, he gets well quickly. When he pays so much, he believes that the doctor is not ordinary. So it is not only a question of getting more money, it is a question of helping the patient. It is part of treatment.”But the police were not ready to listen to me; he was presented before the magistrate. I went there too, and I said, “You should look at the record of how many people he cures. And those are the incurable people. They have been to allopathy, they have been to ayurveda, they have been to homeopathy. Nothing helps, but this man manages to help them. Now the real criterion should be how much service, how much help he has given, but you are simply bothering about certificates.”The magistrate said, “I can understand you, but I have to follow the law.”So the poor doctor is behind the bars. But I was continually talking to him, and he was very open and clear. He said, “I have arranged this whole thing as a hypnotic strategy. Once the patient is hypnotized, is ready to cooperate with me, once he trusts me…and he has to trust because he has paid so much money, and he has to trust because I am the last resort. He has been to all kinds of doctors. If I fail, then he has no hope, so naturally he has to trust me. And he can see that it is not an ordinary doctor’s clinic. It is so extraordinary that it is impossible for the doctor to fail.”If somebody is not willing, the hypnotist has to create the willingness. Hypnotism is not some power in the hands of the hypnotist. That idea I want to criticize absolutely, without any conditions attached to it. It is thought all over the world that it is a power in the hands of the hypnotist. It is not; it is your power.The hypnotist is only a help to awaken you to your own power, and then it can be used for many things: for healing, for making you live longer, for changing your harmful habits, smoking, drinking. It can do tremendous work.It can be used as an educative methodology. You can learn in hypnosis better than you can learn ordinarily, because everything is silent and you are hearing only one voice. Even if somebody else comes and talks, you will not hear, you are open only to a small narrow way to the hypnotist. He can teach you any new language. He can teach you any new science. He can teach you arithmetic, anything within minutes for which people take hours and days to learn.And it can be used for meditation too. As far as I am concerned hypnosis is simply a relaxed, deliberate sleep with a small opening, a little window, to the person who hypnotized you. He can tell you that your meditation will go deeper every day, and if this thought gets in your unconscious, your meditation will start going deeper. Just a few sessions and he can give you the last post-hypnotic suggestion: now you don’t need any hypnosis; your meditation will go deeper on its own accord.Hypnosis has not been used in the whole of history for meditation, but it can be used, and it can be used with tremendous power, because you have to fight so much with your thoughts unnecessarily. That whole struggle with your mind can be dropped by hypnotic sessions without much effort.Hypnosis is also capable of giving you a post-hypnotic suggestion, if you want to hypnotize yourself, by a simple strategy: count from one to one hundred, and from one hundred back to one. By the time you have reached back to one, you will fall into deep hypnosis. And you can tell yourself before going into hypnosis – because you will be alone – “The state of hypnosis will last only for fifteen minutes. After fifteen minutes I will come out of it.” This is auto-hypnosis.Hetero-hypnosis means somebody is helping you. In the beginning it is good to take help. But you have to be very willing, in a very loveful atmosphere.An old man was torturing his family continuously with this disease, that disease. And he was reading the encyclopedia and finding diseases. He was reading medical magazines and finding new diseases that have just been discovered, and he would immediately start torturing his family, “I am suffering from this disease.” It was a way of remaining in power. He was retired. Nobody cared about him; in fact, he was a burden. But even if you are a burden, you don’t want to be neglected. His method not to be neglected and not to be ignored was to create new diseases.Doctors were tired because they said, “That man is strange, he has no disease. He just goes on reading and finding diseases from encyclopedias, and then we have to treat something which he has not got – and that may unnecessarily create trouble.” Medicine which is given to a person who has no disease may cause some trouble, particularly allopathic medicines which are almost all based on poison. So the doctors were saying, “We are tired, just…”Then one doctor said, “It will be good if you go to a hypnotist. I have a friend who is a very good hypnotist, perhaps he may be helpful.” Now the old man is saying that he is suffering from sleeplessness, so the hypnotist will be perfectly the right person. He will give him sleep. He will also give him the post-hypnotic suggestion, “You will go to sleep – just drink hot milk before you go to bed and immediately you will fall asleep.” He will associate sleep with the hot milk, and once it gets associated in the mind, it works.Every child knows that the teddy bear works; you take the teddy bear away, and the child cannot sleep. And everybody has his own methods of creating teddy bears. You will find somebody clutching his blanket. If you don’t allow him to clutch his blanket, he cannot sleep. Everybody has a certain posture of sleeping. If you don’t allow him that posture, he cannot sleep. These are natural ways of auto-hypnotizing yourself.So the hypnotist was brought, and the old man was told, “Now you forget…all your diseases will be finished. We have found the greatest hypnotist.” The old man lay down, and the hypnotist said, “Just as I say you are falling asleep, asleep…and your eyelids are becoming heavy, so heavy, mountainously heavy so that you cannot keep them open…” And soon the old man was fast asleep.The doctor took away his bag, slipped silently out, took his fees, and the family was very happy that this is the right man. But as the son came back, the old man opened one eye and said, “Has that crank gone or not?” He was not willing; he was just pretending. Immediately the moment he said, “Your eyes are becoming heavy,” he closed his eyes, listened to the whole thing, and knew that this is stupid. How can this create sleep?Your willingness is absolutely needed. It is you who creates the hypnosis, not the person who hypnotizes you. But it is good in the beginning if you can help each other. There is nothing much to it; anybody you trust can help you and take you deep into hypnosis. And when you are in deep hypnosis he can check whether you are in deep hypnosis or not. He can push a needle in your hand; you will not feel it. He can take your hand up and leave it, and it will fall because you are not awake and you cannot keep it that way. So there are just a few small things he can try to find out if you are really in hypnosis.Then he can tell you about meditation: whenever you sit to meditate, take a bath, make a special room for your meditation. Don’t do anything in that room so that it remains vibrating with your meditativeness. Burn incense, bring roses and flowers, sit silently. Close your eyes, watch your thoughts and you will immediately go into deep silence; thoughts will disappear. This can happen without hypnosis but it takes a longer time. Hypnosis is a short cut.Your question is significant. You are asking, “How can hypnosis and meditation come together?” They can come together very easily. Hypnosis can be used for many purposes – it can be used for meditation. And the people who said you are being hypnotized by me are, in a way, right. Just because I don’t use methods of hypnotizing you, that does not mean that hypnosis is not created by you.I am not hypnotizing you, but you love me, you trust me – that’s enough. And then when I stop for a moment, you also stop with me. When I am not speaking…just a gap, and you are also in a gap. Slowly, slowly your heart starts the same rhythm as my heart. My words start having a certain music, a certain solacing, a certain relaxing quality. All depends on love, all depends on trust, but you are creating it.I am not hypnotizing – I am not a hypnotist.I don’t need to be, I am myself. My presence is hypnotizing. So I don’t need to tell you, “Lie down and I will move a crystal…ding-dong, ding-dong. You are falling asleep, ding-dong….”I have told you the story…A sex maniac was being hypnotized by a ding-dong hypnotist, and the sex maniac jumped; he said, “Doctor, it works! My ding-dong is asleep!”I am not a ding-dong hypnotist!…I love you. I want to share my truth with you for no other reason except that I am so full of it, I cannot contain it. I want to share; I want to unburden myself. And if you are ready on the other end to receive it, hypnosis will happen automatically. And with hypnosis, because my insistence is continuously on meditation, you will find it easier to meditate here with me than anywhere else – in the beginning at least.Later on, when you have developed on your own and you are more confident that you can fly in the silent spaces of your heart, then you will be able to create the same state anywhere; I will not be needed.I don’t want you to be addicted to me – because I am not a drug, and I don’t want you to be addicted to anything. But you can use things which have been condemned by ignorant people, not knowing what they are saying. You can use them for tremendous benefit, for your spiritual growth.Just an innocent heart is needed for meditation. And hypnosis can cleanse your heart and can bring you into the state of a small child.Little Roger was frightened of the large bulldog that occupied the yard next to his home. One day, feeling adventurous, Roger climbed the fence. The huge bulldog rushed up to him and licked his face. The boy began to scream and his mother came running to his side.“Did he bite you, darling?”“Not yet,” whimpered Roger, “He just tasted me.”That is the simplicity of a child.Old Sam Rosenbaum was seventy-five, really very old, and finally got his nerve together to take a flight in a small airplane. As he climbed out after the ride, he turned to the pilot and said, “Sir, I wish to thank you for both those rides.”“What are you talking about?” said the pilot, “You had only one ride.”“Oh no I didn’t,” said old Sam. “I had two: my first and my last!”In old age also, if people have lived rightly they come back to the same innocence of a child. And according to me, unless an old man becomes again a child, he has missed the opportunity of growing in the spiritual dimension; he has wasted his life in trivia. He has been collecting only seashells and colored stones on the sea beach, but he has not been able to discover the treasure of consciousness, awareness, enlightenment.Hypnosis can be certainly used. Here we are going to create a school for hypnosis, where you will be able to learn how to auto-hypnotize yourself so you don’t have the dependence on the hypnotist. And then you can use that auto-hypnotizing process for meditation.This is a pioneer effort to bring hypnosis and meditation together for the first time. But together they can be tremendously great. They can bring you so much light, so much blissfulness – and so easily. I like to repeat Chuang Tzu’s statement, “Easy is right; right is easy.” I don’t want you to become unnecessarily self-torturing, following unnecessarily long, arduous ways to come to yourself.You don’t have to go anywhere.I want to teach you the great pilgrimage from here to here. I want you to learn the art of reaching to God singing, dancing, rejoicing.Laugh your way to God.In essence that is my teaching.And it is possible, with the help of hypnosis, to make meditation the easiest process. But drop any idea of condemnation of hypnosis, which you may have gathered because all the world, the whole world, is afraid of being hypnotized. There have been people, highly intelligent, who wanted to come to see me but they finally decided not to because they were afraid they may be hypnotized. Nobody can hypnotize you against your will.Millions of people would like to come. They are reading my books, they are listening to my tapes, they are seeing the videos, but they are afraid to come close to me. A fear has been created by the so-called religious leaders that they will be hypnotized.It happened that one famous but ugly and pornographic magazine, Stern, from Germany, had sent a reporter. He became so interested because he wanted to write an inside story. So he meditated, he listened to me, he did everything that sannyasins are doing here. He became so joyful and blissful that he became a sannyasin! He wrote the story, he went back. The Stern editorial board was very annoyed. The first thing they said was, “You have been hypnotized. We cannot publish your article. You have written it under hypnosis.”He said, “What nonsense you are talking!”They did not publish his article. On the contrary, they fired him. And they managed to distort his article the way they wanted: they left out everything that was positive, they inserted their own interpretations, and colored the whole thing in such an ugly and negative way that even he was surprised, because when they fired him…and he was one of their most important chief reporters.He had come to live here, then he lived in the commune in America, and I think soon he will be coming back. Wherever he will be, he will be a sannyasin. He has tasted the experience himself. It is no more a borrowed knowledge; it has entered into his being, but it is not hypnosis.He was wrongly understood, and he was wrongly condemned. Journalists come, but they always are spectators. They will not know what is happening to people in their inner being. Unless they become insiders, their reports are worthless. Many other people come, just as spectators to see what is happening.This place is not for spectators.This place is only for those who have courage to participate in this tremendous experiment of consciousness awakening.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,It seems to me that you are truly the first man this planet has ever known who really understands women and accepts them. Please comment.I have told you that a woman is to be loved, not understood. That is the first understanding.Life is so mysterious that our hands cannot reach to its heights, our eyes cannot look into its deepest mystery. Understanding any expression of existence – men or women or trees or animals or birds – is the function of science, not of a mystic. I am not a scientist. To me science itself is a mystery, and now scientists have started to recognize it – they are dropping their old stubborn, superstitious attitude that one day they will know all that is to be known.With Albert Einstein the whole history of science has taken a very different route because the more he went into the deepest core of matter, the more he became puzzled. All logic was left behind, all rationality was left behind. You cannot dictate to existence, because it does not follow your logic. Logic is man-made.There was a point in Albert Einstein’s life when he remembers that he was wavering about whether to insist on being rational…but that would be foolish. It would be human, but not intelligent. Even if you insist on logic, on rationality, existence is not going to change according to your logic; your logic has to change according to existence. And the deeper you go, existence becomes more and more mysterious.A point comes when you have to leave logic and rationality and just listen to nature. I call it the ultimate understanding – but not in the ordinary sense of understanding. You know it, you feel it, but there is no way to say it.Man is a mystery, woman is a mystery, everything that exists is a mystery – and all our efforts to figure it out are going to fail.I am reminded of a man who was purchasing in a toy shop a present for his son for Christmas. He was a well-known mathematician, so naturally the shopkeeper brought out a jigsaw puzzle. The mathematician tried…it was a beautiful puzzle. He tried and tried and tried and started perspiring. It was becoming awkward: the customers and the salesmen and the shopkeeper were all watching and he has not been able to bring the puzzle to a solution.Finally he dropped the idea and he shouted at the shopkeeper: “I am a mathematician and if I cannot solve this jigsaw puzzle, how do you think my small boy will be able to?”The shopkeeper said, “You don’t understand. It is made in such a way that nobody can solve it – mathematician or no mathematician.”The mathematician asked, “But why is it made in this way?”The shopkeeper said, “It is made in this way so that the boy from the very beginning starts learning that life cannot be solved, cannot be understood.”You can live it, you can rejoice in it, you can become one with the mystery, but the idea of understanding as an observer is not at all possible.I don’t understand myself. The greatest mystery to me is myself. But a few clues I can give to you:A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions that your wife asks you for nothing.The key to happiness: You may speak of love and tenderness and passion, but real ecstasy is discovering you haven’t lost your keys after all.Women begin by resisting a man’s advances and end by blocking his retreat.If you want to change a woman’s mind, agree with her.If you want to know what a woman really means, look at her – don’t listen to her.The lady walked up to the policeman and said, “Officer, that man on the corner is annoying me.”“I have been watching the whole time,” said the cop, “and that man wasn’t even looking at you.”“Well,” said the woman, “isn’t that annoying?”The romantic young man turned to the beautiful young girl in his bed and asked, “Am I the first man you ever made love to?”She thought for a moment and then said, “You could be – I have a terrible memory for faces.”A young girl said to an old maid, “You must have missed a great deal by not marrying!”“Only the ceremony!” replied the old maid.In the Garden of Eden, Eve was nagging Adam, as usual. “I saw you playing around with another woman underneath the tree of knowledge last night!” she screamed.“But Eve,” said Adam, “you know that there is only you and I here in Eden!”“Don’t lie to me! I always know when you are lying!” Eve whined.“Eve, listen! This is just a fantasy brought on by your menopause.”“Don’t give me any psychological bullshit! I know what I saw!” Eve roared.“Okay, okay, then if you don’t believe me, just count my ribs.”A man went on a safari with his wife and his mother-in-law. One day he was lying morosely in his tent when he heard a cry from his wife. He jumped up and rushed into the clearing. There, out in the open, he saw mama-in-law shaking her fist at a huge lion who was standing five feet away from her, ready to move.“Do something!” pleaded his wife in alarm.“Why should I?” retorted the frustrated hunter. “That lion got himself into this mess – let him get himself out of it!”Everything is mysterious: it is better to enjoy it rather than trying to understand it. Ultimately the man who goes on trying to understand life proves to be a fool, and the man who enjoys life becomes wise goes on enjoying life, because he becomes more and more aware of the mysterious that surrounds us.The greatest understanding is to know that nothing can be understood, that all is mysterious and miraculous. To me this is the beginning of religion in your life.Osho,I love to do tai chi and it has become my daily meditation, but I have a tendency to become too serious about it. Can you drive out the monkey?It is impossible for anybody to drive the monkey out of your mind, because it does not exist; your seriousness is creating it. And nobody can change your seriousness either. It is your life attitude which is making you serious. What is there to be serious about? Existence is a continuous celebration, a festival that knows no holidays.You are serious because for thousands of years people have been telling you that the serious man is a better man, higher man, more evolved than the nonserious. The nonserious have never been taken into account.But to me the situation is just the reverse. The nonserious one is the one who will come to know the real life and its experiences. Seriousness is closing you, making you hard, making you sad. Seriousness comes from ambition, from desire which you are not being able to attain.But the religions have paid too much respect to seriousness. I have never come across in any religious scripture of any religion – and there are three hundred religions on the earth – that anybody has paid respect to nonseriousness, to playfulness, to a sense of humor. They all make you dodos.I have heard…one day as the bishop entered a church in New York, he could not believe his eyes: he saw Jesus Christ standing there.He said, “My god! I thought that prayers are never heard. I never believed that there is any God or any son of God – but what to do with this fellow? Either he is a hippie or he is Jesus Christ. I am in trouble.”He approached the man and asked, “Can I ask you who you are?”And the man said, “You have been serving me, spreading my word, and you don’t recognize me!”The bishop’s heart started sinking: “My god! He is Jesus Christ! And now there is bound to be trouble.”He phoned the pope in Rome: “What am I supposed to do? In our teaching courses there is not even a single mention that ‘Jesus will come one day to your church.’ So what has to be done, what is the right course? How should I behave?”The pope said, “Don’t create trouble for me! It is good that he has come to New York. Do two things: first, the most important, look serious and busy. Who knows, he may be…And second, don’t forget to inform the police.”Religions have been teaching people to be serious because seriousness creates a certain kind of dullness in your consciousness. Seriousness is not a help. It is poisonous; nobody can take it away, unless you understand…then it will disappear.A psychiatrist and a friend were walking down the street, and a stranger passing by suddenly kicked the psychiatrist in the shins. The shrink walked on as if nothing had happened. His friend was astounded. “Aren’t you going to do anything about it?” he cried.“Why should I?” asked the psychiatrist. “It’s his problem.”If the monkey is there inside you, it is his problem! He must be getting tortured with your seriousness and your tai chi. Don’t be worried. He himself will be trying to find a way to get out of the mess.A man who is playful does not bother about things like tai chi! There is so much to enjoy around and you, like an idiot, do tai chi! Naturally you are becoming serious. A beautiful woman passes by…and you are doing tai chi! Can’t you do anything playful, blissful, pleasant? Naturally you are becoming serious because you are losing contact with life.There are all kinds of idiots in the world. Somebody is doing tai chi, somebody is doing acid, somebody is doing jujitsu, somebody is doing yoga, standing on his head. Now, I don’t think any woman is going to be interested in you: this kind of fellow who is standing on his head is already dead! So then nobody takes interest in you, and you become serious. You are creating it, and you want me to chase it out. I am not responsible for it. Who suggested you do tai chi?I have heard that three missionaries were caught by cannibals in southern Africa. The chief of the cannibals asked the first, “Which do you want – you can choose – do you want ‘chi-chi’ or do you want death?”The man thought about it and he said, “Whatever chi-chi is, it cannot be worse than death.” So he said, “I want chi-chi.”So he was given the treatment they called chi-chi. He was sexually abused, beaten…and as chi-chi started, he started thinking, “It was better to choose death. These people will kill me by chi-chi, and they are unnecessarily humiliating me.”And the other two missionaries were watching what was going on. Then the turn came to the second: “What do you want?”Death is such a dangerous thing…he thought, “One can survive chi-chi, but death you cannot survive.” He also said, “Chi-chi.”So again the whole game began. All the cannibals were beating him and doing all kinds of stupid sexual perversions – and the poor missionary had come to save them…!Now the turn came of the third, who was the chief missionary. The chief asked, “What do you think – chi-chi or death?”He said, “It will be a great mercy if you allow me death. Chi-chi I have seen.”But the chief said, “This is a problem: we don’t kill anybody before chi-chi, and after chi-chi nobody survives!”Now what are you interested in tai chi for? Naturally it will make you serious. You will forget laughing, you will forget a sense of humor – a man of tai chi has to be serious. And you are asking me to take out the seriousness…and the monkey. The monkey comes in the same package! You become serious and the monkey will come in.And as far as the monkey is concerned, it is his problem – you don’t worry. You just get rid of this chi-chi.Just to deceive you they have changed the name to tai chi!Osho,Please forgive me.I cannot put myself on the line enough. I am at your feet.You must be living in a misunderstanding, because I have never been angry at you; I have never been angry at anyone, Ronald Reagan included!Asking to be forgiven…you are asking something which must be your projection. I have never been angry at anyone. You have been always forgiven, but you must be carrying something in your mind. You say, “I cannot put myself on the line enough.”Who is asking you to put yourself on the line enough? As you are, you are perfectly okay and acceptable and lovable – but you seem to be a martyr.Who can be perfect in this world?The world itself is not perfect, because perfection means death. If you want to live, you have to remain a little bit imperfect always, so that you can go on perfecting yourself. Evolution is nothing but a constant imperfection. Imperfection gives you space to grow into.And remember one thing: you will never be perfect. You will be coming closer and closer and closer, but you will never be perfect. Perfection is not allowed by the laws of nature itself.And the idea that “I cannot put myself on the line enough” – there is no need. Put on the line as much as you enjoy – that is enough.But I have a feeling that you want to go up the ladder to the highest rung…But you don’t know that the ladder at the highest rung goes nowhere. You come to the highest rung and then you look stupid. Then your whole life is wasted: you have become the president, you have become the prime minister and all kinds of nonsense people. But they all feel awkward; that’s why they go on smiling to hide…so that nobody suspects that they have been stupid. There are ladders and ladders….Hymie Goldberg is right. He became the richest man and when asked, “What have you learned?” he said, “Nothing but climbing ladders – and at the end there is nothing.”But you cannot even say that at the end there is nothing.You are perfectly good. You have always been good. My love to you has never wavered. It does not waver to anybody. And I know your devotion, your dedication; it is immensely valuable.But you are living in some misunderstanding. Drop that misunderstanding. You are on the line, and there is no need to be forgiven. You have all my love, as everybody else has. Here there is no hierarchy. Here there is nobody higher and nobody lower.There was to be a christening party for the new baby, but before the ceremony the priest took the new father aside and asked, “Are you prepared for this solemn event?”“I think so,” replied the father. “I’ve got cheese rolls, salad and cake.”“No, no,” interrupted the priest, “I mean spiritually prepared?”“Well, I don’t know,” said the man thoughtfully. “Do you think two cases of whiskey are enough?”You are living in some fantasy about yourself and torturing yourself. A few people like torturing…And I told you, here there is no hierarchy. And that’s one of the most important things to be remembered: the people who are doing the work are just functional; they are not higher than you.In the commune in America…because I was silent and in isolation, people created hierarchies just out of their routine habit. As I came out, those who were at the top of the hierarchy tried to persuade me that I should not speak, that things are going well and I should not see anybody – everybody is okay.I asked, “Then what is the purpose of me being here? If they are all okay, I should go back to my country where nobody is okay.” I had to insist: “Now it is enough. Three years is enough, and I want to come to my people and see what is happening.”And when I started speaking the whole gang that had created the hierarchy escaped, because now there was no possibility…wherever I am there is no hierarchy, only functions. Somebody is doing cleaning, somebody is doing the work of the secretary, somebody is doing the work of the person in charge of the ashram, but there is nobody higher and lower.And you should remember a very significant law:The organization of any bureaucracy is very much like a septic tank – the really big chunks always rise to the top!Don’t be bothered.Osho,Several times I have read in your books, or heard you mention, the psychological fact that man thinks about woman once every three minutes, while woman only thinks about man once every seven minutes. Is this only a psychological difference, or does it go deeper? To be more specific, please explain the two (or four) sides of the midnight bedroom dilemma of “I have a headache.”A few things first. The psychological fact of man thinking about woman every three minutes – they cannot wait more than that – is only average, because science talks only about averages. Don’t believe that you are the average person; the average person does not exist. There may be people who are thinking only of women all the time!A psychologist was testing a patient. He drew a straight line on the paper and asked the patient, “What does it remind you of?”He said, “It reminds me of women.”The psychologist said, “Strange. A straight line?” But he tried more lines. He made a triangle and asked the man, “What does this remind you of?”The man said, “You seem to be a strange person. This reminds me of women!”The psychologist made a round circle. The man got very angry. He said, “You are coming too close. I am suffering from women, and you are reminding me of them again and again. Are you a sex maniac or something?”The psychologist said, “It is a very strange, peculiar case. Why do these things remind you of women?”The man said, “Everything reminds me of women! Look out of the window” – a camel was going by. “That camel too reminds me of women. You remind me of women! In fact, I don’t think about anything else – this is my whole life philosophy.”Those three minutes are for average people – and average people don’t exist. It is just a mathematical calculation in which children are included who don’t think of women; in which really ripe and grown-up people are included who don’t think of women; in which sex maniacs are included who don’t think about anything else…. So don’t be satisfied with the average; just look at yourself and find out how many minutes you can remain without thinking of women.My own experience of thousands of men is that the gap is at the most one minute. You can keep a watch in front of you and test whether in one minute the idea of women comes or not. And you will be surprised: “My god. Every minute I am thinking of women.”The case with women is totally different. Seven minutes is also an average, but ordinarily no woman thinks of man every seven minutes. The average is because women sex maniacs also exist. There are women who don’t think of men at all – hours pass – and they feel great relief.And you are asking me – this has become the midnight bedroom dilemma of “I have a headache.” That is a female thing, not a male thing. It is a female strategy. Unless you are very close to female chemistry you will not say, “I have a headache.”Man uses the woman just like sleeping pills. Sex gives him a good sleep. All energy is gone out of him. Now there is nothing else to do except to fall asleep and hope that in the morning he can get up.Man’s mind is different than woman’s mind. They function in different directions.Doctors, who are mainly men, have researched and come to the conclusion that no man has died while making love. That’s true. In the whole history of billions of human beings no man has died by making love, while making love. Nobody has suffered a heart attack while making love.So for man, woman is almost a commodity to be used for good sleep, for no heart attack, for avoiding death as far as he can.But the woman has been almost tortured. First she has had her orgasmic joy taken away, because man finishes too soon, before the woman has even begun. The difference in the orgasmic capacity between man and woman is immense; it is a recent discovery, in this century – the whole humanity in the past has lived in darkness.Man’s sexuality is local, genital. Woman’s sexuality is widespread, all over her body. Naturally, to attain an orgasmic experience her whole body has to throb with joy, tremble with ecstasy – but that will take time. By the time her whole body is ready and trembling and feeling a dance of energy in her being, the man is fast asleep. He is finished, he has gone to sleep.Man has been in many ways cruel, primitive and barbarous towards women. He has never cared what she feels; he is only concerned with himself. He has been using women – and remember the most humiliating thing in the world is to be used, because that brings you down from your dignity into a commodity.Commodities are used. Human beings are not used, but women have been used for thousands of years. In fact, they have even forgotten that they have any orgasmic capacity. Naturally, they try to avoid this ugly scene as much as possible; hence “I have a headache” is a feminine strategy.You are in a deep misunderstanding; put things right! If you want a woman not to have a headache, then be playful with her: sing, dance, bring to your bedroom the atmosphere of a temple, burn incense, take a good bath after the whole day’s…And your love should be the climax.But wait! Unless the woman starts throbbing and trembling and starts becoming ecstatic, only then making love to her will you have an orgasmic experience and she will have an orgasmic experience. And when both orgasmic experiences happen simultaneously, it is a tremendous phenomenon. Religiously it is a tremendous phenomenon, because it will give you the first glimpse of meditation.My own understanding is that man has come to know about meditation from no other source, because there is no other source available. How did man start to think, in the very beginning, about meditation? Mind, you know, is natural; meditation has to be achieved. Something must have given him a glimpse beyond mind. Orgasmic experience gives you a state when time stops, mind stops, and you are sheer joy.That has been, according to me, the source of thinking that going beyond mind is possible. And if it is possible in sexual orgasm, a few adventurous people, pioneers, must have tried…why can’t it be possible alone? Because two things they have got absolutely correct: time stops, mind stops.Of course you cannot stop time directly; hence the conclusion: stop the mind. And the moment mind is silent and has stopped, time stops, and suddenly you find yourself, without any sexuality, in an orgasmic joy which is far deeper than the sexual. In sex you are dependent on the other person; now you are absolutely free.If people like Gautam Buddha or Mahavira became celibate…it was not that through being celibate they became Gautam Buddha and Mahavira. The situation is just the reverse: they became Gautam Buddha and Mahavira by meditation and they found a far bigger freedom and orgasmic joy. Sex disappeared from their life.But people have looked at it wrongly. From the outside you cannot see their orgasmic joy; you can only see that this man has become celibate. Perhaps by becoming celibate you will also attain the orgasmic joy. It does not work that way.Mind has to stop first, then time stops. And when both time and mind are stopped you have tremendous ecstasy, ecstasy so great…There is not only a difference of degree between sexual orgasm and spiritual orgasm; the difference is qualitative: it has a beauty of its own, a blissfulness of its own, a contentment of its own.But the whole of humanity has been misled because of a logical fallacy. People saw that Bodhidharma or Sanai or Ta Hui have become celibate…perhaps by becoming celibate we will attain to their enlightenment. But by becoming celibate you will become only a pervert.Just the other day my news service, Anando, has brought the news that in Europe Catholic bishops and priests are leaving the churches and getting married. And the fear has arisen…in the backward countries many people have been converted and now they are becoming bishops and cardinals. Perhaps the day is not far away when black people will be teaching in the white countries as bishops and cardinals. And then the final step is the first black man becoming the pope – because it is a question of majority or minority, and white bishops are becoming the minority every day.But those priests are on the right path. They have suffered unnecessarily and now they have gathered courage and they are marrying. My feeling is it is a good sign.But the Catholic church is afraid that black people may dominate Catholicism. That would be a strange situation, because the white man has always thought that he is carrying the whole burden of humanity, that he is responsible for everybody’s salvation. It is not going to be so anymore. Soon black people will be the saviors of white people. You have saved for many centuries, now give them a chance. You have not been able to save anything; perhaps black people may be able to save.The danger is greater because black people are sexually more powerful than white people…perhaps because of the climate, their situation, their food. If black people start dominating the Catholic church, then there is going to be an immense perversion of sexuality; it is now Africa which is suffering most from the disease AIDS. But this influx cannot be stopped; the Catholics have invited it themselves.Just try to be alert and don’t imitate, and your seriousness will be gone, your headache will be gone.Father John, a Catholic priest, was astonished one day to see his friend, Father Michael, driving a Mercedes-Benz. He asked him how he could afford such a great car when all he could afford was a bicycle.So Father Michael told him that one day during the prayer before the collection he was swinging his rosary when he realized that the whole congregation was hypnotized. So he told everyone to empty their wallets and when he counted the money he had enough to buy a car.Father John said, “That’s great. I’m going to try it.”But a few weeks later when they met again, Father John was still riding his bicycle.“What happened?” asked his friend.“Well,” said Father John, “everything went just as you said and the congregation was completely in my power. But just then I dropped the rosary and said, ‘Oh shit,’ and I’m still cleaning the church!”Paddy and Maureen live in an old house, very close to the railway station, and every time a train goes by, the door of their bedroom wardrobe opens by itself. Maureen gets so fed up with this that one day she calls a carpenter to come and fix it. But he can’t locate the problem and he decides that the only thing to do is to get inside it, close the door and watch what happens.Just then Paddy comes home. He sees a pair of men’s shoes in the bedroom and starts looking around for the owner, but before Maureen can explain a train goes by, the wardrobe opens by itself, and the carpenter is revealed inside.Paddy is furious. “And what the hell are you doing here?” he cries.“You won’t believe this,” says the man, “but I’m waiting for a train!”Life is so hilarious, and you are having a headache!Enjoy life and you will forget not only the headache but even the head, because one remembers the head only when he has a headache – have you noticed that? My definition for a healthy man is that he does not feel his body at all. The moment you have a heartache you feel the heart; the moment you have a stomachache you feel the stomach; when you have a headache you feel the head. If you are perfectly healthy you will not feel the body at all. It is simply there.But mistakes happen because our clarity about existence is not meditative. Our mind is continuously creating unnecessary problems, unnecessary dilemmas.Hymie Goldberg was a string salesman from New York. His boss sent him to the deep South in order to open some new accounts for the company, but Hymie encountered discrimination everywhere he went and was unable to do any business. Finally, in Mississippi, an anti-Semitic store owner said to Hymie, “Okay, Jew, I’ll buy as much string as reaches from the end of your Jewish nose to the tip of your Jewish prick.”A month later, the same store owner was surprised to receive four hundred cartons of grade “A” string. Inside was a bill for twenty-five thousand dollars and a note which said: Thank you for your generous order. I hope we can do business again soon. Signed: Hymie Goldberg. Living in New York, circumcised in Warsaw.That much length…! Just be clever and you can use any situation for being happy.Osho,Sitting in front of us, what do you see? Do you find all these jokes while looking at us?You are right. I have to confess it: looking at you, what else can be found? You are all a joke unto yourself.Gautam Buddha said as his last statement: “Be a light unto yourself.” The day I leave the body please remind me, so that I can make my last statement: “Be a joke unto yourself.” That is far more joyful than being a light unto yourself. What are you going to do with a light? Light your cigars, or burn people’s houses?But being a joke unto yourself, you will be a bliss for everyone.You are right…this is the way I find jokes – looking at you. So be aware when I look at you; I am searching for a joke!A big old Indian was sitting in a bar out West when a dirty hippie came in and started to drink a lot and insult all the other people there. Soon everyone had left the bar in disgust except for the old Indian who just watched the hippie with interest.So the hippie walked over to him and said, “Hey, Indian, what the hell are you staring at?”“Well,” said the Indian, “many years ago I was arrested for making love to a buffalo, and I just had a feeling that maybe you are my son.”I see your troubles and really…I take them seriously, but deep inside I am giggling. Not to offend you I talk about your problems, which are sheer nonsense – but don’t tell it to anybody!Once there was a man who had everything a man could desire: a wonderful job that he liked, a wonderful wife and wonderful children, but then one day he began to see spots in front of his eyes. At first he tried to ignore them, but they began to get worse. So finally he paid a visit to the doctor. The doctor examined him but could find nothing wrong with him, so he sent him to a specialist, a neurosurgeon, who examined him thoroughly with many tests. He also could find nothing.But he said to the man, “Although I can find nothing specific, I have seen cases like this before; often it is some pressure on the brain, which usually results in death after six months to a year.”The man became very upset, but then he decided that if indeed he only had such a short time to live, he would enjoy life and do everything he ever wanted. The man loved nice clothes, so he went to the best tailor in town and said, “Give me the best clothes you have in your store: English imported suits, Italian leather shoes, hand-stitched silk ties, and one dozen of the best tailored silk shirts, size fourteen neck.”The tailor who had taken all his measurements said to him, “Fourteen neck? You don’t have a fourteen neck – you have a fifteen neck!”“Don’t tell me what I have,” said the man, “I have been wearing a size fourteen neck all my adult life.”“Well, if that’s so,” said the tailor, “then you must be seeing spots in front of your eyes!”Seeing you, certainly I rejoice. So many jokes all around! Perhaps this is the first gathering in the world where jokes are being used for your spiritual growth….And you cannot be otherwise – unless you become enlightened. Only enlightened people don’t have anything in life which you can make a joke of. But in ignorance and unconsciousness, whatever you do is somehow hilarious – your fights, your love affairs, your marriages, your divorces. If you start watching your behavior, you will find out for yourself – “My god. My whole life is full of jokes!”And it will be a great revelation…far greater than the revelation of God, because that too is only a joke and nothing else.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What does it mean when you don't answer a question?Not answering a question, is also answering it – but you have to be more intelligent to understand it. People don’t understand even the answered questions, but my approach is hope for the best and expect the worst! Whether you get it or not, I will haunt you until you get it.There are questions which can be answered only by not answering them; they are real questions. Only unreal questions can be answered, only questions arising out of the mind can be answered.But there are also questions which arise not out of your mind, but our of your very being. They are not questions of curiosity, but questions of deep longing, searching, seeking. They are not accidental – you have not asked them just “by the way.” Their meaning is as precious as life itself. Those questions can be answered only by silence.Jesus spoke continuously for three years; that was his whole period of work. He started his work at the age of thirty, and people crucified him at the age of thirty-three. His period of work was very short, while Buddha worked for forty-two years, Mahavira worked for forty years.There is only one question that Jesus did not answer. In those three years, thousands of questions were asked, and he answered them. He answered the way people have very rarely answered – with such sincerity and such authority that even his enemies used to say, “We have never heard a man speak this way! The same language, the same words, but from an authentic individual their fragrance is different, their music is different. Their penetration is deep; they touch your very heart.”Jesus’ words are not just words, empty and contentless; his words are his very being. He is pouring himself in his words – and that makes the difference, the great difference.But one question he has not answered, and that was the question asked by a sympathizer who wanted to save him. It was asked by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. Judea was a slave country under the Roman Empire, and Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea. He was not a Jew, hence he could not understand why the Jews were so mad against an innocent young man. Jesus may have been saying things which they don’t agree with, but that does not mean that a person should be crucified. It shows really the weakness of you who cannot answer his arguments.The Jews had a great number of learned rabbis – they could have challenged Jesus. Jesus was an uneducated carpenter’s son; he knew nothing of scriptures, but he knew something more valuable. It seems he knew himself. And that is the only holy scripture there is.The learned rabbis were angry because an uneducated man was speaking with such authority. They were hesitant about their own beliefs…they were also talking great things, but all those great ideas were borrowed. He was speaking directly, spontaneously, according to his own experience – not within quotes.Pontius Pilate’s wife was a very educated woman; she heard many stories about Jesus, and many times she went in disguise to hear him. She was immensely impressed, and it was she who convinced Pontius Pilate that what is going on – this insistence of the Jews, of the crowd, of the masses, to crucify a young man – is simply ugly, inhuman…“and you have to do something.”Pontius Pilate called Jesus to his palace. The man was so beautiful and so simple, so poor, so humble, that there was immediately a rapport between Pontius Pilate and Jesus. Pontius Pilate was a very learned Roman scholar. He could see at least that the young man had something in his being which was radiant, which those learned rabbis didn’t have. But they had power….He wanted to save Jesus, although it was risky…risky because if the whole Jewish population of Judea – and they were the only people in Judea – were against Pontius Pilate, he might lose his tremendously powerful position. The Roman government, the Roman emperor would not want a governor in Judea who is not liked by the people, so it was against his own position. But still he wanted to do everything to save him.The last question he asked was not answered by Jesus. The question was, “What is truth?” Jesus looked into his eyes, utterly silent, and did not say a single word.Pontius Pilate understood the meaning of the not answered question, and he felt even more sorry and in a dilemma – what to do? Still he tried…. As he went into his house, the first thing he did was to wash his hands. That act – of washing his hands – remained uncommented on for two thousand years.It was Sigmund Freud in the early part of this century – strangely, himself a Jew – who first made the statement that Pontius Pilate washed his hands because he wanted to be clear, at least before God, that he was not responsible for the crucifixion of this beautiful young man. “I wash my hands, I don’t have his blood on my hands.”He tried to put up three people for crucifixion. It was an ancient tradition in Judea that the people could ask for at least one person to be released from being crucified, and he was hoping that by putting up three persons, the Jews would certainly ask for Jesus to be released.Jesus was a Jew; he was not a Christian – he had never heard the word Christian. He was born a Jew, he lived a Jew, he died a Jew. The word Christian came into existence three hundred years later.But when Pontius Pilate came and asked the people – and thousands of people had gathered – “According to the convention, I can release one person from crucifixion. He will be made completely free…”he was shocked that they all shouted only one name. That name was not Jesus; that name was of a murderer who had murdered at least seven people. I say at least because that was on the record of the government; he may have murdered more, he was a born murderer and criminal. His name was Barabbas – and the whole Jewish crowd, without exception, asked that Barabbas should be released.No man of any intelligence could have believed it, and even Barabbas could not believe it. He was also thinking that this young man – he has not done anything wrong, he has not harmed anybody, he has not committed anything criminal – is bound to be released.He could not believe his own ears when he heard that people were asking for Barabbas. Even when he was released, going out in the crowd, he looked again and again with unbelieving eyes: What is happening…? All these people know him; he is a drunkard, he is a murderer, he is a robber – there is not any crime that he has not committed. These are the people who know him, and these are the people who have put him into the hands of the government. Strange, why have they asked…?And Jesus was crucified.It is a very strange story: his whole life he answered every question, and at the last, when a significant question was asked, he remained silent. Do you think he did not answer? He answered by his silence. Nothing can be said about truth, and anything that is said about truth is not truth.You can be truth, but you cannot say anything about it.So when sometimes it happens that I don’t answer a question it means the question is of the category which can be answered only in silence. But I don’t want you to be so serious…! Truth, or untruth – but don’t be serious! If you want me to answer any question…I am ready to lie, but I will answer.I care more about you than any truth.Eunice came home with a brand-new mink coat.“Where did you get that?” asked her husband, Bernie.“I won it in a raffle,” she replied. The following night, Eunice walked in with a beautiful diamond bracelet.“Where did that come from?” asked Bernie.“I won it in a raffle,” said Eunice. “I’m going to another raffle party tonight, and I’m in a hurry. Would you mind drawing my bath?”Bernie did as instructed, but when Eunice came in to take her bath, she found that there was only a half-inch of water in the tub.“Bernie,” she asked, “Why didn’t you fill the tub?”“Well, darling,” he answered, “I didn’t want you to get your raffle ticket wet!”Osho,Will you please say something about how you work on us?Have I to say even that too? Can’t you figure out how I work on you? You are asleep, that is true, but not that much asleep! And why have you written behind your name, “Indian”? Because here, in this temple, there is no one who is Indian, and there is no one who is German. This is the only gathering in the whole world where there are only human beings. Perhaps it is because of your Indian mind that is still hanging around you that such a question arises.I am working on you from morning to evening, from evening to morning…even in the night, even in your dreams I am working on you – and you don’t understand how I am working? That means I will have to say a few things about Indians!…Indians are all alike, but they have different faces so you can tell them apart.…There are two types of people in this world: those who come into the room and say, “Well, here I am!” and those who come in and say, “Ah, there you are!”The first ones are the Indians; they are the most egoistic people on the earth – “Here I am.” Their “I” perhaps is the most subtle and strong and ancient “I.” Every Indian thinks he is spiritual; it is very difficult to find an Indian who is not a great saint! At least, I have not found one yet.There is an Indian saying, “Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment.” That is true for India. This reminds me of Carnegie, one of the richest men in America. He was delivering a talk in a university, and he said something about opportunity, and a student asked, “You are right in saying, ‘If you use the opportunity you can also become as rich as I am’ – but how to know when the opportunity comes? As far as I am concerned, I become aware only when it is gone, and then I say, ‘My god, it was an opportunity’ – but it is too late. So what do you suggest I should do?”Carnegie said, “As far as I am concerned, I keep on jumping. I don’t wait for the opportunity; whenever it comes I will ride on it – but I go on jumping. I am always ready…it will come. But if you are not ready, then you will become aware only when it has passed, because opportunity passes in a single moment.”India has been losing all kinds of opportunities because people go on waiting, as if it is God’s responsibility to do things for you. People go on repeating that when things will become worse – and I am amazed how things can be worse than they are! – then God will come in an incarnation and save people. This means: Try to make your opportunities and life worse, so God comes sooner. And they are trying hard! They are becoming more poor, they are becoming more retarded, they are becoming more addicted with the past, they don’t think of the future.These are the signs of a country which is too old: in the future there is only death and nothing else.Indians must have one of the best countries in the world, with all kinds of climates, with all kinds of different cultures, people. But it has not used any opportunity; it is a fatalist country, it believes in fate. If things are going to be better, they will be better; if they are going to be worse, they will be worse – you cannot do anything. This impotence has become symbolic of the Indian mind.There is another Indian saying – and these sayings show the wisdom of centuries – “If the shoe fits, it is ugly.” A strange statement! Whenever things are good, Indians don’t feel good: if the shoe fits, it is ugly. The shoe is good only when it pinches….Mulla Nasruddin was purchasing a pair of shoes, and the shopkeeper was saying, “Mulla, you are trying an almost impossible job. You are trying to force your foot into a shoe which is one size smaller than you need.”Mulla said, “You keep quiet! I know what kind of shoes I need.”The shopkeeper was very much puzzled, but Mulla managed to force his foot into a small shoe, and tears came to his eyes. The shopkeeper said, “What are you doing?”Mulla said, “You don’t understand the philosophy of it.”The shopkeeper said, “There is some philosophy in it?” – in India everything is philosophical!Mulla said, “Yes, this is not an ordinary philosophy, but a great philosophy. This is the only thing that keeps me happy.”The man said, “And tears are coming to your eyes….”Nasruddin said, “That’s why I cry the whole day: it is pinching so much that I forget all worries, all difficult problems – the wife that is waiting at home, the difficult children, the ugly neighbors, business failures – everything is forgotten when the shoe is pinching. And when I reach home and I take the shoes off, it is such a relief! This is the only relief in twenty-four hours. I feel so good and so grateful to God that one day has passed…. Now the problem will arise again the next day, in the morning; I can rest the whole night, and my sleep is really deep, because of the whole day’s torture.”But this is the philosophy of this country. People are living in self-inflicted torture. Torture has become something of a religious discipline: the more you torture yourself, the more religious you are and the closer to God.Another proverb for you:…The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.That’s how Indians go on remaining in utter misery, but still contented. It is simply a case of bad memory; they forget that it was the same yesterday, and it was the same the day before yesterday. Every day seems to them to be new – and it has been so old and so dirty. It has been for centuries the same slavery, the same poverty, the same suffering, but every day the Indian gets up and thinks that everything seems to be new. Just a case of bad memory…but very advantageous: you will not find anywhere in the world people so contented and so miserable at the same time.…You should look into Indian proverbs and you will find the very heart of the Indian personality. Another proverb says:…Don’t worry over what other people are thinking about you. They are too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.…He who laughs last is most likely a German. The Indian never laughs.…For an Indian, cleanliness is next to impossible!…To an Indian, to err is human, but it feels divine!…To the Indian mind, it is absolutely clear:…Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether!…There is no time like the present for postponing what you don’t want to do!…A small ad in a Pune newspaper: “Young farm worker wishes to marry beautiful girl with a tractor. Please send photo of the tractor!”…For an Indian, it is a simple task to make things complex, but a complex task to make them simple.Why have you written “Indian” after your name? Such things provoke me!Osho,Even though it seems that life for me is wonderful, I see this happening only on the surface. When I move a little deeper, my reality is of a restless being worrying about all sorts of things.I find this circle boring where I am stuck now. Maybe it's because of my lack of meditation; still I don't seem to find the way in, deeper – even when the door is wide open.Osho, I have heard you say, “Before you die, destroy the ego.” I am grateful to existence for everything, including this ego, but now it feels to be the right time to make room and be finished with it.Osho, is this happening because I don't know meditation?Nivedano, you will always remain crazy! What are you doing here if you don’t know meditation? You have perhaps got lost and forgotten your way, and somehow ended up here – because here everybody is doing meditation.I have been telling you to be thankful to existence, but I have never told you to be thankful for the ego. Ego has not been given to you by existence. It is your own great creation! And now you feel that it is the right time to make room and be finished with it. Great idea! – but the problem is that you don’t know whether this is happening or not, because you don’t know meditation.Nivedano, if it is happening then you must be knowing meditation without knowing it. There are many people who have qualities they are not aware of, but this is a very rare case! I have never heard of anybody who is in meditation and does not know that he is in meditation – because meditation is such a tremendous difference, such a qualitative difference from your ordinary life that you cannot miss it. It is almost impossible; that’s why I said you are going to remain crazy. This is possible only if you are crazy.Contemplate over this small story:A man decided one day that he was not paying enough attention to his family, so that evening he went home, kissed his children, gave flowers to his wife, shaved, showered and changed before dinner, and told lots of funny stories during the meal. Afterwards he whistled while he cleared the table, and insisted on washing and drying all the dishes. When he had finished he went into the living room and found his wife in tears.“Everything has gone wrong today,” she sobbed. “The vacuum cleaner broke, Ernie threw his ball through the bedroom window, Polly fell and tore her best dress – and now you come home so drunk, you don’t know what you are doing!”Nivedano, you are doing meditation. I look at you, and I feel you more grateful than anybody present here – more prayerful, more humble, more simple, more silent.Just this morning, passing by Buddha Hall, I saw your little child. He looked so beautiful. I inquired whose child he is, and Nirvano told me, “He is Nivedano’s child.” For a moment I thought Nivedano must have looked exactly like this child – so simple…but he still looks just like a child whenever I look at him.He may not be the same with others, that is almost certain, but as far as I am concerned, when I look at him, he looks so silent, so saintly…. Although he does not know what he is doing, he is doing well.Osho,Again on the subject of destroying ego, another question appears to be relevant to me right now, and that is the fact that wherever I go, sooner or later, trouble bubbles up. Usually it happens with authorities of some kind.Osho, I wonder if this happens because, being unaware, I go on pushing the edges? Or is it an old habit of the ego? or…?Nivedano, no matter where you go, there you are!The bank robbers arrived just before closing time, and promptly ordered the few remaining customers, as well as the clerks and guards, to take their clothes off and lie face down on the floor.One nervous blond pulled off her clothes and lay down on the floor, face up.“Turn over, Maybelle,” whispered the girl lying beside her. “This is a stickup, not the office party.”It must be just the old habit – you think it is the office party! If you feel that wherever you go sooner or later trouble bubbles up, just be a little aware! And don’t thank existence for the ego, because that is the cause of the whole trouble. If you are carrying your ego, wherever you go trouble is bound to bubble up.Ego is the only trouble in the world.If everybody in the world just for one hour decides to put the ego aside – just for one hour – there will be no trouble, no problem; there will be such great peace and silence and love that we have not known before. This whole planet has not known that.But the ego is nourished on troubles. If it cannot create trouble, it will starve to death. It needs continuous nourishment, and that nourishment comes from trouble. So if you understand that the trouble is a pain in the neck, and you are tired of it…If you are not tired of it, then I am not saying you have to drop it; first get really tired, then there is no need for me to tell you to drop it. You will just drop it.Trouble is your spiritual cancer; it is better to get rid of it. It is the only agony of the human soul, the only hell that really exists. And it is within your hands to get out of it.I have told you a story that I love….A Japanese king went to see Master Lin Chi. He touched the feet of the master and before he could say anything, Lin Chi said, “You idiot! You don’t know even manners.”The king completely forgot for what he had come. He pulled out his sword, and Lin Chi laughed. He said, “You have forgotten your question. Now I remind you” – because the king had sent his prime minister before him to inform Lin Chi that he is coming and his question is, “What is hell and what is heaven?” Now, when the sword was just about to fall on his neck, Lin Chi said, “Wait a minute! This is the door of hell.”The king was shocked. His hand stopped. He put back the sword in the sheath, and Lin Chi said, “That is the door of heaven. You had forgotten your question, but your prime minister told me. It was good that he told me before, otherwise you would have killed a poor man unnecessarily, and you would have suffered hell – because hell is not anywhere else but in your ego. When I said, ‘You idiot!’ what was the trouble? Why did you become so angry? Who was hurt? It is your ego that was hurt.”If you don’t have any ego, it doesn’t matter whether somebody says you are an idiot or somebody says you are a genius. It does not matter…they are their opinions. You know who you are – you don’t depend on other people’s opinions. Your ego depends. Your ego keeps you a slave of the society in which you live. Ordinarily people think that their ego is something very precious. It is nothing but their slavery.A man becomes independent and free and individual only when he has dropped his ego, when he is just a silent being, without any idea of “I” – just a pure silence…this silence. And if in this silence you look inward, you will not find any “I,” any ego, any self, but just a pure space.This pure space is your spirituality.This pure space is your enlightenment.This pure space is your ultimate ecstasy.The ego is preventing everything. Ego is making you a beggar, while you are an emperor of a great empire. Of course, that empire does not belong to the outside world; it is in your own being, but its vastness is as big as the universe itself.Your ego is keeping you encaged, imprisoned. Don’t nourish it…and I am saying it because I know it is everybody’s possibility not to nourish the ego and to get out into the open sky.One day at the London zoo two Jewish ladies, both blond and middle-aged, were standing in front of the cage of Guy the gorilla, and no doubt passing remarks on aspects of his physique.Suddenly Guy, who was kept alone and whose life was very boring, was possessed by a tremendous urge. He gripped the bars before him, and, such was the force of his lust, wrenched them apart. He leaned out, seized the blonder of the two ladies, drew her into the cage and pulled the bars together. The hapless, screaming, blonder lady was dragged towards the inner sleeping quarters, screened from public view.Some days later, recovering in a Harley Street clinic, the lady was visited by her friend.“Oy Veh, Rachel,” the friend commiserated. Then, whispering hoarsely “…and tell me how you feel?”Came the reply, “How do you think I feel?…he hasn’t written, he hasn’t phoned.”Learn to laugh at your own ego. The moment you are gripped by your ego, relax and have a good laugh.And don’t be worried…and I know you are crazy, you will not be worried what people think about you. But if you can laugh at your ego, that is the best way to kill it. Don’t be serious about your ego, because that is very nourishing food for the ego. That’s why all egoists are serious people.The people who can laugh and enjoy and be playful are never egoists. It is on this particular point that I disagree with all the religions of the world. They have made people’s egos very strong by teaching them to be serious about life.My effort is to erase the tremendous impact of millions of years of religious training. On the one hand they say, “Drop the ego,” and on the other hand they don’t allow the childlike playfulness…. On the one hand they go on insisting, “Drop the ego,” and on the other hand they don’t have any sense of humor.No religion in the world has accepted a sense of humor as one of the fundamental religious qualities. I accept it, and I want that no religion can possibly exist in the future unless it has as a fundamental quality the sense of humor.A religion without laughter…a God who cannot laugh and dance and sing is not worthy of being God. Send him to hell!Osho,Becoming more aware of myself, I have often been feeling more intensely “up and down,” and since being in the ashram this feeling has grown.Whenever I ask some sannyasins “How do you feel?” the most popular answer is, “up and down.”I can recognize a trick of the mind in this feeling, but a doubt arises: Isn't this (up and down) the shape of the vertical growth line and the rhythm of human beings, given that human life starts from an “up and down”?Maurice came home from work early one day and found his wife in the arms of his best friend, Max.He staggered back and said, “Max! I am married to her, so I have to do that. But you? You are a free man!”Old Finkelstein was seventy-five when he decided to marry a young girl of twenty. His friends were scandalized, and one of them said, “Finkelstein, do you realize that a man of your age having sex with a young girl could be very dangerous – even fatal?”Finkelstein considered for a while, then shrugged and said, “Oh, well, if she dies, she dies!”Life is such…it is up and down! It is up and down everywhere, not only here. And the moment it stops being up and down, you are dead! So let it go as up as possible and as down as possible…. The higher it goes, the deeper it goes, the better. Why are you worried because everybody says, “Up and down”? They know…and you know also.Paddy was known for his foul language by everyone in his congregation. The parson took him aside on Sunday and said, “Every time you swear you must give five dollars to the nearest stranger. That will cure you soon enough.”As Paddy left the preacher, he stubbed his toe and then silently handed the five dollars to a woman just entering the church.“Okay,” whispered the woman, “But can you wait until after the service?”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is the devil really male?Deva Prachurya, it is a beautiful question because the women’s liberation movement is talking about God being a woman; they have started pronouncing him not he but she. But none of them has thought about the devil, which is a counterpart. They both exist together, just like light and darkness, life and death.Both are hypothetical. God does not exist the way you exist and the trees exist and the mountains exist; it is just a hypothesis. And because of the hypothesis of God, theologians have had to create his other pole, the other polarity, the devil. So the devil becomes darkness and God becomes light.The Hindu Upanishads have one of the most beautiful prayers, perhaps the most beautiful in the whole world of religion. I love its poetry, but I don’t agree with its philosophy. The prayer is very small, but very pregnant with meaning and significance. It says, “Lead me from darkness to light” – tamso ma jyotir gamaya. It says, “Lead me from untruth to the truth” – asto ma sad gamaya. And in the final stage it says, “Lead me from death to deathlessness” – mrityor ma amritam gamaya.It is sheer poetry, you cannot improve upon it – but it is utterly false, because darkness and light are one phenomenon. You cannot go from darkness to light, because light is nothing but a little less darkness, and darkness is nothing but a little less light. It is a difference of degrees. Neither can you go from untruth to truth – the same differentiation of degrees is there. Every untruth has something true about it, and every truth expressed has to join hands with untruth.And you cannot go from death to eternal life, because death is part of life. It is not against it – it is the very crescendo of life. They both exist together. A person who cannot die, cannot live either. Life exists with death almost like two wings of a bird: you cannot have the bird flying in the sky across the sun with one wing. Life and death are just like your two legs – you cannot move with one leg.Existence is dialectical: it always has its opposite. Without the opposite, it will not exist. Because man created God as the very holy of the holiest, he had to create a devil. It was just an absolute philosophical necessity! The devil is the counterpart of God. You will be surprised to know…your name is Deva Prachurya. Deva means divine, and devil also comes from the same root; it also means divine.But both are hypothetical. I have no objection if God is a woman, but certainly I am immensely happy if the devil is a woman! God may be, may not be, but the devil is certainly a woman; otherwise for such a long eternity the devil could not have been nagging God continuously! From whom is God escaping? Where is he hiding, and from whom? Why has he not the guts to come out, at least once in a while, to remind people that he is still alive? The woman does not allow it.So I am not certain about God, but, Deva Prachurya, woman is certainly a devil – and vice-versa!Mrs. Markovitz got a knock on the door.“It is your husband,” shouted her neighbor, “he is face down in the swimming pool. I think he is drowned.”“Is today Wednesday?” asked Mrs. Markovitz.“Yes,” said her neighbor, “it is, but…”“What time is it?” Mrs Markovitz asked.“Eleven o’clock, but…” replied her neighbor.“Then don’t worry about a thing,” said Mrs. Markovitz, “the pool man will be here in an hour!”The husband has drowned…but the wife and the husband are the greatest enemies in the world; psychologists call them “intimate enemies.” They have always been! It is a very recent development of insight.God being a woman will create trouble. Then the devil will be a man – because they have to be polar opposites. Perhaps the women’s liberation movement has not thought about the implications of what they are doing. I would like God to be the man and tortured by the devil, the woman, rather than vice-versa, because good can be tortured by bad, but bad cannot be tortured by good. But the question simply has not come up around the world – and women are insisting that God is a woman.It is really strange that nobody has bothered about the devil, who is a more important person than God. God is only a VIP, the devil is a VVIP! God may have created the world, but the devil is running it – and running it so devilishly and so perfectly.Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadirshah, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Ronald Reagan – who do you think they represent? Certainly not God! They represent the devil, and they have made our history. They are the people who go on creating more and more evil in the world.Friedrich Nietzsche has declared, “God is dead and man is free.” His statement is incomplete; he has forgotten about the devil. God may be dead – most probably he cannot manage to survive the devil for so long – but the devil is there. And unless the devil is also dead, man cannot be free.Man’s real problem is not God; that poor fellow has never been seen after those first six days when he created the world. Since then nobody knows where he is – whether he is sick, or got so tired of creating the world in six days that the seventh day he rested…that is allowed. But what happened on Monday? On office days you should be back. Since then he has been on holiday…it is an eternity. Most probably he died.But the devil is still alive, and shows himself again and again. You cannot conceive of Adolf Hitler in any other way than an incarnation of the devil; you cannot think of Nadirshah and his great company, Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, as anything other than incarnations of the devil.I remember one case…Nadirshah attacked India – and he was a man who enjoyed killing people so greatly that his whole life he was killing and killing. One night he asked his soldiers to bring the most beautiful woman of the area, so they brought a prostitute from a nearby village. In India, prostitutes are a little different than in the West. In the West they are only sex objects. In the East they are artists, dancers, singers; their being sex objects is secondary.She danced, and Nadirshah was very happy. The night was almost coming to an end when Nadirshah said, “Now I want to go to sleep, you can go back.”He gave immense rewards to the woman, but the woman said, “It is dark outside. With so much money, so many diamonds…I am a woman and alone, and the path goes through a dark forest – I cannot go.”Nadirshah told his soldiers, “You go ahead of her, and go on burning everything that you find – forest, village, anything. Make it a light.”Nobody has made light that way – just a small torch would have done. But Nadirshah had such a devilish mind: he burned seven villages and the whole forest to make it almost look like day. He told the prostitute, “Now you can go. And you will remember that you had come to see not some Tom, Dick, Harry; you had come to see the great emperor, Nadir Shah. He can make the night into day.” Thousands of villagers were burned alive. You cannot say such a man represents God in any way.The devil is spread all over your history; even today, the devil is ruling you. The devil is a politician, has always been a politician. God is a nice guy – if he exists – very gentlemanly, has remained almost anonymous, almost a nobody. If one has to think about who is more important, indubitably it is the devil.I would like him to be a woman, because the woman has many devilish qualities. But then God will have to be a man, because the polarity…both cannot be women, both cannot be men. If both were women, there would have been constant struggle and fight and jealousy and envy. If both were men, there would have been homosexuality and AIDS. So that is not acceptable; they have to be polar opposites.My feeling is that the devil is man and God is woman – at least he has been functioning as very womanly. The devil is very aggressive, and God goes on retreating.So your question is very important theologically – although in reality they both don’t exist. Hypotheses cannot be male or female: two plus two is four – do you think it is male or female? It is just neutral, it has no genital difference.God and the devil are just theological hypotheses. It simply shows the weakness of the theologians that they could not manage the world without false hypotheses to support their systems. God they needed to create the world – without ever bothering who created God. Their fundamental idea is that without somebody creating, nothing can be created; that’s why they have accepted God as the creator of the world. But why stop with God? What happened to the original thesis?The thesis was that nothing can be created without a creator. Who created God? According to all religions…the question has remained unanswered. They know that if they say God A was created by God B they will get into more trouble…then God C and God D, and the whole alphabet. Still, when they reach XYZ, nothing will be solved – who created God Z?In fact they have started from a very wrong premise. Existence is intrinsically self-generated. It has always been here, so the question of creation does not arise. And it will always be here, so the question of destruction does not arise. It may pass through many phases of evolution, but it will remain.If God can be dropped, there is no need for the devil. They are a married couple – because nobody has seen either of them, it is very difficult to say who is man and who is woman. But the devil seems to have been functioning around the world for centuries; after those six days, he has been in charge.Most probably, if you want hypotheses also to be divided as male and female, then he seems to be the male, because he has been working all along…and God must be a housewife – that’s why you don’t see her any more in the marketplace. But the devil you will find anywhere. You don’t have to look for him; he is looking for you!I am more interested that you get rid of both – whoever they may be, male or female. Getting rid of both of them, existence becomes absolute freedom; man attains dignity and self respect.The very idea of God and devil makes you either the slave of one or the slave of another. The sinners are the servants of the devil, and the saints are the servants of God. But to be a servant, to be a slave, is against human dignity.Hence I say unto you: God is dead, the devil is dead. Their death is very necessary for you to be alive. If they are alive, you are dead. Then you are imprisoned from both sides. Then man has to do a strange game continuously: he works for the devil, and worships God – because you have to keep both of them happy.An old man was dying and suddenly he started worshipping first God, repeating his name, and then the name of the devil. His family was aghast! They said, “Are you mad? In the last moments of your life you are remembering the devil?”He said, “I don’t want to take any chance…who knows where I am going and whom I am going to meet? And it costs nothing, so I will remember both. Whoever meets me, I have remembered him, and if nobody meets me, there is no problem. If both meet me, then too there is no problem. I am calculating every possibility.”Man is crushed between the devil and God, between good and evil. I want man not to be crushed, not to be enslaved, but to be an individual in his own right, free. And out of his freedom, and out of his awareness, he should act – not according to what God wants.I have told you the story of the ten commandments…When God made the world, he went to the Babylonians and said, “Would you like to have a commandment?”They said, “First we would like to see what it is.”And he said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”The Babylonians said, “What would we do? We don’t want any commandment, please forgive us.”He went to the Egyptians, and he went to other races. Nobody was willing, because everybody asked, “What is the commandment?” And they said, “We don’t want to be encaged in any commandment. We want to live on our own.”Finally he reached Moses and asked him, “Do you want to have a commandment?”Moses asked, “How much does it cost?”This is a rare question! God had gone all around the world…and it was only Moses who asked the price, the first thing. God said, “It costs nothing.”Moses said, “Then I will have ten!” If it does not cost anything, why not have ten? – that’s how there are ten commandments.Every religion has created its own commandments – strange, unnatural – out of fear or out of greed. But they have made this poor humanity that you see around the world.Even the richest man is so poor because he does not have the freedom to act according to his own consciousness. He has to act according to principles given by somebody else, and one does not know whether that man was a con-man, a fraud, a poet, a dreamer. There is no evidence…because so many people have claimed that they are incarnations of God, that they are messengers of God, that they are prophets of God, and they all bring different messages. Either God is mad or these people are simply lying. Most probably they are lying…!It gives you a great egoistic feeling if you are a prophet, a messiah, an avatara, a tirthankara – somebody special, not just an ordinary human being. Then you can dominate. This is a different kind of politics. Wherever there is domination, there is politics.The politician is dominating because of physical force – his armies, his armaments, his nuclear weapons. The religious prophets, messiahs, saviors, avataras are dominating you spiritually. Their domination is more dangerous – they are far greater politicians. They are dominating your life not only from outside but from inside. They have become your inside, they have become your morality, they have become your conscience, they have become your very spiritual being.From inside they go on dominating you, saying what is right, what is wrong. You have to follow them, otherwise you start feeling guilty, and guilt is one of the greatest spiritual diseases. If you follow them, you start feeling unnatural, neurotic, perverted, because you are not following your nature. If you follow your nature, you are not following your prophets and your saviors.All these religions have created for man a situation in which he cannot be at ease, he cannot enjoy life, he cannot live it in its totality. So my suggestion is, it is better to let both guys be dead. And what does it matter? – when one is dead, whether he is man or woman does not matter. A dead woman is not dangerous, neither is a dead man. They are not alive.Let humanity be free from all these old superstitions which have dominated so badly, and distorted human nature so immensely. You can see the humanity that is the result. You say that a tree is known by its fruits. If that is true – and that is true – then your whole past of prophets, saviors, avataras, tirthankaras, God, devil, should be judged by the humanity that you find today.This insane humanity – miserable, suffering, full of anger, rage, hate…If this is the result of all your religions, of all your leaders – whether political or religious – then it is better to let God and the devil die. With God and the devil gone, political leaders and religious leaders will not have any support; they will be the next to die.I want man to be politically free, religiously free, free in every dimension to function out of his own still small voice, out of his own consciousness. And that will be a beautiful world, a real revolution.Osho,I feel so blessed to have this opportunity to float in your ocean of silence. Does my wanting more block my availability to receive it?I am sorry to say to you that your wanting more is certainly going to block your availability to receive the bliss that you are receiving without expectations. This is a simple, basic rule.Jesus says, “Ask and it shall be given to you.” I say, “Don’t ask, otherwise it will be not given to you; not only that, whatever is given to you will be taken away.” Jesus says, “Knock and the doors shall be opened,” and I say unto you, “Knock, and even if the doors are open, they will be locked!”Jesus says, “Seek and ye shall find,” and I say unto you, “Seek, and you have missed forever. Don’t seek, and you are it – there is nothing else to find.”The bliss that you are finding here is not coming from outside; it has been within you always – you just have never been in the company of blissful, madly divine people. Seeing so many people flowering, suddenly you have blossomed.Blissfulness is contagious. That’s my whole idea of creating small oases around the world, where people can find blissful people all around. The very presence of those blissful people will transform them. Intrinsically everyone has the capacity, but they are always surrounded by miserable people so they never become aware that there is a possibility of being blissful. Everybody is miserable and it looks a little weird and awkward and embarrassing: when everybody is miserable and you are enjoying, one feels guilty. You have to be part of the company you have chosen.The whole world can be blissful because everybody carries it within himself. But there are a few points to be remembered, and the most important is: don’t ask for it, don’t knock for it, don’t seek it, don’t expect it – otherwise you will become closed. Remain available and open, and it comes…and it comes in abundance.Paddy drove through the red light and smashed into a car driven by Father O’Hagan. The car turned over three times and the priest was thrown from the vehicle into the gutter. Paddy rushed over and said, “I am terribly sorry, Father.”“Saints above!” said the shaken priest, “You almost killed me.”“Here,” said Paddy, “I have got a small bottle of whisky. Take some and you will feel a lot better.”Father O’Hagan took a couple of large gulps and then continued his tirade: “What were you doing? You nearly launched me into eternity.”“I am sorry, Father,” said Paddy. “Take a few more sips and it will ease your nerves.”The priest took another large gulp and almost finished the bottle, which he offered to Paddy saying, “Why don’t you have a drink?”“No thanks, Father,” said Paddy, “I will just sit here and wait for the police to arrive!”Just be a little alert, that’s all! If you can learn only one lesson, that of being conscious, blissfulness will arrive. And it is natural – I can understand – when it comes, you want more. But you have to be alert not to want more. On the contrary, be thankful for that which has come, and more will be coming – that is absolutely certain. I say it on my own experience, not according to any scripture, or according to any religion, or according to any saint.Don’t expect! Whatever you get, be grateful for it. Instead of expecting more say, “This is too much! I don’t deserve it, I have not earned it.” Bow down to existence in deep gratitude, and you will feel flowers of bliss and benediction showering on you from all sides.Once you have learned the simple rule, you will never expect – and you will always be getting more and more. Just remain available, keep the doors and windows of your heart open.Osho,For a few days my heart has been jumping all around the ashram and it feels like I am losing control. Osho, how far can I go?Nirgrantha, you have already gone too far if your heart is jumping all around the ashram! And you are still saying, “It feels like I am losing control.” You have lost control long ago; otherwise how can your heart go on jumping all around the ashram?You forget all about control. This place is not for people who control; this place is for people who let their heart dance wherever it wants to dance!Remember a famous proverb: Talent is what you possess, genius is what possesses you. You cannot control genius; you can control talents. Here we are creating the possibility for your sleeping genius to be awake. Once your genius is awake, you are going to be possessed, you will not be in control – and there is no need to be in control. The sky is vast, millions of stars are moving without crashing, and no traffic control! Here I see thousands of hearts dancing, running – no traffic control! Nature manages itself so perfectly that if you don’t disturb, everything goes all right – and very smoothly.A man dressed as Adolf Hitler visited a psychiatrist. “You can see I have no problems,” he said. “I have the greatest army in the world, all the money I ever need and every conceivable luxury you can imagine.”“Then what seems to be the trouble?” asked the doctor.“It is my wife,” said the man, “she thinks she is Mrs. Jones.”So just remember one thing: you can be dancing all around joyously, just don’t get caught up with a wife, otherwise she will control you! You have lost control – and here in my place there are great women controllers! The moment they see that some fellow is getting out of control, they immediately control. So avoid a wife. Once in a while you can dance with any woman, but remain free.Control is not my message; control is repression. Nirgrantha…I have given you the name Nirgrantha; do you understand its meaning? One who is absolutely free – without any complexes, without any chains, without any bondage. And you are asking me about control…?I had explained to you when I gave you the name to drop all chains, drop all bondages. Just be yourself and do whatsoever pleases you. Just remember one thing: don’t interfere into anybody’s life, and don’t allow anybody else to interfere in your life. This is true humanity – authentic, honest, pure.It was a rough ocean crossing, and Mr. Levensky was suffering the tortures of sea-sickness. During one of the more unsettled periods, he was leaning over the rail retching miserably, when a kindly steward patted him on the shoulder. “I know sir,” said the steward, “that it seems awful, but remember – no man ever died of sea-sickness.”Mr. Levensky lifted his green face to the steward and said, “For heaven’s sake man, don’t say that. It is the wonderful hope of dying that is keeping me alive!”It is a very strange life!“Be careful,” the doctor told the relatives of an elderly man who was dying.One by one they went up to him, “You look so much brighter today,” exclaimed his daughter.“You must be on the mend,” said his son.“I have not seen you look so healthy for years,” said his wife.The old chap opened his eyes and said, “Thank you for your kind words; it is good to know that I am going to die cured!”Rather than dying cured, why not live cured?You are cured if your heart is jumping – I have never heard of any dead man’s heart jumping all around the ashram. We have three enlightened dead men in the ashram. This day is in their memory, and even on this day, they are not here! Dead men, even if they want to jump, cannot jump. So while you are alive, enjoy it to its fullest. Don’t be worried about being tired or anything, because finally in your grave you will have enough rest!Live a life of immense intensity and totality so that in your grave you don’t toss and turn, because there is not much space! Don’t miss this moment in thinking about control. In graveyards you can think about all these great things, and nobody will prevent you. You can keep control, you will have to keep control! You can follow all ten commandments, you will have to follow – how can you commit adultery in a grave?Before that, it is good to live as joyously and as freely as possible, because who knows when you will be coming back to this beautiful earth, to these beautiful people? Even today you will not find a gathering of such beautiful people.This is my only crime: I am condemned all over the world for simply one reason, that I am making people live totally and intensely, not bothering about their commandments, not bothering about their holy scriptures, not bothering about their gods and their devils, their heaven and their hell.All those things are to be thought about and contemplated in your grave. You will have enough time, almost the whole of eternity. So lie down there and be philosophical, be moral, don’t commit any sin. But right now, don’t be bothered about all these superstitions.Only one thing has to be remembered, and that is to be as conscious as possible, because that will make you dance rightly, in right places, with right people! Your consciousness will not allow you to jump on somebody else’s toes. That is the only sin.According to me, to interfere in somebody’s life is the only sin, and the only virtue is not to interfere in anybody’s life. Let him be himself, and let you be yourself…your freedom.This is, according to me, the authentic religiousness.This is the only holy pilgrimage:From here to here – you don’t have to go anywhere.From now to now – you don’t have to travel in time or space.You are in a good spirit; don’t lose the track of it. Control is an old habit which every child is being taught from the very childhood: control – control everything – discipline, behave.Now you are no more a child, and I am not your father – I am not even your uncle! Throw all control, throw all licenses, throw all boundaries. Life is so short, don’t destroy it in controls and boundaries and mannerisms and etiquette and all kinds of nonsense.Rejoice! I repeat, rejoice – and rejoice totally. And if your heart is dancing, give it full energy. Everybody’s heart is dancing. This is a place of dance, of song, of laughter. And I say this is the only kaaba, the only holy place in the world today. All holy places have become unholy, they have become prisons for man in the name of morality, control, discipline.This is a small place with a vast territory of independence, freedom. The whole sky is yours – even the sky is not the limit.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Give me some sutras to meditate on.Devageet…Devageet is a dental doctor, but lately he is turning into a philosopher! Just today he has sent a telegram to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, saying “Drop the idea of saving the world through transcendental meditation. I have a better suggestion….” His suggestion is “transdental medication”! And I think that if the world can be saved by yogic hopping, then there seems to be no problem why it cannot be saved by transdental medication.He is asking for some sutras to meditate on, but sutras are serious, and meditation does not need any sutra. Meditation is a state where absolute emptiness exists, not even a sutra; there is not any possibility of any object. A philosopher never meditates, a philosopher contemplates. So I can give sutras for contemplation, but not for meditation because that will be absolutely wrong.Meditation simply means silence – absolute, unconditional serenity of the heart, of the mind, of the being…no stirring of any kind. Even a sutra is enough of a disturbance. You can contemplate on a sutra; sutra is Sanskrit for maxim.The first…a successful man: one who earns more than his wife can spend.And second, a successful woman: one who finds such a man!Third: A jealous man always finds more than he is looking for.Fifth: Some minds are like concrete – mixed-up and permanently set.Sixth: The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance. The last half consists of the chance without the capacity.Seventh: What Pune really needs is a vegetarian mosquito.Eighth: The man who admits he is wrong is wise. The man who gives in when he is right is married!Ninth: The rich get richer and the poor get children.Tenth: Middle age is when it takes longer to rest than to get tired.Eleventh: You never know how many friends you have until you rent a cottage in Pune.Twelfth: You can’t tell how deep a puddle is until you step in it.Thirteenth: Virtue is its own punishment.Fourteenth: By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he is too old to go anywhere.Fifteenth: Prayer must never be answered. If it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes a correspondence.Fifteenth: An asylum for the sane would be empty in this world.You don’t get it! You belong to this world!Sixteenth: It is always the best policy to speak the truth unless you are, of course, an exceptionally good liar.Seventeenth: He who does not mind a big belly will hardly mind anything else.Devageet, contemplate as much as you can, but it will not lead you anywhere. Anything that can bring you some light, some conclusion, is not contemplation, it is meditation.It has been an old fallacy that meditation also needs an object to meditate upon. The very word ‘meditation’ is wrong because it gives the idea that you have to meditate upon something. Meditation simply means that you don’t have anything left to meditate upon. All is empty: there is no object, no chanting, no mantra, no sutra…just pure emptiness. And suddenly all your energy of awareness turns upon yourself, without any effort on your part.And the turning of the energy of awareness upon yourself is the ultimate experience of life, of light, of everything that is really valuable; everything that cannot be purchased but can be attained, everything that is not a commodity anybody else can give you but is something that you already have – but you have never looked inside.Looking inside is meditation – just pure looking inwards, a turning of the eyes inwards one hundred and eighty degrees, and you have arrived home. Not a single step has to be taken, because you are not going anywhere; you are simply coming from here to here. You are already there where you need to be, just you are not aware. Hence, meditation can be called awareness, watchfulness, alertness, witnessing – but it is not thinking. Contemplation is thinking; it will not lead you anywhere.No philosopher has reached to any conclusion that solves the ultimate question of life, Who am I? But you are not to think about it…what will you think about it?There are many people who have followed Maharishi Ramana. His teaching was very simple – he was a simple man, uneducated, not learned. He had escaped from his home when he was only seventeen. He escaped because his father died. When the whole family was weeping and crying, and the neighbors were preparing to take the dead body to the funeral pyre, nobody noticed that Ramana had disappeared.The experience of the death of his father became a tremendous revolution in Ramana’s mind. He was only seventeen, the only son of a poor family, and he escaped to the mountains. He remained his whole life on the mountain of Arunachal where he did nothing but just sit and watch inside. He never asked anybody anything. He had no master, he had nobody to guide him, but just sitting silently watching his own mind, he transcended his mind and he came to know himself.And by knowing himself he came to know the ultimate bliss – the ecstasy that surrounded Gautam Buddha, the enlightenment that was radiating from Mahavira, the joy, the dance of all those who have awakened. So whoever was asking him, “What are we supposed to do?” he had only one answer his whole life: “Meditate on ‘Who am I?’”But people have misunderstood him…even such a simple statement. He was not saying, “Contemplate,” he was not saying, “Think about ‘Who am I?’” – what can you think? Either you know or you don’t know; thinking is impossible. What will you think? If you start you will think, “This is my name, this is my country, this is my family, this is my race, this is my caste, this is my profession….” But what will you find by doing this? You will not find out who you are. These things are all on the periphery.But Ramana was not a master in the sense that he could explain to people that watching the mind, the whole process of the mind, the whole traffic of thoughts…Even “Who am I?” is a thought; don’t get stuck to it. Just watch that thought too, and a moment comes when all thinking disappears – just by watching. Just as you bring light into a dark room and darkness disappears, as you bring watchfulness to your mind, mind disappears.And the disappearance of the mind is the beginning of knowing yourself.This is the highest peak of consciousness, and unless a man achieves it, he has wasted his life in trivia. He lived only in name; in fact he vegetated. He may have been a very rich vegetable…They say there are only two kinds of vegetables, cabbage and cauliflower; the cabbage category is uneducated, and the cauliflower is a cabbage with college degrees. But there is not much difference.If you really want to live and not to vegetate, meditation is the only way; and meditation means no-mind…just silence.Osho,You have spoken to us about being in the world yet not of it. How come you have not spoken to us about being in the commune yet not of it?I have spoken about being in the world but not of it. A commune is not a community, a commune is not a world, a commune is not a society. A commune is a very friendly gathering of people who live in the world but are not of the world.A commune is not an organization, it is simply the gathering of individuals. It does not take away anybody’s individuality. It does not destroy your dignity, your pride, your self-respect. On the contrary, it gives you dignity, respect, love: it accepts you as you are. It does not demand that you should be somebody else, then only will you be thought worthy; it does not ask you to be a saint. It simply loves you as you are. That’s why in the commune there is no question at all…How can I say to you, “Be in the commune but don’t belong to it”? The commune is basically individuals who have learned to be in the world and not of the world. That statement is true about the world, because the world tries to strangle you, the world tries to make you a prisoner in a thousand and one ways. The commune gives you total freedom to be yourself; there is no question of belonging to it. Each individual exists as an individual, not as a part of the commune.In the larger world each individual is only a cog in the wheel, he does not exist as himself. He is only a number, just like in the armies. A soldier dies…on the board of the office appears the notice that “number sixteen has died.” In the army names are not recognized, but only numbers.You will be surprised what the psychology is behind it; there is tremendous meaning. If your name is recognized, then you have a wife, you have children, you have old parents, an old father, an old mother, who must be waiting for you, who must be praying that you come back home alive. If you have a name, you are irreplaceable; but if you are just a number – number sixteen…Numbers don’t have wives, they don’t have children, they don’t have parents – nobody is waiting for them. In fact numbers can be replaced, but names cannot be, individuals cannot be. Hence for centuries armies have been changing people into numbers. So when somebody looks at the board – how many numbers have died – he does not feel anything about their wives, their children, their father, their mother, their friends, all their hopes, all their prayers…. It is a very cunning strategy to deceive people. And these numbers can be immediately replaced by other numbers; somebody else will become number sixteen. There is no problem in replacing numbers.Society also, in a more subtle way, makes you just a part; it never allows you total freedom to be yourself. You are a husband, you are a wife, you are a father, you are a brother…you are never yourself, you are somebody else. There are a thousand and one expectations from you to be fulfilled; those are your chains. There are responsibilities and duties; those are your prisons.In a commune you don’t have a duty, you don’t have a responsibility. You don’t have to be somebody else to be worthy, to be respected, to be prestigious. Just as you are, in your utter nudeness, you are accepted, loved. Your very being is enough, nothing more is needed.You don’t ask a roseflower to be somebody else, and you don’t ask a lotus to be somebody else. A marigold is as beautiful as the rose. The world would be poorer if there were no marigolds, and only roses. The world is richer because more variety is there. Each individual in a commune is unique; in the world he is just a carbon copy. In the commune, everybody is original; in the world, only a true copy.The world expects you to follow, imitate – everything others are doing you should do. The commune does not ask anything of you; you should simply do what is spontaneous to you, what you feel like doing. You should allow yourself absolute freedom for your potential to blossom. Hence I have not talked about the other part of your question, because that will be against the very idea of the commune.A commune is not an alternative society.A commune is a brotherhood of rebellious souls.Bernie was more than a little annoyed when a neighbor telephoned at 3:00 a.m. and complained, “Your dog is barking so loudly that I can’t sleep!” The neighbor hung up before he could reply.The following morning at 3:00 a.m. Bernie called his neighbor and said, “I don’t have a dog!”This is your world – utterly insane! That’s why I say that unfortunately you have to be in it. Be, but don’t belong to it; keep yourself as much unimpressed, uninfluenced by others as possible. Keep your originality; don’t lose it in the crowd.The young bride was inconsolable, in spite of the fact that her dead, seventy-five-year-old husband had left her ten million dollars in his will. Her friends tried to make her understand: “You are so young,” they said. “You have a great life ahead, and ten million dollars! He had to die sooner or later.”“You don’t understand,” she sobbed. “He was the greatest lover. We lived next door to the church and he used to make love to me by the sound of the church bells – ding-dong, ding-dong. And he would be alive today if it wasn’t for that damn fire truck!”That’s why I say: Don’t belong to this world. Be in it, but be alert that you don’t get lost in the madness that is all over the earth.Old man Finkelstein, aged eighty-five, went to a sperm bank to make a deposit. The young woman at the reception was skeptical. “Are you sure that you want to do this?” she asked.“Yes,” said old Finkelstein. “I feel it is my duty to give something from myself to the world.”The woman gave him a jar and directed him to a room down the hall. When thirty minutes had passed and he did not return, the girl began to worry that he might have had a heart attack. But just then the old man came out of the room and approached the woman.“Listen,” he said, “I tried it with one hand, then I tried it with two hands, then I got it up and hit it on the sink, then I ran warm water on it, then cold water over it, and I still can’t get the lid of the jar open!”It is better not to be part of this insane world! Remain sane. Insanity is normal in the world – that’s why you don’t detect it. Once you understand that it is the normal insanity, and you start looking deeply into it, you will be immensely surprised that you are living in a big madhouse.The commune is a rebellion, it is not a revolution. A revolution creates an alternative society. For example, what happened in Russia was a revolution; it created an alternative society. But that society is as insane as any other society; perhaps it has different names for its insanity, but nothing has changed.Seventy years after the revolution, people are standing in queues just to get bread – even today. Seventy years ago they revolted against the czar to make a new world where nobody will be poor, but what actually happened is that they have created a world where nobody is rich. They have brought equality to the world, that’s certainly true: they have made everybody equally poor. People in Russia, which is one sixth of the whole world, are living in a concentration camp.I have been in America, and my sannyasins in Russia are trying for me to enter into Russia some day. Today they must have gathered to celebrate – they have informed me that they will be gathering at the same time as we are. They have to gather in basements. They have to read books silently, “underground,” so nobody can hear.The KGB, the Intelligence Department, has caught hold of twenty sannyasins and has interrogated them continuously for weeks, harassed them just because they had my books. They have taken away all their books, and they were trying to force them to tell who the other sannyasins are. And because they were not telling, they were harassed continuously in the middle of the night; they would be called to the police station and the whole night continuous interrogation…and this is revolution!Man has become even more a slave than he was ever before. Man was not such a slave even in the days of the czar before the revolution; society was not so dominant and so afraid of people and their freedom.America makes claims of democracy. I lived there for five years, and there is no democracy at all. It is one of the most hypocritical societies; it is deceiving the whole world in the name of democracy. It is another kind of dictatorship. But the whole world is like this….I have been refused entry by twenty-one countries. Even before I had applied for a tourist visa, the German parliament decided and ordered all the borders and all the airports that if I try to enter into the country from anywhere I am not allowed…not only that I am not allowed in the country, my airplane has not to be allowed to land at any airport.What kind of world have we made?I have not done any harm to those people. I have never been in their country. And what harm can I do if my airplane just lands for refueling in their international airport? – and why do you call it an international airport? In what way can I affect their morality, their religion, their tradition?I was never aware that people can be so afraid of rational thinking, of intelligent behavior. I had never thought that the whole world lives under different kinds of superstitions. They are so afraid that somebody may create an upheaval – at least in the younger generation – by making them aware of their superstitions.But to live under superstitions is to live blindly. That’s why I say: don’t belong to this world. This is not the world for human beings, this is not the world for intelligent people; this is an ugly world created by millions of years of superstition and darkness, exploited by the religious leaders, politicians and so-called moralists. They have all proved to be parasites – and nothing else.A commune is not an alternative society. A commune is simply a brotherhood without any organization, without any hierarchy. Nobody is your religious leader and nobody is your political leader. Everybody is simply allowed to be his natural self, without any judgment and without any evaluation.Osho,I found out that my two basic interests are sex and meditation. Am I doing right? I want to be your favorite disciple. What to do? Which is the worst question to ask you?You have asked it! You say your interests are two: sex and meditation. If sex is your interest, forget all about meditation. When you get tired of sex, fed up with it, then the same energy that was involved in sex can be used for meditation. But you can’t have both together – that will be like riding on two horses together. Either you have sex, or you have meditation.But one thing you have to understand: you cannot have meditation unless you have transcended sex. But transcendence should not be understood in the old ways as repression. Transcendence is experience, so much experience that you don’t think anymore about attraction, infatuation.Sex simply drops like dry leaves from the trees.It is not that you have to make some effort. If you have to make some effort to drop it, it will remain with you. And if it is there, meditation is impossible; it won’t let you be silent. It is one of the most torturous biological slaveries. It is good to get rid of it by experiencing it with totality and intensity – don’t think of meditation at all. Sex, lived totally, will bring you to meditation; and then meditation will be very easy, because there will be no biological pull against it. Your so-called priests, monks, saints, cannot meditate.Even a man like Mahatma Gandhi, at the age of seventy, was having sexual dreams. This was the result of a whole life of repression. And finally at the age of seventy-five he started to sleep with young naked girls.His disciples, who had become the rulers of the country – he was the greatest spiritual and political leader, both – tried to hide this fact; the masses of the country should not know about it. They protected him in every way. The news should not become common; people should not come to know about it. There was a danger that he might lose all his saintliness. People have respected him, followed him…and before his death, he will see himself fallen, failed.They tried to persuade him to stop this, but he had his explanations and excuses. He used to tell them, “This is an experiment to check on my celibacy – whether I am really celibate or not.”Mind is very cunning. Nobody in the world has ever checked celibacy this way before. If you are celibate, I don’t think you will not know whether you are or not, whether the idea of the other sex comes to your mind or not. You don’t need any test. You yourself will be enough to know whether your mind is visited by sexual ideas, dreams, fantasies, or not.But the reality was he was tortured…and the reason was not that he was insincere; he was a very sincere man, but he followed a wrong path sincerely. Always remember: just sincerity is not going to help. You can be very honest, very sincere, very arduous…but if you are on a wrong path all your sincerity will lead you not to the goal you wanted to reach, but exactly to its opposite.Gandhi could never understand what meditation is, and that was one of his greatest failures. He could not understand that you can be free from any desire only if you have lived it completely, entirely. If something has remained unlived it is going to haunt you.You are saying sex and meditation are your two basic interests. Please have one basic interest! And sex is absolutely first, because that is your biological bondage. You have to get free of it, and the way to get free of it is not to fight with it – that’s what religious people have been doing for centuries. They have not succeeded.Not a single person has succeeded in transcending sex by fighting it, by repressing it. Live it! – and don’t live it with guilt, don’t live it as if it is something wrong, it is a sin. It is not. It is neither a sin nor a crime, it is an absolutely natural way of reproducing. You are not responsible for it.You are produced through sex. Your every cell is sexual. Nature has found a way to go on reproducing life in new forms; sex is simply a methodology which nature has chosen. You cannot fight with nature. Nature is vast and tremendously strong, but you can get beyond it, and the way beyond is through it – not by fighting, but by understanding, experiencing…. And the more you become experienced, capable of understanding, it is absolutely easy to move your energy into the second stage of evolution: from sex to meditation.Meditation is very simple if sex has been lived completely without any fear, any repression, any guilt. My own understanding is that by the time…just as at the age of fourteen you become interested in sex, if you live perfectly and totally and sincerely – religiously – your sexual life, by the age of forty-two you will be out of it.Life has seven year cycles. If you take as an average seventy years, it has ten cycles of seven years. The first seven years you are absolutely innocent – you are just as a saint should be. Your second seven years are a preparation for sex; slowly, slowly, the snake of sex starts uncoiling within you. By the age of fourteen you are mature and you can reproduce children. From fourteen to twenty-one your sexual energy is at its highest peak, exactly between fourteen and twenty-one: that means seventeen and a half is the climax of sexual energy.But this society has lived with such repressive and unnatural, unscientific ideas that these are the years when you are told to be celibate. And these are the years when you could have lived sex, and celibacy would have come by itself by the time you are forty-two.Between twenty-one and twenty-eight, sex is very normal, very natural. From twenty-eight to thirty-five, sex starts declining. From thirty-five to forty-two, sex reaches its ultimate decline. From forty-two to forty-nine, sex disappears. That’s why in ancient India the wise people decided that by the time one is fifty-one should start preparing for vanprasth. His face should be now towards the mountains, towards the forest – that is the meaning of vanprasth. He is still in the world, but now his whole consciousness has turned and he is getting ready to move into the deep forest to be alone. The days of meditation have come.By the time a person is fifty his children will be nearabout twenty-five. They must be getting married, they must be getting into a profession. The father can look forward to twenty-five years more…these are the twenty-five years, from fifty to seventy-five, that he can watch – he can live in the world yet not be of the world. He can watch his children slowly taking over. And after seventy-five all his interest in the world will have disappeared; then meditation will be his only interest.But this is just a formal categorization. It depends on you and your intensity of living. You can be beyond sex by the time you are thirty-five. You can be beyond sex without much difficulty when you are forty-two. But it is unfortunate that people die still as foolish as young people.Psychologists have come to the conclusion that most people die with the idea of sex…that is their last idea. They may be repeating the name of God, but inside they are thinking, If only it was possible one time more…! They have not lived their life wholeheartedly. That’s why something that should have ended at forty-two has continued up to eighty, up to ninety.Live your first interest and be finished with it. But be finished with it by living it, joyously! There is nothing wrong, there is no sin. Then meditation will become absolutely simple and easy, because your mind will not be burdened with sexual infatuation and desires. That is your only bondage. All other bondages are secondary, all other bondages are branches of your sexuality.For what do you want money? For what do you want power? Have you watched that all other interests are centered on sex? A man without money will not be able to get the most beautiful woman; a man without power will not be able to get the most beautiful woman. All your so-called desires are centered on a single fact, a single interest, and that is sex. Just live it, and live it joyously without any fear of hell or heaven. There is no hell, no heaven.Once you are out of sex, once it has disappeared like smoke disappearing into the sky and you cannot see it, then meditation is so easy. You don’t have to make any effort, you have just to sit silently with your eyes closed, relaxed, and you will find meditation is there.Sex and meditation…? You will not be able to live sex fully, and that will go on lingering with you. And you will not be able to meditate because sex will continuously interfere.You know the stories of the old seers, that even at their height, in their old age, after a long, long preparation of austerities, fasting, chanting, studying holy scriptures – doing everything – when they come to the point of realization, the stories say that suddenly apsaras from heaven…Apsaras are nothing but heavenly prostitutes, specially provided for the saints. They are sent down to disturb these poor fellows’ meditation.This is strange, why should anybody be bothered about these poor fellows who have been torturing themselves in every possible way – starving, fighting with their body, repressing their sex? There is nobody who is sending these apsaras, and these apsaras are nowhere. It is just their own repressed sexuality that starts coming up in fantasies, in hallucinations.And it is so simple…if you want to experiment with what hallucination is, just go to a mountain cave alone, fast three weeks, and don’t meet anyone. By the end of the second week you will start talking to yourself – and not only will you talk, you will answer also! By the third week you will start seeing people…if you are a man you will see women; if you are a woman you will see men. By the fourth week you will not be able to make a distinction at all whether the woman that you see sitting in front of you in the cave is real or an hallucination…!Just four weeks’ experiment and you will know how apsaras have come. They will come to you too; they have not stopped the process of coming. But it is simply the hallucination of your repressed desire, so deeply repressed that it takes revenge – with a vengeance.My suggestion to you is, first sex, because it is more basic to your body, to your life; it is the foundation of life. Meditation is the highest peak, but sex is the roots. First think of the roots.Meditation is the flowers. They come at the very end, at the very top of the tree; they will come. But don’t try both together, otherwise you will remain wishy-washy, always halfhearted…meditating and thinking about sex, making love and thinking about Gautam Buddha! This will simply drive you crazy.And you are asking, “I want to be your favorite disciple.”I feel scared! Please just remain a disciple! I don’t have any favorite disciples, because to have favorite disciples means people who will betray you, people who will become Judases, people who will assassinate you. People who are first trying to be favorite disciples soon would like you to move over, give place to them; now they want to be masters. I don’t want any favorite disciples. This is simple politics. Just keep to the space where you are. I am feeling perfectly at ease; when you come too close…I am allergic!And you are saying, “What to do? Which is the worst question to ask you?” You cannot ask it. What worse question can you ask? You have asked it. But I can answer you, as bad as you like! Just I am looking for a worse…! So just be patient! It is really the worst, so just be quiet.An English lady was on holiday in the wild west. One day she decided to visit an Indian reservation and became interested in the number of feathers in the men’s headdresses. So she asked one brave, and he replied, “Me only have one feather because me only have one squaw.”Thinking this was a joke, she asked another brave. “Me only have four feathers because me only have four squaws,” he replied.Somewhat perturbed, the English lady decided to ask the chief, who had a magnificent headdress full of feathers. “Me Chief,” he replied, “so me fuck them all! Big, small, short, tall…me fuck them all!”The lady was horrified. “You ought to be hung!” she cried.“You damned right,” said the Chief, “me hung like a buffalo!”The English lady cried, “You don’t have to be so hostile!”“Hoss-style, dog-style, any style…me fuck them all!”With tears in her eyes, the lady cried, “Oh, dear….”“No deer,” said the Chief, “Deer run too fast and asshole too high!”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I need my guitar to play my music.I hear your blessed music, but I don't see your guitar.Osho, what is your instrument?And a few sutras for me too.Milarepa, neither the music is mine nor the guitar. The music belongs to existence, and the guitar belongs to you. You are the guitar, and this whole vast universe is the music.I am at the most just a passage for the music to reach to the guitar. That’s why you don’t see my guitar – because you don’t see yourself. Who are you? On whom am I playing my music? You hear my words and you also hear my silences, and naturally you feel a certain music surrounding me. That music is your response, your love, your trust.In a way I am not here. It has been a long time since I left this small house for the eternity. It is the compassion of eternity that this small house still goes on continuing to function. It is also your love, your prayers, your gratitude that helps my body-mind system to function. I don’t have any desire to be fulfilled. All is fulfilled – and when all is fulfilled a music arises. I don’t have any ambition.Just the other day Hasya was telling me about one beautiful man who is being followed by many people. Lovingly he is called Dada. Bhadra’s husband is his follower, and he stays at Bhadra’s house. He told Bhadra, “I agree with Osho on every point except one – that is, he wants to save the world. I have been around the world,” he said, “and I am fed up, and I don’t see any hope for the world.”He is going to come to Pune. I told Hasya to meet him and tell him one thing, “You must have had a desire to save the world and you are feeling frustrated.”I don’t have to save anybody. The world is perfectly saved – this moment at least. Why not enjoy this moment?I love talking to my people without any purpose. It is just my joy seeing your faces, seeing your intrinsic capacities. Who cares about the world? – if it dies next moment, we will still be playing guitars, singing, dancing, celebrating a last farewell to the world.Who has given the idea to this man Dada that I am a savior? It is enough to save yourself. I am not a savior and I am not at all interested what happens to the world ultimately. I enjoy the idea, the dream that some miracle will happen and this world will be saved, but it is not my goal; I am not an optimist. Only optimists turn into pessimists. Dada must have been thinking himself to be a savior, and seeing the whole world he is feeling frustrated. I have never felt frustrated by anything, because I have never expected in the very beginning. If you don’t expect you avoid frustration.I am a man of total acceptance.If this world exists, good; if it does not exist, better. But why should I be puzzled about it? It is my joy, and this joy is not the kind which makes people serious.I have looked into Dada’s books before; his famous book is Beyond the Mind. Strange that a man who knows beyond mind should be frustrated…. Who can be frustrated? No-mind has never been heard to be frustrated. And he thinks he has given up the idea, and this is his disagreement with me. He has given up the idea; I never had the idea. And whatever he is saying is just a repetition of J. Krishnamurti.J. Krishnamurti has left many orphans in the world, illegitimate children, because he never accepted them as his disciples. But deep down they enjoyed the idea that without being a disciple they are gathering so much wisdom. Soon all of them have become masters. I have come across many masters who have never been disciples. It is simply ego.With J. Krishnamurti’s idea that “nobody is my disciple,” you feel relaxed: this is great you don’t have to love this man, you don’t know the beauties of grace that exist between the master and the disciple. You enjoy only one thing: the ego that you are nobody’s disciple. And then these who are nobody’s disciples start collecting disciples – and of all that they are saying, not a single thing is original; it is all borrowed.I have told Hasya and Kaveesha that when Dada comes here, “Encounter him and put him right. He is misguiding many people.”I am a man who lives moment to moment, and I want those who love me to learn the art of living moment to moment. What happens tomorrow we will see tomorrow. At least one thing is certain: whatever happens, our blissfulness, our ecstasy, our dance, our song will continue – if not on this planet, then on another planet.There are millions of solar systems, and each solar system has hundreds of planets, each planet has many moons. Our earth is very poor, with just one moon. Our sun is mediocre; it is six thousand times bigger than the earth, but compared to other suns, which are millions of times bigger than this sun, it stands nowhere in the queue.What is the problem? We have not asked this planet to be born; it was existence’s decision to be here. Why should one worry if existence wants us to take our song and our music and our consciousness to another planet? We will be there…one thing is certain: this commune is going to exist. The whole existence is there….Ronald Reagan cannot manage to destroy the universe. This poor earth will be destroyed…that too is possible if existence deep down wills to destroy it. Or perhaps the earth itself has become old, tired, fed up with all kinds of nonsense that man has been doing, and it wants to go into eternal sleep. It is a living being.But these are not our problems. Our only problem is how to be in this moment, so totally, so intensely that we don’t need another moment. This will be enough to give us fulfillment, contentment, ecstasy, which I don’t think this man Dada has ever glimpsed.Pessimists cannot get it; optimists only hope for it. We are realists, existentialists: we have it right now.It is not a question of getting fed up, it is not a question of hoping for the future. We take the present moment and squeeze the whole juice of it – that’s our religion. Wherever we will be, one thing is certain: we will recognize each other just by the style of squeezing the juice from the present moment.Faces may be different, planets may be different, that does not mean anything. We have a key to recognize our people: in their eyes, in their faces, they are always existential.Milarepa, you are my instrument. Your guitar is my guitar. Your fingers playing on the instruments are my fingers. Can’t you allow that?Ramakrishna was dying. He had a cancer of the throat; he could not eat, could not drink. His disciples continuously were harassing him saying “Why don’t you close your eyes and tell the mother goddess?” – he was the priest of a temple of mother goddess Kali – “Just saying, ‘Remove this cancer’ will be enough.”Ramakrishna said, “Don’t be angry with me. I have tried it, but the moment I close my eyes and I see the mother goddess, I forget about the cancer.”All the disciples gathered with Ramakrishna’s wife, Sharda, and told her, “Now only you can help.”Sharda went to Ramakrishna and said, “This time you are not going to forget the cancer. Why are you making so many people miserable?”And Ramakrishna respected his wife so much; she was almost a mother to him rather than a wife. He touched her feet the very moment he had been shown her as a candidate for marriage. Everybody thought, “This boy is mad. Who touches the feet of the wife? – and she is not your wife yet.”And the first thing he called to her was, “Mother, don’t forget me; I had chosen you.”Everybody in the village tortured him, “You idiot, the wife is not called mother. And touching her feet…” He had three rupees. He offered those three rupees to the feet of Sharda. The family of Sharda also became puzzled: “The man seems to be crazy.”But Sharda insisted that if she will marry anyone, that is the man: “The innocence, the purity…he is no ordinary human being. He has something of the beyond already” – and he was only thirteen years old.Since Sharda married Ramakrishna he always called her mother. It doesn’t look good not to follow the advice of the mother. He said, “I will try one time more, and because you are telling me, I will put my whole energy to remember what I have to say to the mother goddess.”He closed his eyes…and then opened them laughing. He said, “Sharda, call all the disciples in who have made you their mouthpiece, because I remembered and I told her. And she said, ‘Ramakrishna, you have been using this throat for so many years. Now you have so many throats, your disciples, your lovers – why can’t you eat through their throats, why can’t you drink through their throats? Why cling to this body? Why not spread into everybody’s body who loves you, who will welcome you in the silences of his heart?’”There was great silence, there was nothing to say.Milarepa, you hear my music; that music comes from the beyond. I cannot claim any monopoly, any copyright on it. And you want to see my guitar – just look at your guitar, just look at your hands. In deep love a synchronicity happens. You start doing things which my deepest being wanted to do, but I don’t know music; I cannot even recognize which is a guitar and which is a harmonium and which is a saxophone.I have never been a singer, not even a bathroom singer. I have lived in many houses in this country with many friends, and many times people have asked, “At least we were thinking you will be singing in the bathroom, but you don’t sing?”I don’t know singing…I am a song. I don’t know singing – you will have to sing in me. You will have to allow yourself to be totally available to me.You can dance and it will be my dance.You can sing and it will be my song.You can play on instruments, but your fingers will be in synchronicity with me, and I am in synchronicity with the whole. So it is just formal to say that you are my songs, that you are my music. I am just a small passage; the beyond comes through me to your eyes. And because it is of the beyond it has a tremendous capacity to transform you.I have not said a single word to you on my own; hence I can claim originality in the literal sense of the word. Ordinarily originality means nobody else has said it, only I am saying it; that is using the word wrongly. Originality should mean it is coming from the origins…origins of life, origins of love, origins of existence.And you are asking, “And a few sutras for me too.”Milarepa, that is not your business. Devageet has gone mad contemplating on transdental medication. You are already crazy, you can go far – Devageet you can leave far behind – so I am a little worried about you. But whatever has to be, has to be. These are a few sutras for you:…If your neighbor does you harm, just buy each of his children a drum.…All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and the success is sure.…Sex is what happens between a man and a woman before they get to know each other.…Reality is what your mother thinks you ought to live in.…You know you are getting old when the girls at the office start confiding in you.…A woman can keep one secret – the secret of her age.…Except for that, she cannot keep any secret!…God invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.…A man never knows what a fool he is until he hears himself imitated by one.…It is natural. How can you see your face without a mirror?……Be nice to people on your way up because you will meet them on your way down.…A mistake is evidence that someone tried to do something.…You can see the mistake all over the world. This is the only proof that God tried to do something. Perhaps he was the creator. Creation may not need some creator, but mistakes need someone to do them. This whole world is a mistake, and I think this is the only proof that God may have been trying to do something….…If a person does not learn from the mistakes of others, he won’t live long enough to make all of them himself.…The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.…Everyone is as God made him, and often a good deal worse.…Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.…It is difficult to climb a ladder with your hands in your pockets, but it is possible if your hands are in someone else’s pockets…Then you can climb any ladder. The people you see at the top, those big chunks, their hands are always in somebody else’s pocket.So whenever you meet the so-called leaders, popes, shankaracharyas, take care about your pockets. They are not interested in you, they are interested only in your pockets….…Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.…The hardest task of a woman’s life is to prove to a man that his intentions are serious.…How do you know your therapy group is right for you?One: It is too expensive.Two: All your friends have done it.Three: It focuses on problems you never knew you had.Osho,Every time I come to you, I feel like one of those ancient warriors who came to pay his respects to the emperor. He would enter into his presence, take off his helmet and put it at the feet of the emperor.The only difference is that I am putting my head at your feet. More so when I ask you a question, and even trembling inside, I put my head as close as possible, for you to cut it with your sword.But every time, to my infinite surprise, you shower the nectar of your grace on my poor head, the fragrance of your compassion, and an ocean of love in which I find myself drowning deeper and deeper each time.Osho, what has happened to your sword?How many times will I have to provoke you to cut my head?Sarjano, it surprises me to know that you have a head. Some idiot guy must have given you the idea.I have not lost my sword – you have forgotten your head somewhere…maybe drowned in spaghetti!…or do you prefer pizza?But as far as I know you don’t have any head. I have tried to cut it, but what to cut? Certainly you are brave enough to go on trying again and again and again. This does not suit the Italian; this is the American stupidity! Try again and again and again…For what? – for the sake of trying. Everybody in America is so busy trying, and nobody knows for what. Trying itself has become the goal; speed itself has become the destination.But Italians are far more loving beings, far more centered in the heart. Perhaps that’s why you go on living without a head – the heart is enough. And no master in the whole of history has cut anybody’s heart with the sword. But I am not a reliable man, so you be alert!A story for you…The English pirate ship was alone on the high seas. Suddenly the lookout came running. “Captain! Captain!” he cried, “there are five Spanish galleons on the horizon!”“Quick!” said the captain. “Bring me my red coat.”So he did, and the captain put it on, and the pirate ship defeated the Spanish galleons.The next day the lookout came running again. “Captain! Captain! There are ten Spanish galleons on the horizon!”“Okay,” said the captain. “Bring me my red coat.”He put it on and they defeated the ten galleons.“Captain,” asked the lookout. “Would you tell me why you always ask for your red coat before we go into battle?”“Oh, that’s because if I’m wounded, the blood will not show; then the men will not be frightened and we will fight to victory!” the captain replied.The next day the lookout came running. “Captain! Captain!” he cried, “there are a hundred Spanish galleons on the horizon!”At these words the captain’s face turned white, and he called to his lookout, “Quick, bring me my brown pants!”Just be alert!I love you, so I’m going to kill you – that’s certain. Love is a sure killer. But I kill gradually, because in my experience if you kill suddenly, people start escaping. Gradually, they don’t know what is happening, they come to know only when they are gone.And this place is for only those who are ready to be gone. You become your ultimate flowering only when you are not. It is a strange fundamental law of existence, and there is no way to change it.The more you are, the less you are.The less you are, the more you are.If you are all, then you don’t exist. If you are a nothingness, you have tasted existence for the first time.So, Sarjano, while I go on taking small pieces from your ego, from your so-called personality, you keep yourself engaged in spaghetti and pizza. It is a perfect art!The authentic master kills the disciple, so that he also can become a pure nothingness, and can become one with the universe. The ancient sages of this country have said that the master is a death. Unless you find a master who can be a death to you, don’t waste time. Go on searching, somewhere you will find a master who is going to erase you completely. He will give you your real and authentic being.Your question is right: I have not lost my sword. It is just because you don’t have your head, so you can’t see it. But you can feel, and that is far better – to function through the heart.Osho,Kahlil Gibran has said, “I will tell you a thing you may not know: the most highly sexed beings upon the planet are the creators, the poets, sculptors, painters, musicians – and so it has been from the beginning. And amongst them, sex is a beautiful and exalted gift.”Please talk on sex as part of the creative life of the artist.Kahlil Gibran is a man of tremendous insight. What he says is always significant and worth contemplating over. He has forgotten just one thing, which is natural, because he had no experience of that faraway horizon. He talks about the creators – the poets, the sculptors, the painters, the musicians – but he forgets completely about the awakened ones. It is not right to forget; in fact he had no idea – and they are the highest creators. Poets and sculptors and musicians and dancers are very low categories in comparison to a Gautam Buddha, Bodhidharma, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu.What he is saying is absolutely right: sex is the only energy you have. But you can use it in a destructive way – and that too he has forgotten. An Adolf Hitler or a Joseph Stalin or a Benito Mussolini or Ronald Reagan, these people are all abnormally highly sexual. In a few people the sex energy is so much that they cannot be satisfied by only creating children.This is simply a known fact, that children are created through sex. So sex is certainly a creative force, which can even create life. But there are highly sexed people, and just to produce children is not enough to exhaust their sexuality. They create music; music becomes their outlet. They create art, they create paintings, poetries…and they are thought of always by the society as outsiders, they are not accepted as normal human beings. Something is crazy about them; they are eccentric.So he has forgotten two things. One is that the destructive people are also highly sexed people, but they use their energy in destruction. It is not automatically decisive that a highly sexed person will be always a creator; most probably he will be a destroyer.But he is right that sex creates children, creates painting, creates music, creates sculpture. The world is divided into three kinds of people: the normal sexual people who only create children, the abnormally sexual people who either become destructive, create wars, destroy as much as they can – and the third category, the creators.Kahlil Gibran’s insight is right, but incomplete. He himself is a poet and a painter, but he knows nothing about awakened consciousness. That is the highest point of creation: creating yourself as an immortal. Because it is an inner creation, people don’t count Gautam Buddha as a creator, or Mahavira or Naropa or Tilopa; they don’t consider these people as creators, because they can’t see what they have created. They have created themselves, and that is the greatest creation in the world. Just look at Gautam Buddha, his silence, his peace, his understanding, his clarity, his blissfulness, his ecstasy…unwavering.No enlightened person has ever committed suicide, but the great creators Kahlil Gibran is talking about are well known for two things: either they go mad or they commit suicide. They go mad when their energy cannot find an outlet. They are mad in their paintings, in their poetry – but nothing satisfies, everything falls below their standard. That drives them mad. Almost every great artist in the West has at least once visited the madhouse for a few years. Or when they feel they are exhausted and now there is no more energy left to create, their whole meaning of life disappears. Creation was their meaning. In creating things they had become small gods, and now they are nobody, exhausted, used cartridges. These are the people who commit suicide.Van Gogh I can give you as an example – one of the greatest painters the world has ever known passed through all the stages, so he is a perfect example. He was so mad in creating. He was a poor coal miner’s son, uneducated, but from the very beginning he started painting laborers, old people, children. And whoever looked at them was amazed: his painting was almost photographic.His parents wanted him to be a priest. Fortunately, he did not listen to them. He went to the school to become a priest, but all that he did there was drawings of the professors, the missionaries. He never learned anything else. Finally, he was brought back home. The parents were tired; they told him, “Now you are free. Whatever you want to do…but we are not going to take any financial responsibility.” He was even happy in this situation. He left for Paris.He was Dutch. His younger brother was employed, and out of compassion every week he used to send him the exact money so that he could purchase bread and butter for seven days. He was afraid to send him enough for the whole month, because that would go into purchasing paints and canvases. But he was not aware what he had done to his brother. Out of seven days he used to eat three days – one day here, one day there – and four days he saved money to purchase canvases, colors, brushes, whatever is needed for painting.No man has been so mad that he was dying of hunger and starvation, but that was the only way to paint. And the great difficulty was – otherwise things would have been easier and more comfortable – he did not manage to sell a single painting, because his paintings were the paintings of a genius, and a genius always comes before his time. This existence has strange laws.Now his paintings…only two hundred have been saved. He used to give paintings to his friends just for a cup of tea, just for a packet of cigarettes.Now his paintings are the costliest paintings in the world. The last painting was sold for thirty-five million dollars – that is the record. Never before was any painting sold at thirty million dollars; the last record was only nine million dollars. I don’t think any painting is ever is going to outdo him.Why could people not purchase his paintings? He was ready to give at any price, just the cost price. He worked for days and he was not asking even for labor. They could not understand those paintings; those paintings needed a genius to understand them. He has painted stars, not the way you see them, but as spirals. Now who is going to believe that these are stars? – everybody knows what stars are! Only just this year it has been found that stars are not the way you see them, but the way Vincent van Gogh saw them. Strange, without any scientific instruments without a big lab…tremendous clarity.It took one hundred years for science to find out that his stars are the only right stars, and all other stars painted are just rubbish. The same has happened about his other paintings. If he could have sold his paintings, he could have made more paintings, but he became tired, starved. His only desire was to paint all the phases of the sun, from the sunrise to the sunset, a whole series of paintings.The day that series was complete he had exhausted all his energy. He simply wrote a letter to his brother, “I am not committing suicide. I have burned myself out. But I am dying happily because what I wanted to accomplish is accomplished – I am one of the most contented men. The last painting is complete today.” And he shot himself dead. He was only thirty-three years of age.It is true that you have no other energy than sexual energy. All creation is out of sexual energy. In other words, every creation is a by-product of your sexual energy; even if you become the richest man in the world, that is sexual energy. But Kahlil Gibran has forgotten two things: one, that sexual energy can be destructive; second, that sexual energy never brings you to self-realization, which is the ultimate creation.It seems he was not actually aware. Although he has written books on Jesus, and he spoke in the language of tremendous beauty and poetry, he was looking at Jesus as a poet. He was not aware of Ta Hui or Bodhidharma or Gautam Buddha, and he was not aware what the problem is. In the East, no enlightened person goes mad, no enlightened person commits suicide. Going mad is the function of the mind. Committing suicide is also the function of the mind.And because the enlightened person is beyond mind, there is no question of madness, and there is no question of suicide. He lives, and he lives totally. He lives, and he lives at the very peak of intelligence and understanding and awareness.But I want to add this much to Kahlil Gibran’s statement: that these people are also immensely sexual, perhaps more sexual than the poets, than the singers, than the musicians. They have so much energy that they are capable of self-realization, that they are capable of giving a rebirth to themselves.But basically I agree with the incomplete statement of Kahlil Gibran. I would have loved it if he had made it complete, but he himself was not complete. It is a great exercise of understanding if you look at Kahlil Gibran’s statements, and then you look at Kahlil Gibran’s life. You will be amazed; his life was very ordinary, perhaps below ordinary, and the poetry is reaching to the stars.Because they are not artists of life – they are artists creating objects who have forgotten themselves – their situation is exactly like the scientist’s. A man like Albert Einstein has immense energy, and that energy is sexual, because there is no other energy. The word sex has become so condemned that it is better to say it is life energy, just to protect the energy from the centuries of condemnation.Albert Einstein worked on objects, faraway stars, the speed of light…and he managed to figure it all out. But he never bothered about his own life; he remained focused on the outside.If a poet turns inwards he becomes a mystic.If a scientist turns inwards he becomes a mystic.The energy is the same, but the direction changes.Kahlil Gibran lived a very miserable life, sometimes ugly. He was a man of great anger, quarrelsome, but he has created great poetry. If you just look at his words, they are pure twenty-four-carat gold. But avoid the man, don’t look at him; otherwise your respect for his words will be lost.The poets, the scientists, the musicians and other creators have a double personality, a split personality, some kind of schizophrenia. One part of them goes on creating, and one part lags far behind.The mystic is the only person in existence who is not schizophrenic, who is unique and one, organically one, undivided. His life and his words have the same flavor. But I think Kahlil Gibran in the first place was not capable of knowing the interiority of a mystic; and in the second place, perhaps he was afraid to say that a buddha is created by great abundance of sexual energy. Nobody bothered him, nobody condemned him when he called poets and sculptors and musicians and other creators oversexed. But if he had called Jesus, Gautam Buddha, Mohammed, Moses oversexed, he would have been condemned all over the world.But I want to say that all great people in the world, destructive or creative, are people of so much energy, life energy, life force, that they cannot contain it within themselves; they have to do something. I would like that they all turn inwards, so their life is not a split and an agony, and so it becomes an ecstasy.Joe was sitting at the bar, slowly sipping his drink, when his friend, Mickey, came running in.“Joe,” he shouted, “get over to your house real quick. I just stopped off to see you and I heard a man’s voice in your bedroom. So I looked through your window and I saw your wife in bed with another man.”“Is that so?” said Joe, matter-of-factly. “What does this guy looks like?”“Oh, he’s tall and completely bald,” said Mickey.“And did he have a thick red mustache?” asked Joe.“Right, right!” yelled Mickey.“Did he have a front gold tooth?” asked Joe.“Damn it, you are right!” replied Mickey.“Must be that idiot Dick Roberts,” said Joe. “He will screw anything.”There are people of that category also – no life energy, at the most lukewarm. They never create anything. Even to create children is such a task.And by the way, I should also mention to you – to make Kahlil Gibran’s insight more clear – that no impotent man has been a poet or a sculptor or a scientist; the question of being a mystic does not arise. Perhaps impotency is the worst situation a man can find himself in. But strangely enough all the religions are teaching people to be impotent; they call it celibacy.Because of this idea of celibacy, religions have been absolutely uncreative. The energy was there in people…they could not create, because to create you need an esthetic sense, you need a loving heart, a feeling individuality. To become celibate they have destroyed all these qualities. So the only possibility for their expression of sexual energy is either perverted sex, homosexuality, lesbianism, or destruction in the name of God, in the name of truth, in the name of Christianity, in the name of Islam…. They have been continuously destroying each other.Perhaps nobody has looked at the psychology of why it happens. It has nothing to do with their metaphysics; it has something to do with their inner life force. They cannot contain it…then a crusade, jihad, a religious war – Jews fighting with Mohammedans, Mohammedans killing Jews, Christians killing Mohammedans, Christians killing Jews.Hindus have completely destroyed Buddhism in India. Buddha was the greatest man on the earth in the past history…and he has left such a great impact on every intelligent being in this country. But when he died, within five hundred years the old priesthood of the Hindus, the brahmins destroyed everything that they could.You will not believe that Mohammedans not only killed human beings, they also destroyed great pieces of art, because they were worshipped as religious – beautiful statues of Buddha, great temples.In every ancient well in India there are beautiful statues, because out of fear that their statues would be destroyed, people have thrown them into the wells. So whenever an ancient well is cleaned or looked into, they are surprised…”What is the matter?” In every well are beautiful statues of Mahavira, of Bahubali, of Gautam Buddha.There was no need to destroy the whole statue because a superstition exists all over India that if a statue is a little bit damaged – one ear is missing – it is no more worshipable; it has to be removed. There are millions of statues so beautiful…somebody’s ear is missing, somebody’s nose is missing, somebody’s hand has been cut – that was enough, and they have been thrown out.I happened to be in a city near Katni in a small place in Madhya Pradesh. There are thousands of statues – the village consists only of statues, so beautiful that thousands of people must have worked for thousands of years – but nobody lives there. I inquired, tried to find out in old gazettes of the government, and I found only one reference in an old scripture. That village was the village of sculptors. Being afraid that their statues will be destroyed, they covered their statues with mud and escaped, burned their houses so nobody will think that there is a village.Now it has become a thick forest, wild trees have grown, but it must have been a very great place when it was alive. Those statues show that the village must have contained thousands and thousands of great artists. Now it is a ghost village. Only statues…they have been discovered during the British regime; their mud has been taken away. It was one of the great discoveries.In Khajuraho, one of the most famous cities of temples, there were one hundred temples. It is simply mind-boggling to see a single temple; it takes almost one day, there are so many statues. You cannot find a single inch which is not carved…and huge temples. They were also buried under mud, small mud hills. Only thirty could be saved; the Mohammedans destroyed seventy.They have been discovered again, and there is no sculpture anywhere in the world – I have looked into all kinds of sculpture that existed and exists in the world, but the beauty that Khajuraho sculpture has is just superhuman – so perfect that one cannot believe things can be made so perfect, so beautiful.Religions have only destroyed, because they prevented the creative dimension. In the name of celibacy only two things have happened: destruction and AIDS. These are the two great contributions of all your religions. And if man is intelligent enough, there is no need to say that these religions should disappear. They have done enough harm. We don’t need them at all; we can be religious without religions.I have made you serious again! Once in a while I forget. So for no reason at all, just for a good laugh, because I hate to leave Buddha Hall unless I see you all are rejoicing and laughing…A Polish worker went to a local bank to deposit his wages of one week. Worried about the dire conditions of the Polish economy, he inquired what would happen if the bank collapsed.“All our deposits are guaranteed by the ministry of finance,” the teller replied.“But what if the ministry of finance could not honor the guarantee?” the worker persisted.“In that case the Polish government itself would intercede,” the teller said with growing irritation.“But what if the government would go bankrupt?” the worker asked with undiminished concern.“In that case our socialist comrades in the Soviet Union would naturally come to our assistance,” the teller retorted.“But what if the Soviet Union collapsed?” the Polish worker persisted.“Idiot,” snapped the teller, “is not that worth losing one week’s wages?”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Last night as you were giving sutras for Devageet to contemplate, you went directly from the third to the fifth, without speaking about the fourth. Is there some significance in this?I don’t know much arithmetic…that’s why I continuously go on counting on my fingers! But that is the original way. That’s why there are ten digits in every language – man started to count on his fingers. Because there are ten fingers, that’s why ten is the basic number in all languages.I am an original man.But aside from that, there was really something significant. The fourth I have saved for you. So now I will have to begin from the fourth.The fourth is:…There are four stages of getting old.First, when you forget names.Second, when you forget places.Third, when you forget to zip up.And fourth, when you forget to zip down.The fifth sutra for you:…A ninety-three-year-old man married a ninety-one-year-old lady and they spent the first three days of their honeymoon just trying to get out of the car.…Sixth: Middle age is when you have stopped growing at both ends – and have begun to grow in the middle.…Seventh: An optimist is a man who goes to the window every morning and says, “Good morning, God!”The pessimist goes to the window every morning and says, “Good god – morning!”…Eighth: There are two ways to be rich. One is to have all you want, the other is to be satisfied with all you have.Now I have forgotten the number…I assume it is ninth:…Freedom is a great thing. It means a man is free to do just what his wife pleases.…Tenth: A man does not stop playing because he grows old, he grows old because he stops playing.…Eleventh: Tolerance is sometimes the uncomfortable feeling that the other person may be right after all.…Twelfth: To have average intelligence is to be less stupid than half of the people and more stupid than the other half.…My god, I have forgotten the number! I hope it is thirteenth:…If all else fails, give up.…Fourteenth: It is always best not to tell people your troubles. Half of them are not interested, and the other half are glad you are getting what is coming to you.…Fifteenth: When Henry Ford was asked for the recipe for a long and happy marriage, he replied: “Always stick to the same model.”Sixteenth: A man who can smile when things go wrong has probably just thought of someone to blame it on.…Seventeenth: Inscription on the tombstone of a notorious hypochondriac: “See!”…Eighteenth: A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is one who hopes they are.…Nineteenth: The definition of alimony: “The screwing you get for the screwing you got.”…Twentieth: The ten best years of a woman’s life are between thirty-five and thirty-six.Osho,What is this generation gap? I hear so much about it these days.Two old men of eighty were sitting in their club when one said, “Do you think there is as much love, as much fun going on as there used to be?”“Yes, certainly,” said the other, “but there is a whole new bunch doing it.”That’s what the generation gap is.A large crowd had been waiting quietly at the foot of a mountain. Moses had been gone for hours. Suddenly his white robe was seen fluttering in the breeze, and now the lawgiver stood before his flock: “People of Israel! I have been with the Lord for seven hours and I now have some good news, and some bad news….”“Speak, O Moses!” shouted the crowd.“The good news,” says Moses, “is that I have managed to bring the number of commandments down to ten!”The people cheered. Then they cried, “Moses, what is the bad news?”Moses sadly replied, “Adultery is still in.”For the new generation it is no longer in. That’s the generation gap. Now the whole meaning of adultery has changed: it simply means to be adult.There has never been any generation gap in the past. Hence, one has to look deeply into it because this is the first time in the whole history of man that even the expression “generation gap” has been used. And the gap is growing bigger and bigger every day. Things seem to be unbridgeable.There is certainly a great psychology behind it. In the past there used to be no young age. You will be surprised to know about it: children used to become adult without being young. A six-year-old, seven-year-old child would start working with his father; if the father was a carpenter he would learn carpentry, or at least help his father. If the father was a farmer he would go to the farm with the father, would help him with the animals, cows, horses. By the age of six or seven he had already entered into life. By the age of twenty he would be married and have a few children.In the past there was no “younger generation” hence there was no gap. One generation followed another generation in a continuity, with no gap between them. By the time the father died his son would have already replaced him in every field of his life. There was no time to play and there was no time to get educated; there were no schools, no colleges, no universities.The new generation is a by-product of many things. In the past the only way of learning was to participate with the older generation, work with them – that was the only way to learn. And of course the older generation was always respected, because they were the teachers. They knew, and you were ignorant; the ignorant necessarily respected the knowledgeable. Hence in the past it was almost inconceivable that the younger people would disrespect the old people, or could even think in their dreams that they knew more than the older people. Knowledge was very decisive.The people who knew had the power, and the people who did not, had no power. It was in those old days that the proverb must have been coined: “knowledge is power.” That was the only criterion in life, so you never heard of any revolt of the young against the old.This generation has come to a new, totally new stage. The child never goes following in his father’s footsteps. He goes to the school; his father goes to his shop or to the office or to the farm. By the time he comes back from his university he is twenty-five years old. For these twenty-five years he has no connection with the older generation. His only connection is financial; they help him financially. In these twenty-five years many things happen: one, he knows more than his parents because his parents had been to school at least twenty, twenty-five years before. In these twenty-five years, knowledge has taken such quantum leaps – it has grown so much….I was very much puzzled when I was in the university: my professor of psychology was quoting names and books which had been out of date for almost three decades. And because I was so interested to know everything – before I entered into myself, I had to know everything that was happening around – I was continuously in the library.And it is impossible to respect a professor who knows less than you know, who is outmoded. He should be ashamed to remain in the seat of the professor. That’s what I told my professor of psychology: “It is simply undignified for you to remain in that seat, because you don’t know what is happening in the field of psychology today. You know what was happening thirty years before. Since the day you left your university you have not touched a single book.”He was very angry. He said, “Who says that?”I said, “Come with me, I have checked in the university register.” For twenty years he had been a professor in that university and he had not taken a single book from the library. I had looked into twenty years’ registers, just to check whether this man had ever had issued in his name even a single book.He could not believe…when I took him to the library he said, “Where are you taking me?”I said, “This is the library.”He said, “But what is the point of it? What are we going to do in the library? How are you going to prove that I have not been reading?”I said, “You just come in.” And I had those twenty years’ registers there, and I told him, “These are the registers for all twenty years and your name is not mentioned even a single time. And now I am coming with you to your home.”He said, “For what?”I said, “Just to see what you go on doing, how many books on modern psychology are in your home. I am giving you a chance: perhaps you have your own collection and you don’t come to the library.”He said, “No, there is no need!”I said, “You don’t be worried. I have been there this morning already – I don’t take chances. I asked your wife and she said, ‘That idiot, all he reads is the newspaper.’”Education has created one of the most important elements of the generation gap. Teachers complain that students don’t respect them – why should they?When addressing a meeting of professors, I said to them, “Every professor is complaining about only one thing: ‘Something has to be done; students don’t pay respect to us.’ And I am here to say something exactly the opposite: Something certainly has to be done, because no professor seems to be respectable. It is not a question of students not paying respect to you; it is a question of your own. You are no longer respectable. Why were you respectable in the past? – do you understand? You knew more. Today, students know more than you. Unless you remain ahead of your students you cannot be respected.”Respect needs some rationale. Parents are continually complaining that their children don’t respect them, because children are no longer the old kind of children who were following in their footsteps. A new dimension of education has opened in this century which is not in the direction of the old. The old direction was simple: follow the elders, because they know and you don’t know. There was only one way of knowing and that was by experience. Naturally, the older person had more experience.Now, through education, experience is not at all a necessity. By learning, studying, you can know as much as you want. Just sitting in the library you can know the whole world in all its dimensions, whatsoever is happening. You need not even move out of the library.It reminds me of Karl Marx – the founder of communism, the last religion in the world. He spent his whole life, without a single holiday, in the British Museum, just reading and reading and reading. He used to reach the British Museum before it opened; he would be waiting on the steps. And there were many occasions when he was pushed out forcibly because the museum had to be closed. There were a few occasions when he was taken away in an ambulance…because he had been reading all day since the morning – without eating, without drinking, and he had fainted on the table.Now if this man knew more than anybody else of his generation, however old he was…he could not respect old age. Old age has lost respect because a new territory, a new space of learning and knowledge has opened up.You are going to see a still bigger gap – one of which humanity is still not aware – and I am talking about it for the first time. One gap has been created by education. If meditation becomes a worldwide movement, another gap will be created which will be immense. Then the old man and the young man will be as far apart as the two poles of the earth. Even communication between them has already become difficult; it will become impossible.The people who are here with me can understand what I am saying. If you start moving into the world of no-mind, then the people who are old, who have gathered much knowledge in the mind, will look to you retarded, undeveloped, very ordinary. There is no reason why you should respect them; they have to respect you – you have transcended mind.And the world is becoming more and more interested in meditation. It will not be long before the day when meditation will become your education for the ultimate. Your ordinary education is about the outside. Meditation will be the education about your interiority, about your inner being.Of course it will take a little time, because there will be many frauds; there will be many pretenders, false prophets, technicians. You have to understand the difference between a meditator and a man who knows the technique of meditation; he is not himself a meditator – he is a technician.For example, I have not seen Dulari here; she is one of my old fellow-travelers. So I inquired today what has happened to Dulari, and I have heard that she has been in one man’s meditation camp. That man is utterly, utterly stupid. But he knows the technique, about that there is no doubt. He has been in Burma…and in Burma…he was only a businessman, but he learned the Burmese technique of Vipassana.Vipassana has many forms: the Burmese, the Ceylonese, the Tibetan, the Chinese, the Korean, the Japanese. The Japanese is the best. But all those techniques have come from Gautam Buddha; perhaps he never thought that it would be possible to learn the technique and not to do the meditation. The technique is simply how to do it.This man, Goenka…I have never thought it worthwhile to say anything about him. Many of you must have been in his Vipassana camps…. Just a few days before I left America I received a newsletter in which he had made a statement about me. That amazed me – that was the beginning. I started looking into this man’s capacity, potentiality, realization. He made a statement that he had seen me and talked with me for hours in Madras. Now, I have been to Madras in India only once. That was twenty-five years ago, and I am absolutely certain that I have met nobody and talked with nobody for hours about Vipassana. Even the word Vipassana was not mentioned while I was in Madras for three days.Seeing this statement gave me the idea that this man cannot be a meditator. If he can lie so easily…. Now Dulari has been in his camp, and after the camp she has been meditating, using the technique given by him, for ten hours a day.I want Dulari to be alert. And particularly her husband should report to the police, because meditation – particularly Vipassana meditation – should not be done more than two hours. And those two hours have to be early in the morning; the best time is before sunrise. If somebody goes on meditating for ten hours, the ultimate consequence is going to be insanity. And there will be by-products also; for example, a man meditating for ten hours will lose his sleep completely.I had a case sent to me from Ceylon, which is a Buddhist country, with so many Buddhist priests preaching Vipassana meditation…. The technique is so simple, but they have never done it themselves. To teach anything to anybody which you have not done – and experienced all its possibilities, consequences, difficulties, problems that it can lead you into – then you are a criminal.This man who was sent to me was a Buddhist monk. He had lost his sleep for three years, and every treatment was done but no treatment was successful; no medicine would work. He had been told by his teacher – I cannot call him a master – to do Vipassana in the night. Even if you do Vipassana in the day, its effects will carry into the night; that’s why I am suggesting the most distant point, before sunrise. Just two hours are enough; more than that…even nectar can become poison in a certain quantity.Vipassana for ten hours a day can drive anybody mad. That’s why I want to make it clear, because if Dulari goes mad I will be condemned because she has been associated with me for twenty years. She should stop doing that technique. At the most, for two hours before sunrise she can do it; that will be healthy and that will bring her deep insight and understanding. But ten hours is too much. Her consciousness will not be able to contain that much. Instead of having a breakthrough, the greater possibility is of having a breakdown. It can become a strain – it will become a strain.That’s why I am saying, if she continues then her husband should inform the police. And if she goes mad then he should sue this utterly, utterly stupid Goenka for driving his wife mad.There are many idiots all around. And because humanity has come to a crisis point where it needs a new dimension for consciousness, naturally many people will come with false ideas. Or maybe the ideas are right but the person who is bringing them is not right; then too the idea is going to harm humanity.Meditation is not something mechanical; hence there can be no technicians of meditation. Goenka is a technician: he knows exactly what is being done in the Burmese style of Vipassana, but he is not a man of meditation – he is not a man of enlightenment.And now he has made teaching Vipassana his profession; now it is a business. He is still a businessman. He was a businessman in Burma; just the commodity has changed. He must have been selling something else; here he is selling the technique of Vipassana. And people are gullible. When they see that so many people are going, they start thinking perhaps they should also go.The generation gap that education has created is nothing compared to the generation gap that meditation can create. This gap is quantitative, that gap will be qualitative. A man with meditation has no age: he is neither a child nor is he young nor is he old. He is eternity itself. How can you expect from him that he should be respectful to old idiots, donkeys and all kinds of animals all around?But this is also a time to be very alert and very aware: don’t be too much impressed by what a person says. Look deeper into the person and his individuality. See whether he has ecstasy in his eyes, watch whether his gestures have the grace of a Gautam Buddha, look very carefully to see whether his inner being radiates light and fragrance. Is he a man of love, compassion and truth? Look at the man, not at his knowledge, because knowledge is available in the books so easily; anybody can collect it. But your being is not available in the holy scriptures.Your being you have to find. You have to sharpen your intelligence and you have to bring the ultimate within you as a guest. And when the ultimate is a guest within you, you are a flame, you are a fire. Of course your fire does not burn anybody, but heals. Your fire is cool, not warm. Your fire is just a lotus flower.The seeker should look at the master first – not at what he says, but what he is. Is he something transcendental? Is his life a laughter, a song, a dance, a joy, a blissfulness? Or is he just a pretender, a businessman fulfilling your expectations – of course, showing humbleness, humility…just business tactics.A man of real truth has no need to be humble. He is neither egoist nor humble, because those are the same things in different quantities. Only the egoist can become humble. I cannot say I am a humble man. I cannot say that I am a simple man, because simplicity is only a lesser form of complexity, and humbleness is on a lower strata, the same as ego. They are not different; the degrees are different.I am neither humble nor egoist.I am simply just the way I am.These people will pretend everything. They will behave in every way that you expect them to behave. That is their whole strategy of catching people. But the intention is to exploit.Vipassana is one of the greatest meditations, but only in the hands of a master. In the hands of a technician it is the greatest danger. Either the man can become enlightened or the man can become mad; both possibilities are there, it all depends under whose guidance it is being done.When the Ceylonese monk was sent to me I said, “I am not a Buddhist, and you have been under the guidance of Buddhist monks. What was the need for you to come to me?”He said, “They have all failed. They have taught me, but they cannot cure me. And I am going crazy. I cannot sleep a single wink.”When he told me this…Buddhist monks are not supposed to laugh, but I told him a joke. For a moment he was shocked, because he had come very seriously. I told him that a man in England, no ordinary man but a very rich lord, was asking another lord – with the English attitude, mannerism: “Is it right that you slept with my wife last night?” And the other lord said, “My friend, not a wink.”Even the Buddhist monk laughed. He said, “You are a strange person. I have come from Ceylon and you tell me a joke! And I am a religious man.”I said, “That’s why I am telling you a religious joke. If you stay with me I will tell you irreligious jokes too.”I said, “Your problem is not curable by any medicine. Your problem is created by your Vipassana.”He said, “Vipassana? But Vipassana was the meditation of Gautam Buddha; through it he became enlightened.”I said, “You are not a Gautam Buddha, and you don’t understand that Vipassana done after sunset is very dangerous. If you do Vipassana for just two hours in the night, then you cannot sleep. It creates such awareness in you that that awareness continues the whole night.”And if somebody is doing Vipassana for ten hours, almost the whole day, the sanity will give way. And then Goenka will not come to help, because he will not even be able to understand that this has happened because of Vipassana. And you cannot sue him in the court, because even the law does not understand that Vipassana can create madness in people.My whole effort here is to keep you as non-serious as possible, for the simple reason that meditation, all kinds of meditation, can make you too serious and that seriousness will create a spiritual disease and nothing else.Unless a meditation brings you more laughter, more joy, more playfulness, avoid it. It is not for you.The generation gap is unfortunate. I am not in favor of it. I have my own strategy for how it can be avoided.The whole system of education has to be changed from the very roots. In short…we prepare people in education for livelihood rather than life. For twenty-five years we prepare – that is one third of the life – for livelihood. We never prepare people for death, and life is only seventy years; death is the door to eternity. It needs tremendous training.According to me – and I feel with great authority that this is going to happen in the future if man survives – that education should be cut into pieces: fifteen years for livelihood, and again after forty-two years, ten years in preparing for death. Education should be divided in two parts. Everybody goes to the university – of course to different universities, or to the same university but to different departments. One is to prepare children for life and one is to prepare people who have lived life and now want to know something more, beyond life.Then the generation gap will disappear. Then the people who are of an older age will be more quiet, more silent, more peaceful, more wise; their advice will be worth listening to. Just sitting at their feet will be a great blessing; the respect for the old will return. Except this, there is no other way.Education divided in two parts means young people study for life, and middle-aged people study for death. Of course, the middle-aged people will be studying meditation, singing, dancing, laughing; they will be learning celebration. They have to make their death a festival – that should be the goal of the second part of education.They will paint, they will play music, they will sculpt, they will compose poetry; they will do all kinds of creative things. Livelihood they have managed; now their children are doing that. Geography, history and all kinds of idiotic subjects, their children are learning. Let them know where Timbuktu is.I have always wondered why – with my geography teacher I was continually in conflict – “Why should I know where Timbuktu is? What business is it of mine?”He said, “You are strange, nobody has ever asked this.”I said, “I am going to ask on every point…Constantinople, which in Hindi becomes even worse: Kustuntunia. I have no business with these things. Teach me something valuable.”And my geography teacher used to hit his head…he would say, “The whole of geography is this!”The history teacher was teaching about the ugliest people that have existed in the world. From the history teacher I never got any idea about Bodhidharma or Zarathustra or Baal Shem Tov or Lin Chi or Chuang Tzu; I never got any idea, and these are the people who have made humanity evolve.But I have heard about Tamerlane. Do you know what lang means? He was one-legged. It is Tamurlang. Giving him respect, nobody called him “one-legged Tamer” but he created so much nuisance that very few people can be compared with him. And for almost three generations…his son was worse than him, and his grandson defeated both.About these people, who were just murderers and criminals, the whole history is full. And they are called emperors, conquerors, “Alexander the Great.” Even if they were really bad, still history repeats their names, their great acts: “Ivan the Terrible!”This kind of history is bound to create wrong kinds of people in the world. All these histories should be burned simultaneously all over the world, so all these names disappear completely. And they should be replaced by those beautiful people who have all the credit for your being human. They are the people who have made humanity worthy of respect, who have given it a dignity and a pride, and who have opened doors of mysteries, of the beyond.The second part of education should consist of meditativeness, of awareness, of witnessing, of love, of compassion, of creativity – and certainly we will again be without any generation gap. The younger person will respect the older person, and not for any formal reasons but actually because the old person is respectable. He knows something beyond the mind and the young person knows only something within the mind.The young person is still struggling in the trivia of the world, and the older person has gone beyond the clouds; he has almost reached to the stars. It is not a question of etiquette to respect him. You are bound to respect him, it is absolutely a compulsion of your own heart – not a formality taught by others.In my childhood…in India it is an absolute formality: anybody who comes as a guest, you have to touch their feet. Before my father became completely aware of my behavior he used to push down my head: “Touch the feet, the guest is God. And he is an old relative, you should follow the custom.”One day a male goat with a beard entered just in my house. I touched his feet. My father said, “What are you doing?”I said, “A guest is a God – and moreover with a beard! An old goat needs respect. You come here and touch his feet.”He said, “Your mind functions in a very different way than anybody else’s.”I said, “You have to understand it: from now onwards if I meet an old dog on the road I’m going to touch his feet, an old donkey and I’m going to touch his feet. What is the difference between an old dog, an old donkey, and your old guest? To me they look all the same. In fact the old donkey looks so philosophical; the old dog looks so ferocious, like a warrior – they have some qualities. That old fellow that you were forcing my head down for…. Next time you force my head down you will repent!”He said, “What are you going to do?”I said, “I will show you, because I believe in doing things, not in saying things.”Next time one of my faraway relatives came and my father forgot. He pushed my head down. And I had a big needle ready in my hand, so I pushed the needle into the old man’s foot. He shrieked. He almost jumped. My father said, “What has happened?”I said, “I have warned you, but you never listened. I don’t have any respect for this person. I don’t know him, I have never seen him before; why should I touch his feet? I am ready to touch the feet of someone whom I feel is respectable.” He understood that it is better not to force me because this was dangerous. Blood was coming out of that old man’s foot.I never stood in my university classes when the professors entered. In India you have to stand up. The professors looked immediately at me – forgot everybody else; they focused on me. And if it was just the beginning of the year they would ask, “Why are you not standing?”I said, “There is no reason.”And the professor would say, “You don’t understand. Have you never stood before in any class?”I said, “Never, because I don’t find any reason. I’m perfectly at ease.”He said, “You…. How to make you understand that when a professor enters into the class, out of respect you have to stand up?”I said, “That’s right. But I have not seen yet anything respectable in you. If I see something, I will stand up. And remember: there should not be double standards.”“You mean…” he said, “what do you mean?”I said, “I mean if I enter the class, you have to stand up – of course, only if you see something respectable in me. Otherwise there is no question, you can remain sitting down, or if you want you can even sleep. I don’t care a bit.”My professors used to try to persuade me. Once in a while the vice-chancellor would come on a round, and they would try to persuade me that “Just for once…we don’t want you to stand for us, but when the vice-chancellor comes into the class, don’t create a fuss. Because then nothing else happens except the discussion about it.”I said, “I am helpless. I cannot do anything against my will. Let the man come. If I feel that he is respectable I will stand up. You don’t have to tell me.”And the first vice-chancellor under whom I was studying, the first time he came into the class he was drunk. And I am so allergic that I immediately felt that he was drunk. I remained sitting. The teacher looked at me, stared at me, gave indications that “You stand up.” I remained sitting. When everybody was told to sit down, then I stood up.I said, “Now is the time for me to stand up. This man is drunk. It does not matter who he is, I am going to report him to the police.”And the vice-chancellor was so much afraid and so nervous…. He had put his hat on the table. In a hurry he took my professor’s hat and went out of the class. And my professor was running behind him to say, “You are taking my hat.”I said, “You see what happens when you are drunk? That man has not even the guts to remain here and you wanted me to stand for him?”The generation gap exists simply because the reason for respect has disappeared. Unless you create the reason again, the respect will not return. On the contrary, every kind of disrespect will take place. But it is possible to change the whole system.I would love that the older people be not just old but also wise, not just in age but also in understanding, not only horizontally old but also vertically old…not only growing old but growing up also.A society where old people are still behaving like young fools is not a society worth calling cultured or civilized. Old people should behave like enlightened people – not only behave, they should be enlightened. They should become a light to those who are still young and under biological infatuations, natural bondages. They have gone beyond; they can become guiding stars.When education for death and education for livelihood are separated, when everybody goes twice to the university – first to learn how to go around this world of trivia and the second time to learn about eternity – the gap will disappear. And it will disappear in a beautiful way.Osho,I'm in a hurry to become enlightened. What should I do?First just listen carefully to this small story.The plane had just taken off and the captain was telling the passengers about the altitude of the plane, the cruising speed et cetera. But he forgot to switch off the microphone.He then turned to his copilot and said, “First I’m going to have a cup of tea and then I’m going to screw that pretty stewardess, Denise.”The shocked stewardess was down the end of the plane when she heard this come over the loudspeaker. So she began to rush down the aisle to tell the captain to switch off his mike.Halfway down the plane an old lady stopped her and said, “There’s no hurry, Denise, let him have his cup of tea first.”There is no hurry at all. First have your cup of tea!Enlightenment will be coming, just you have to learn waiting for it. Hurry will not help. Hurry is going to hinder.The only thing that is a hindrance is hurry.The moment you are in a hurry you are never here; you are looking far ahead. You are running. And for enlightenment you have to be still and silent and in this moment – utterly still, because this whole pilgrimage is from here to here.For centuries people have been hurrying, and missing. I teach you a totally different approach: of being here, without any hurry – the whole eternity is there. And don’t be a beggar: the moment you are ready and ripe, enlightenment will happen.Trust existence.This is the only thing worthwhile for those who are interested in becoming enlightened. Trust existence that whatever is needed, for whatever you are worthy, it will be given to you. You need not even ask for it. Only the unworthy ask; only the undeserving desire. The deserving remain silent; the worthy never demand, but when it happens they are full of gratitude. They wait, they allow the spring to come at its own pace, and when the flowers start blossoming they enjoy the fragrance with tremendous prayer in their hearts, of gratitude.The very desire to be in a hurry can lead you in a wrong direction, because there are peddlers all around who are ready to give you enlightenment instantly. That’s why I told you: first have your cup of coffee – that means instant coffee…but let enlightenment come on its own.One day a young woman was walking home when a man grabbed her, dragged her into a back alley, and started molesting her.“Help! Help me someone,” she cried. “I’m being robbed!”“You are not being robbed, lady,” interrupted the man, “you are being screwed.”“Well,” she replied, “if this is being screwed, then I have always been robbed before.”Don’t get mixed up. Everything in the world needs hurry, because so many people are running for it. You cannot wait; otherwise you won’t get it. You have to trample people, you have to go ahead without thinking what means you are adopting. Even if people are to be killed, kill, but remain ahead; otherwise you are going to miss. That is one dimension of life – of trivia, of meaningless things, money, power, prestige.But there is another dimension where there is no need to be in a hurry, because there is no competitor. You are alone. In your inner world nobody can enter. In your stillness you suddenly find yourself, absolutely alone, surrounded by nothingness. Just rejoice in it, relish it. Your enjoyment of your aloneness and nothingness will make you ripe for the enlightenment to happen.It happens.I can say it to you because it has happened to me. I am not depending on any Gautam Buddha or any Jesus Christ. Whatever I am saying I am saying with my own signature. Hence I can say with absolute authority without any hesitation: there is no need to worry. It comes, and it comes without giving you any advance notice. It comes so silently that you cannot even hear its footsteps.You just have to be ready and ripe, and to be ready and ripe there is only one way: be still and wait. Don’t move, not even in your thoughts, not even in your emotions…just a pure pillar of stillness. And suddenly there is the explosion, and where there was darkness is light and where there was death is pure life and where there was sadness is just an explosion of song and dance and laughter.But never think in terms of hurry. That is a hindrance. Be patient.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I thought I heard you say that if one goes deeply into sex it will eventually drop off by itself. I have thought long and hard about this, desperately trying to penetrate its hidden meaning, but all I got was a headache.Devageet, it is a good sign, the headache – the beginning of the revolution. Only one thing you misunderstood. I have not said that sex will fall off, you will fall off – but enlightened, don’t be worried.Here people die only enlightened; otherwise they hang around, hang around, go deep and go hard…and one day they drop off. And this dropping off is really entering into eternity. You would not need any meditation. Meditation is needed for those who cannot think too hard and too deeply. The headache indicates what is going to happen to you…But it does not matter whether sex falls off or you fall off. Your physical, mental, social personality is what you know about yourself. The moment sex drops off, you become for the first time really alone – because sex is your relationship with the world. For the first time you become immaterial, because sex is binding you to matter. For the first time you become transcendental to your body and biology.The death of biology or chemistry or society in you is, in other words, the resurrection of your real life.I have always loved the story about Jesus. Christians have misunderstood him, as usual; they thought that it was really a factual resurrection – bodily, biologically, psychologically. That’s where they have missed the point. He certainly resurrected, but in a spiritual sense. He died on the cross as a physical personality, and he resurrected as a spiritual being.So whether sex drops or you drop – because you and sex are almost synonymous – what remains is your authentic life.So, Devageet, you are moving on the right path. Headache…and the head will drop off; then other aches and other things will start dropping off. Finally you will be left only with that which is immortal. And that is our whole search, that’s what we are seeking. These things which can be taken away will be taken away; only that which cannot be taken away from you is yours.A reporter once asked Winston Churchill whether he agreed with the prediction that women would rule the world by the year 2000.Churchill replied, “Yes, they will still be at it.”Woman is also a symbolic word. To man it represents nothing but sex. If you take it literally, then Churchill is to be condemned for condemning women. But if you take its metaphorical meaning, then woman is replaced by sex; that’s what it represents in man’s mind. And sex has been ruling over the world from the very beginning, if there was any beginning, and is going to rule man to the very end – if there is an end.Only a few people have transcended the physical, the sexual, the psychological, and have entered into a different dimension that I call enlightenment. And unless the enlightened are listened to, understood, there is no hope for the world.It is not that millions of enlightened people are needed; just two hundred enlightened people on the earth, and the whole earth will be dazzling with their light, with their being. And those two hundred will create chain reactions: they will provoke you for the great pilgrimage, they will remind you who you are. Just looking into their eyes, suddenly inside you will click – it is only a click – and the whole dimension changes.Paddy and his friend Sean were sitting in a bar moaning to each other, talking about how ugly their wives are – a common topic among husbands.“My wife is so ugly,” said Sean, “if I want to make love to her I have to put a bag over her head.”“That’s nothing,” said Paddy. “My wife was so ugly when she was born that the doctor slapped her mother.”But these statements have become ugly in the sense that they have forgotten that instead of woman they should use the word sex, because that’s what it means in the deepest core of the mind of the male.As far as women are concerned, they are not interested in man’s physical body; they are not interested in his ideological, philosophical, mental gymnastics. Their approach is far more direct: they simply see your spirituality. The thing a woman is attracted to is the charisma, the aura of spirituality around a man; hence they never talk about the ugliness or beauty of men. That is not their concern. That is a great difference between the approaches of men and women.Women go directly deep inside men. That’s why it is one of the most difficult things to keep a secret from the woman: where will you keep it? – she goes directly inside you. And she is capable of going directly inside you because man has lived very superficially. Many men are not aware that they have hearts. Yes, they know they have lungs, but the lung is not the heart; neither is the brain the mind, nor is the mind your being. These are superficial layers.No woman in the whole world has created any ideology, any great metaphysics, any great philosophy. Her concern is not the outside; her concern is the inside. That’s why I have immense respect for women. Perhaps no man in the whole world ever had as much respect for women as I have.Women have been loved, but not respected. And without respect the love is nothing but lust; you label it with a beautiful word, but deep down inside you it is always sex, always sex. Man has reduced woman and her spirituality to such a state that she has become only an object of sex.And if the American trend has to be followed – where everything has to be used once and thrown away – the ultimate consequence is coming closer: use the woman once and throw away. They are already doing it in a way….In America, three years is the limit for everything. People change their jobs every three years, they change their cities every three years, they change their wives every three years. But those three years will get smaller and smaller – perhaps even by the time the honeymoon ends, everything has ended. Most probably it has ended. But people go on pretending that it is still continuing, because they have given so many promises, so many words to keep that now it looks very awkward to go against their own promises.But a woman loves in a different way. Her love has some quality of spirituality. Man’s love is only physiological, biological. You may not have found a single joke in any language of the world from women against men. It is below her prestige. All jokes are from men against the woman, because for him woman is not a spiritual being at all.In China for thousands of years the woman was accepted by law as a commodity that a man possesses. He can bargain, he can stake her in gambling, he can sell her, he can even kill her – the court was not concerned. If you kill your chair you will not be arrested…the woman was not more than that. And the whole past has been so ugly that man has not even asked forgiveness for it.Women have been treated like cattle. But the woman has not, in spite of all this ugliness that has been done to her, changed at all. She still loves…and her love has a purity and a beauty and a grace. Man’s love is ugly, animalistic; it is not more than a sneeze – he is just relieving himself. But the woman is not relieving; she is living it with its totality. It is a prayer to her, as sacred as any prayer can be.These are the differences that have to be bridged. At least for my people I want these differences to be bridged. Just as we don’t discriminate between religions, we don’t discriminate between nations, we don’t discriminate between races, the final discrimination that has to be dropped is between men and women. They both are beautiful. If they become a little more alert, they are in fact two complementaries of one whole: man is half, just as the woman is half.My effort, in spite of the whole world’s condemnation of me, is to bring man and woman to a space where they can accept each other as their other part, as their other pole. I don’t care about the condemnation of the world; it simply brings giggles to me. Who cares about idiots condemning you? – they are not even worth any reply. But even if a small section of society starts respecting each other, there will be a tremendous revolution.My own understanding is that as your love deepens, your sex disappears – because love is so fulfilling, what is the need of this bullock-cart sex? It is out of date….And soon the day will come when children will not be born out of men and women’s sex. We have suffered very much: blind children, retarded children, have had to live their life in utter agony and suffering…but there were no means to clear the situation. But now we have the means, now love can be completely a fun, a joy, a celebration, with no responsibility, no fear of making the woman pregnant, because that keeps her in bondage and that keeps you also in the bondage. You are partners in creating a child; now you have to be a partner in bringing him up.I have heard…in a court a man, ninety-five years old, and a woman, ninety-one years old, appeared for divorce. The judge had seen many cases but this was really shocking. He could not believe it: one foot is already in the grave; for what do they want a divorce?He asked, “How long have you been married?”They said, “It is very difficult to remember. Maybe seventy-five years, or it could be a little more.”The judge said, “I cannot understand: you managed to live together for seventy years, and now at the very end you have come to divorce.”They said, “We had to wait for all our children to die. Now we are completely free, no burden.”Man’s past history, Devageet, has been really not human. It can be human only if the woman and the man are no longer just sex partners; that drags them both to the very lowliest spaces. If they can love each other with respect, not using each other as commodities, men and women both will have a great uprising of consciousness.The more your sex energy becomes love, the more you are a spiritual being. Sex is only a reproductive process forced by nature on you. Nature has been using you just like a factory – and you don’t have even the dignity to declare, “I am not a factory.”But this can happen only if you are alert, aware, conscious of what you are doing, what you are thinking, how you are behaving. And that brings such grace and such beauty, that the physical beauty simply disappears. I have seen many beautiful women with very ugly minds. I have seen many beautiful men, but their beauty is not more than skin-deep. And this is the trouble: beauty is always skin-deep, and ugliness goes to the very bones. Go on digging to the bones, to the marrow, and you will find it…it is there.Love is the alchemy to change that ugliness from within. And once it disappears from within, even an ordinary face, a homely face, starts shining with the bliss and joy of the beyond.Don’t be worried about the headache; the headache is simply an effort of biology to drag you back. I have not suffered almost for thirty years from a headache. Slowly, slowly I have forgotten how it feels. And because I have not suffered from headache, I don’t feel my head either. It is only pain that makes you feel anything. But thirty years before I have also suffered from headache, and the headache is certainly concerned very deeply with sex.No medical researcher has come to the conclusion, but I say it from my own discoveries that I go on and on making – I’m an incurable discoverer – and sooner or later science will have to agree with me. The sex center exists in the head, not in the genitals – that much science has come to know. And if the sex center exists in the head and not in the genitals, then sex deprivation can create a headache. It will not create genital ache because there is nothing…it is only an extension of a certain center in your mind.Why have people started thinking – and doctors have started even advising their patients – that sex is good for your mental health? And they are right: all the people who have repressed sex in the past in the name of religion, have suffered tremendously with headaches. Even a man like J. Krishnamurti suffered for forty years continuously with such great headaches, migraine, that even he, a man of such understanding, used to think of hitting his head with the wall and be finished – the pain was too much.J. Krishnamurti was brought up by people with all the old ideas: Repress your sex. He was not allowed to meet young women. Even when a woman who was almost the age of his mother once had been taking care of him when he was sick, immediately great turmoil started in the leadership of the Theosophical Society: “They have fallen in love. Remove the woman” – and the woman was removed. It was sheer stupidity: Krishnamurti was not more than fifteen, and the woman was nearabout fifty. But the woman was a beautiful woman, very understanding. No man can take care of anybody else the way a woman can take care even of strangers.I was in jail in America. They had put me in the medical ward, so that nobody could say that I had been tortured, harassed. In the medical ward there were six women nurses and a doctor, and one male nurse. It never used to be that way in the past. In fact, in this country you cannot find a male nurse; in this country ‘nurse’ means a woman. A male nurse looks awkward, unpsychological.I watched the way the woman doctor behaved with me – with such respect and such love. And all the nurses…the oldest nurse – a very womanly woman, almost a Jewish mama – took care of me so much that during the three days I was there she dropped one of her holidays. She said, “I cannot go out….”All the nurses behaved as though I had been known to them forever: I was not a stranger but part of their heart. But the male nurse was a trouble. One day only was given to the male nurse in seven days, but that one day he tortured me – not physically, but he would come into my cabin and he would start asking questions…and religion and theology and philosophy….I told him, “Listen…with great difficulty I have got these few days’ holiday, and you are destroying that. I have forgotten all about religion, all about philosophy, I don’t know anything. Just don’t torture me.”But the male mind functions only intellectually; it does not know anything about the heart. Not a single woman in the medical ward ever asked a single question. They brought my food, they managed…the doctor managed that I should not go to the common toilet, she gave me her own bathroom: “We will feel ashamed to send you there, it is dirty. All criminals…While you are here just use my bathroom, and I will remember it: because you have used my bathroom, it becomes a temple for me. The moment I enter it I will remember you.”The head nurse has never gone in her life to purchase things for the prisoners; they come on a fixed routine basis. But for me she used to go every day – and she was an old woman – to purchase fruits, vegetables, anything that was vegetarian. I asked her, “You are unnecessarily taking trouble. Things come, they are perfectly good. If they are good for other human beings, they are good for me too. Just take care because I am a vegetarian.”She said, “No, those things come mixed with non-vegetarian food. And you are here only for a few days.”The last day when I left the first jail, all the nurses and the doctor and the sheriff and the whole staff had tears in their eyes. The doctor said to me, “We don’t want you to leave.”I said, “It is a jail. As far as I am concerned there is no problem, I can remain here. But millions of people around the world are waiting for me to get out. Your tears prevent me…it looks very heartless.”She said, “No, I understand. Just in three days you have become so much part of us, we have forgotten completely that you are a prisoner here” – because the whole day I was sitting in the doctor’s room. To make me comfortable, she had moved to another room – because there prisoners will be coming, patients will be coming – and they did everything that a loving family can do.She said, “Forgive my tears. Don’t take any note of it. It is my problem that we will miss you from tomorrow.”When I shook hands with the nurses they were all trembling. They had all cut photos from newspapers and they said, “Please, give a signature and write my name. This is our most precious gift. We are enough rewarded…otherwise this jail is a torture house. Even in the medical part the torture continues; it is just a strategy to show to the world that a sick person is not tortured.”But because the whole staff was in such a deep loving attitude, they could not do anything to torture me. The nurses brought soaps from their homes, new combs from their homes. If they cooked something which was vegetarian they brought it from their home. I said, “Why are you taking so much care of a prisoner?”They said, “You are not a prisoner. You have changed the whole climate of the medical ward.”But it is to happen all over the world…. The woman has to be respected, not only used. And slowly, slowly you will see that sex is the lowliest form of relationship. It will drop. Just go a little higher in your consciousness…But I don’t want you to drop it with effort, deliberately, because then it will cling around you. Go into it. It is our destiny to pass through that fire test.And once you have gone through it and come out of it into the clear, meditation becomes so easy that you don’t have to do it. Just sit by the side of any tree and from all over a subtle showering of a new silence, of a virgin serenity, starts falling over you, just like rain, or just like flowers of madhukamini falling in thousands.I have not seen any other plant which has so generous a heart as madhukamini. The word madhukamini means “honey woman.” Its fragrance is incomparable. And the most beautiful thing is that it goes on showering almost like water, rainwater. The petals of its flowers go on falling the whole night. You can sit underneath it and you will be all covered with flowers.Something like this is bound to happen, Devageet, if you allow the false personality that surrounds you to die. Then love and meditation are not two things – they become one. The loving is meditative, and meditation is nothing but the radiation of love.Osho,In my mind I am writing to you almost every day. All these questions and statements boil down to the following: gratitude – I want to say thank you, Osho – and attention. Could you say in discourse, one single time, “Hello, Hareesh,” so everyone can hear it, so that I am certain that you and everybody else knows I am existing as your lover and fellow dance-partner?Hello, Hareesh…. But this will not be enough. It will be just plates without anything to eat, to drink. It will look like a desert where nothing grows.And people are saying “hello” to each other without any reason; so I say…but I would like to present you also something, so “Hello Hareesh” is not empty. My first present:A man sitting in a bar is complaining to the bartender: “After one year and three thousand dollars with that psychiatrist, he tells me I’m cured. Some cure! A year ago, I was Nancy Reagan – now I’m nobody.”A Roman Catholic, a famous priest, and a Protestant minister, also very famous and well-known, had a heated discussion over the merits of their respective faiths.Finally they agreed to differ, and as they parted the Catholic said, “Let us go our ways – you continue to worship God in your way and I will continue to worship him in his way.”The minister’s wife…my second present…was becoming upset that her husband exclaimed, “Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus!” every time he reached orgasm.“It’s perfectly proper, my dear,” he assured her, “and in accordance with the Bible where it says, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”And the third:The Catholic priest heard a number of women confess that the grocer’s new delivery boy had seduced them all. He made them each put ten dollars in the poor box.The delivery man appeared last, and the priest asked angrily: “What have you got to say for yourself?”“Just this,” replied the boy, “either you cut me in on those ten dollars or I take my business to another parish.”Hareesh, keep your business here!I can understand a deep desire in everybody to be loved, and I love you all whether I know your names or not. Names are just labels stuck to you. You have come here in the world without names, and you will leave this world without names.As far as I am concerned you don’t have a name; and if you look within yourself, you will not find any name there. You are a nameless reality – and it is good, because every name creates a boundary around you, makes you small.But your question is significant. Attention can do two jobs: if it is forced, it nourishes the ego; if it is prayed with gratitude, it nourishes the soul.I cannot say anything against your question. Your question is so full of love, gratitude, that I can repeat as many times as you want, “Hello, Hareesh.” It will not strengthen your ego, it will weaken it. And so many people here, hearing me calling to you, “Hello, Hareesh,” are also repeating the same. Then it becomes a tremendous energy field, a brotherhood of spirituality, where everybody is to share his abundance.It is perfectly right. Many would have liked the same, but could not gather the courage. You are a courageous man. And you are asking “…and everybody else knows I am existing as your lover and fellow dance-partner.” Here we are not gathered to talk about nonsense – about God, heaven and hell. Here we have gathered to rejoice, to sing, to dance together in such an ecstasy that individualities melt into each other and it becomes one organic whole.I have seen it becoming one organic whole many times, when you all laugh together. Even the Germans don’t understand why they are laughing – but they are intelligent people: seeing that everybody is laughing, they also participate. In fact, they laugh louder than anybody else, so nobody suspects that they are Germans. Of course, outside Buddha Hall they inquire of people, “What was the matter? Why were people laughing so much? I could not get it.”My suggestion to all the German sannyasins is: Forget trying to get it – that is what is troubling you! You are engaged in trying to get it and the moment passes…. Everybody is laughing, and you are always second; you cannot laugh first because you have not got it yet.Here it is a temple of celebration, utterly pagan. Nobody is serious, nobody is bothering about how to reach heaven, how to get a harp, sit on a cloud and go on singing for eternity, “Alleluia, alleluia….” Those are the idiots. They have been taken up just to relieve the earth.If you can rejoice with me you have understood me.If my music has touched your heart, it is enough.I am not here to convert anybody; I am just here to help you learn a little dance of the soul. This is the most religious phenomenon: the dance of the soul – no fear of punishment, no greed for any reward.This moment is all in all.Osho,Would you tell me a joke or give me some sutras, or anything before I leave?Hari om tat sat…that is the starting of any Eastern holy scripture. It is a very beautiful thing: hari means a thief, om means the ultimate music of existence. Tat sat means this eternal music of existence…the thief is the only truth.This question is from Dhyan Om. He is back. For a few days he had disappeared – not from the ashram, but he had stopped asking questions because I loved him so much that I gave him good hits. The greater hit you get, remember, your reward is much…you deserved it.First he is asking, “Would you tell me a joke or give me some sutras, or anything before I leave?”In the first place, why should you leave?In the second place, you are a joke unto yourself; you don’t need any jokes. But I will not disappoint you.A few sutras for you:…A curved line is the loveliest distance between two points.Get it?I have also been a German in one of my past lives, so I understand the Germans more than anybody else.…We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we are young. The young sow wild oats, the old grow sage.It is really difficult…. But I will go on telling sutras until you get one.…A cigar gives a wise man some time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth.…The principle thing an inquisitive child learns is how little adults know.…You know you have reached middle age when weightlifting consists merely of standing up.…We are all born mad; some remain so.I will not say to which category Om belongs. Most probably he has remained so.…Behind every successful man is an astonished woman.…A Japanese proverb: Nothing is as ancient as progress. It started from the very moment Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden.…I have heard the first words of Adam to Eve were, “We are passing through a great crisis….”These are the first words, and they continue to be relevant every day. Thousands of years have passed, but we are passing through the greatest crisis every day.…Any child who gets raised by the book must be a first edition.There are books on how to raise your children, how to be a mother, how to be a father; it is so unbelievable that all the animals are raising their children without any difficulty, without reading any book. Only man seems to be utterly retarded. He needs to read how to raise his children. He has forgotten even the simplest things which any animal, any bird, knows perfectly well. Still we go on calling it evolution, for the simple reason that nobody objects. And even if they object – for example this bird is objecting – we don’t understand their language.…Temptation usually comes in through a door that was deliberately being left open.…A man may know his own mind and still know next to nothing.…The latest thing in clothes is usually the woman you are waiting for.…When you don’t know what you are doing, do it neatly.…Beauty is only skin-deep, but ugliness goes right to the bones.…What no wife of a philosopher can ever understand is that a philosopher is working when he is staring out of the window.…You can be positive of anything of which others are as ignorant as you are.It is because of such fundamental principles that God goes on existing, the devil goes on existing, heaven and hell go on existing, sin and virtue go on existing. And you can be positive, absolutely positive…because neither you know nor anybody else knows, so nobody is going to contradict, nobody is going to negate. Only an innocent person may perhaps start saying things which go against all the ignorant people of the world.…One of the hardest decisions in life is deciding when to start middle age.One: old age is when your symptoms are the most interesting things in your life.Two: old age is when your face in the morning has more wrinkles than your bed.Three: old age is when you not only cannot remember when you first made love, but also when you last did it.That is real old age!And you ask for a joke also. A joke that I hope can be understood…otherwise I will try another – but I will not allow you to leave this place disappointed.First: Rabbi Gideon Finkelstein died and went to heaven. He saw only three people there, reading by a dim light. One of them was reading Playboy, another Penthouse, and the other Popular Science. He decided to see what hell was like.The rabbi got to the devil’s domain and it turned out to be a big night club with every kind of music being played. There was an eight-piece Dixieland band, a thirty-piece swing band, three discos, and all the people were dancing.Rabbi Finkelstein went back up to heaven and asked for an audience with God. “I don’t understand it, Lord,” he said, “there are only three people here in heaven and they are all reading. Down in hell everybody is dancing and having a good time. Why can’t we have that in heaven?”The Lord said, “I can’t hire a band for just three people.”And second…if you have missed the first joke, this certainly you will miss.Three old ladies were sitting together on a park bench when a flasher walked up to them, opened his coat, and exposed himself.The first old lady had a stroke, and the second old lady had also a stroke, but the third old lady’s arms were too short to reach.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Watching the mind, it seems to me there is an infinite ocean of thoughts. Meditation gives me more peace and grounding, but hearing you speak about enlightenment – it seems to me far, far away.Can you give me some advice?Enlightenment is as far away as you are from yourself; hence the distance differs from individual to individual.You are certainly in a difficult position: first, you are a German, and nobody has ever heard of any German becoming enlightened. Only one of my German sannyasins used to become once in a while enlightened, and again he understood, “What am I doing? It is not for me,” and he dropped the idea. That happened many times. Just now I have heard that he is washing dishes in a Zorba the Buddha restaurant. The person who told me about him had asked him, “What happened? You had become enlightened….”He said, “Forget all about it. Five times I became enlightened, and then I dropped the whole idea. I am feeling far happier washing dishes in the restaurant.” What was happening was that whenever he would come here he would become unenlightened, and whenever he would go to Germany he would become enlightened. In Germany there was no question, no objection; nobody has even heard what it means, so in Germany it would be easier. Here it is a little difficult.Secondly, you are really in a big dilemma: you are a liar! First a German, and then a liar makes things very complex – otherwise enlightenment is as easy as nothing else in the world. Everything needs some effort, except enlightenment. Everything needs you to go somewhere, everything needs you to do some climbing the ladder – except enlightenment.Enlightenment is the easiest, because it is not an achievement. Don’t make a goal of it…that’s what is making it difficult for you. If you are feeling good and grounded in meditation, you are perfectly in the right direction. Just get all your ocean of thoughts settled. Let it become a lake without any ripples.You drop the idea of enlightenment – it is none of your business. Meditation is going well; that means the tree is growing well, the flowers will be coming in their own time, in their own season. No tree is worried, no tree is concerned about why the flowers have not come yet; they always come in their own time.All that you have to take care of is that the tree should not die, that it should be nourished, that it should have a good soil, that it should be watered, that it should have your love, your friendship. All you can do is nourish your meditation, become more and more grounded and centered. One day suddenly, from nowhere…the explosion.You don’t have to go to enlightenment; it comes to you. In fact, even that is not right to say. It does not come either; it happens – and it happens from your innermost core. It is an explosion, just like the explosion of an atom. Atomic explosion comes from the innermost core of the atom. Enlightenment is the explosion of your innermost life center. Suddenly all darkness is gone! A light has descended upon you from every side, and a light that needs no fuel…a light that remains, that has come forever.Nobody can become unenlightened; that is an impossibility, that’s a difficult task – even a German cannot do that. But enlightenment becomes a problem because you go on hearing me. I am the problem. I cannot stop talking about enlightenment, and that creates the desire in you and the longing in you. Just don’t listen to me! The moment I say “Enlightenment…” simply say, “It is not for us.” If you can avoid…You cannot make me feel responsible for it, because I am helpless, I will continue to talk, I cannot talk about anything else. Whatever I say suddenly turns out to be something about enlightenment. Just watch…A priest went to a ranch in order to buy a horse, and saw a beautiful one that he liked and asked if he could try it. “Sure,” said the rancher, “but I have to tell you something. That horse used to be owned by the bishop, and if you want the horse to move, you have to say, ‘Good Lord,’ and if you want him to stop, you have to say, ‘Amen.’”“That’s okay,” said the priest and jumped up and said, “Good Lord.” The horse promptly moved off and then was seen galloping in the mountains. The priest was yelling, “Good Lord, good Lord.” and the horse was really moving.But suddenly they were coming to the edge of the cliff and, in panic, stricken with fear, he yelled, “Stop, stop!” That did not work and then he remembered and shouted, “Amen.” The horse stopped right on the edge of the cliff and, wiping his brow with his relief, the priest said, “Good Lord!”Do you think Gautam Buddha could have made this story in any way connected with enlightenment? But I am just incurable. I see every element in it exactly leading to enlightenment. All that you need is the last “Good Lord”…finished!There is no hurry. You are moving slowly, gradually, you are getting grounded, becoming centered, but listening to me your desire catches fire. It starts thinking, “If meditation is so beautiful, so silent, what will enlightenment be like?” And then it becomes a constant worry and a tension. It will not help you; it will even disturb your meditation.But you should look at my trouble also. If I don’t talk about enlightenment, you are not going even to do meditation; if I talk about enlightenment, that disturbs meditation. Now you tell me the way…! So just be sane. Enlightenment comes – I can guarantee you it comes. It is not as though it is something that has not happened to many people. You have the potential for it, but you have to understand the whole process.In the beginning the master goes on telling you all the beauties and all the blissfulness and all the ecstasies of enlightenment. He has to – otherwise who has time to meditate? Television is there, football matches are going on…. The world all around is so full of idiots doing all kinds of gymnastics: boxers are boxing, actors are acting – who has time for meditation, and for what?If I don’t talk about enlightenment, then naturally you will ask me, “Why should I meditate?” And the moment I say “Enlightenment…” trouble arises. Then your mind is habitually making everything a goal, far away. Mind enjoys challenge, and enlightenment is not a challenge.People even want to go to Everest.When Edmund Hillary, the first man who reached on top of Everest, was asked by the news media, “Why did you take such a risky step of going to the highest peak of the Himalayas?” His answer was really beautiful, an answer with great understanding.He said, “It is not a question of my going. It is just because Everest is there, unclimbed, and I cannot tolerate it. It is not troubling me, it has nothing to do with me, but simply the idea that it remains unclimbed…hundreds of people have died trying to climb it, and it has become a challenge. I will risk my whole life.” You will not gain anything….He reached to the top, looked all around, and felt embarrassed, because there was not even somebody to say “Hello, hi, Edmund Hillary, how are you?” – not even a single tree, not even a single bird, not even a single animal, nothing. Just miles and miles of eternal snow which has never melted…He did not remain there for more than two minutes; what is the point? Man may go to the moon, man may go to Mars, man may go some day to some star. They are challenging to the mind. Mind is very interested in any challenge: provoke it, and it will go.But enlightenment is not a goal, it is not Everest, it is not the moon. It is you. You don’t have to go anywhere, not even out of your room. You don’t have to take a single step. You have just to be silent, unmoving, and it is there. It has always been there.So you should understand: the problem of the master is that he has first to talk about enlightenment to create a little interest, a little longing in you, and then he has immediately to make it clear to you that you should not make your longing attached to a goal. You have to find it just within yourself. No effort, no doing, no action…nothing is needed.If you can simply remain meditating and enjoying the silence and the peace of it, you have done whatever is needed on your part. Now leave enlightenment to existence. Existence is not miserly; it is not exhausted because a few people have become enlightened. There is no quota, that only so many people can become enlightened. The whole world can become enlightened, everybody has the intrinsic potential; you just have to disconnect your meditation from any goal-orientation, from any motivation. It is not difficult if you understand: just a little intelligence…But we live in a world where intelligence is not valued, where the mediocres rule, where the mediocres are the leaders…where the intelligent people simply get out of the crowd, they don’t want to be unnecessarily hassled and hustled in the crowd; they stand by the road and let the crowd pass. Once you become aware of the strangeness of the people around you, you will be surprised: how have you been missing it up to now?Just today Neelam has brought a news which has been published by all the newspapers of India. The statement is from a man called Devaraha Baba, who is worshipped by thousands of Hindus, thought to be a great saint. All his qualities for being a great saint are very peculiar. One is that for twelve years he was standing in the water day in, day out. He will eat standing up to his chest in the water, he will do everything there: that made him known nationwide, a great man. Somehow people persuaded him that “it is enough, twelve years…” Just out of compassion he came out of the river, and since then he has been sitting in a small hut made for him on a tree. These are his two qualifications for being one of the representatives of Hinduism.His statement was just according to his qualifications. The statement was that the world can be saved, all problems can be solved, if only cow slaughter is stopped. Now his statement is being published by every newspaper without a single criticism – but my statement will not be published by anyone. Now this is sheer stupidity, not intelligence. How can the world’s problems be solved by stopping cow slaughter? But in India it is a very common way of thinking….Mahatma Gandhi used to think that if everybody starts spinning his own clothes, all problems will be solved. India is great in finding simple solutions! Now Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is saying that if people start learning yogic hopping, which he calls yogic flying, all problems will be solved. There will be peace, serenity, no war, no hunger.And I am amazed that nobody criticizes them, nobody holds them by the neck and tells them, “You idiot!…” The world is suffering with so many complex problems, and you are suggesting that somebody sitting in the lotus posture, hopping, will solve all the problems. Nuclear weapons will disappear, communism will not be against capitalism, Russia will become a democracy, America will distribute all its wealth to the poor, the West will distribute all its products to the poor countries – just because a few idiots are sitting in the lotus posture and hopping. I cannot even conceive in my dream…Perhaps that’s why I have stopped dreaming for thirty years. I have not dreamt for thirty years – what to dream? And if you call these people idiots, immediately somebody’s religious feeling is hurt. Immediately an arrest warrant…I have been summoned thousands of times – I have even forgotten the number – and how many times have they issued arrest warrants for the single reason that I have made some reasonable statement?It is a very unreasonable, almost insane world in which you are living. If you can manage just to meditate, you have done more than is expected of the contemporary man. And your meditation is going good. Just go on saying, “Good Lord!” In meditation there never comes any cliff. You don’t have to remember “Amen” – there is no need.Meditation slowly, slowly turns into your enlightenment. You suddenly become aware one day, Where is that darkness? where is that continuous rush of thoughts? where has the mind gone? Suddenly you are absolutely as hollow as a bamboo; but your hollowness is not empty – it is full of joy and full of rejoicing. You will dance for no reason at all, you will sing for no reason at all, songs that you have not composed, dances that you have not learned. They are just bubbling spontaneously in your consciousness.That is enlightenment, but don’t make it a goal.Meditation is enough.Everything else follows on its own.Osho,When you were talking about sex and meditation the other evening I got mixed up. So often before I have heard you say: “Let your sex be your meditation.” Also, how do your latest suggestions fit into the Tantra vision?Please comment, Osho, I am puzzled.When I said, “Let sex be your meditation,” did you do it? When I was talking about Tantra vision, what did you do about it?It seems my work is talking and your work is listening, and then finding out contradictions – what I said yesterday, what I said the day before yesterday….You get puzzled because you don’t do anything. If you had done sex as your meditation, the question about sex and meditation as two interests would not have arisen. Now the question has arisen that you have two interests. That means my first statement has not been heard. And I am not a person to remember what I have said yesterday; I don’t know even what I have said today – otherwise I will be in the same boat as you are, puzzled!I go on making as many contradictions as possible without any puzzlement. It doesn’t matter. I must have said to somebody, “Let sex be your meditation.” His question must have been different, the person must have been different. It would have been possible for him to make sex his meditation.But the person who has asked, “I have only two interests in life – sex and meditation,” cannot deceive me, whoever he is. I may not know him, but his question gives me absolute perception of his innermost being. His only interest is sex. Meditation he is putting in just to make the question look religious.I cannot say to this person, “Let sex be your meditation.” I can say to this person, “Let meditation be your sex” – and that’s what I have said. First get finished with sex, have it as much as you want – because meditation can be done even when you will not be able to go into sex.You can always go into meditation to the very last moment of your life – it can be postponed. But you cannot rely on whether tomorrow sex will be possible or not. It is not within your hands; it comes on its own at a certain age, and at a certain age it disappears. Then people are talking about it and thinking about it – which is perfectly good, but there is no sex at all. It is all cerebral, in the mind. And sex in the mind is the problem, not sex as a generative force.I want to tell you that in the mind these two things, sex and meditation, cannot exist together. Sex is pulling you downwards, and meditation is pulling you upwards.A thief was caught and brought to the court. He had not stolen anything, but some drama was going on in the house, and he forgot completely for what he had come there. And he enjoyed the drama so much that he was caught. The court asked him, “Why did you remain the whole night, and not steal anything? For what have you entered? You are a well-known thief.”He had been to jail many times, and it was the same judge. He said, “I know you perfectly well, but this is strange, something new. You have not stolen anything, and still you remained inside the house the whole night.”The thief said, “These things we can discuss later on. First I want Your Honor to make it absolutely clear to me that one punishment you will not give me. You can send me to the gallows…but don’t tell me to be married to two women.”The magistrate said, “What nonsense are you talking? There is no punishment like that.”He said, “Then it is perfectly okay. That is the problem. I had gone into the house to steal…. But the man has two wives, and one lives on the first floor, one lives on the ground floor. The man was being pulled by one upwards and by the other downwards. And it was such a funny scene – one was pulling him by his hairs, the other was pulling by his legs – that I forgot completely for what I had come there.“I enjoyed it so much that I started giggling, and that’s how I got caught. If I had remained silent there was no problem, I would have escaped very easily. But the poor man…that’s why I said to you from the very beginning, ‘Just don’t give me that punishment!’ One woman is enough, two women are too much.”The man who is saying, “Sex and meditation are my two interests…” if I say to him, “Yes, go ahead,” he will be torn apart. Sex will give him continuous downward gravitation and meditation will try to pull him out of the hands, the chains and the forces of gravitation that pull you down.Meditation is a way to open your wings and fly into the sky. It does not believe in gravitation. You cannot have both.So always remember: if I am saying something, do it. You are not here as my examiners so that you have to find out what contradictions I have been telling you. But people take such self-appointed positions….Now Sarjano has written a letter to me. He goes on writing stupid letters almost every day. Just because last night, when I went out, Avirbhava was on the outside door to open the car…And I have my own way of relating to people; I scare her, and she is so innocent, she gets scared – at least she pretends. She never disappoints me, “No…” Who is Sarjano to write to me, “I cannot forgive you that you scare simple Avirbhava.” Now, who is he?I used to think that Swabhav is in charge of the ashram…has there been some change? Sarjano is neither in charge of the ashram, nor is Sarjano a guardian to Avirbhava, nor is Sarjano my boss. So who gives him all these appointments? He cannot forgive me! – and who has asked him that he should forgive me? I will not ask even God himself to forgive me. Even if I can manage to forgive God, that will be enough. For this whole stupid idea that is going on all around, God is responsible – if he is still alive. And the day I am going to encounter him is going to be really the last judgment day!But who are you to judge me, in my own place, amongst my own people? First he was a disciple; it seems now he has become my master.I will read your question again to make it clear so that you never repeat such stupid ideas again. You have not done anything, whatever I have said; you are just listening and waiting to find contradictions. What will you get out of it? It is a well-known thing that only idiots are not contradictory; they are absolutely consistent.It needs a little intelligence to be inconsistent, and it needs immense intelligence to be contradictory. Why does it need immense intelligence? – because unless you can prove your contradictions are complementaries of an organic unity, you don’t have the right to make any contradictions. I have never made any contradiction, because I can prove to you each contradiction has its own function in the organic whole where opposites meet and merge and mingle into one unity.You are not supposed to be here to bother about these things. But this is how people are. Somebody is worried….Just today there was an article by Vijayanand. Eight years before he left me; in these eight years so much water has gone down the Ganges, and so many idiots have come and gone here that I cannot remember the names of all of them. Now he goes on writing articles against me, and today’s article I was amazed at. What are his objections? He left me because a man who has ninety-three Rolls Royces, dozens of watches, cannot be enlightened.But he left me in ‘78, when I had not yet gone to America – and the reason why he left me was still to happen five years afterwards! He seems to be an astrologer or a palmist or a prophet. And he should know that those cars did not belong to me: I have never looked back at what happened to those cars, I have never bothered to inquire of anybody what happened to those cars.Here I am a guest, I don’t possess anything; whatever my people provide me I use. If they stop providing me even clothes, I will still be delivering lectures, naked! It does not matter.All those ninety-three cars were not mine. I had never had – or for almost thirty-five years, even touched – money. I don’t have any pockets to keep it; I dropped having pockets thirty-five years ago. I don’t have any bank account. Perhaps I may be the only man in the world who can be called the richest poor man – richest because I am loved by my people so much that what more do you need. People accumulate money because they are afraid no one is going to take care of them. I’m not worried; I know there are millions of people who would like to take care of me.Why should I bother having a bank account and paying income tax? I have not paid any income tax to anybody, I have never purchased a ticket in thirty-five years. Somebody purchases it…somebody keeps it…I don’t know. I don’t know who has my passport, or even whether it exists or not!I depend on my love, and I trust that love will manage things. And if it does not manage, that too is okay.Vijayanand does not know that the commune we had managed in America was no ordinary commune – perhaps the greatest commune that has ever existed in the whole history. Sannyasins from all over the world had put at least three hundred million dollars into the commune. They were not my property…I am giving him the whole list, so for his next article he will be able to prove that “this type of man cannot be enlightened.”The commune had one hundred and twenty-six square miles of land – that should be mentioned as my property. The commune had one hundred more cars as well as ninety-three Rolls Royces; they should also be included – make it one hundred and ninety-three. The commune had also one hundred buses, twenty of them were fully air-conditioned – that should also be included in my property. The commune had five airplanes – that should be also included. The commune had its own cranes, its own tractors, all kinds of construction instruments, road-making mechanisms – it should all be included. Why only ninety-three Rolls Royces? – why make me poor? It had houses for five thousand people to live in, and it had temporary houses for twenty thousand people, ready any time to be erected. But do you think all that was my property? Do you think anything here is my property?But these hungry, starving, greedy, sexually repressed Indians, but pretending to be spiritual, are worried unnecessarily. If I am not worried – and I have never gone to see the garage where those ninety-three Rolls Royces were. The director of that garage is here, and I have been telling him, “I will be coming some day” – but I knew and he knew that I would be the last person to come there.He made a beautiful place and he kept those cars with care, with such care that the president of Rolls Royce himself had come to see and was amazed. He said, “The cars, the way you are keeping them – even we are not keeping our new cars with such care.” Now all those cars are being exhibited in the great cities of America, on television, because one of the sannyasins had painted almost thirty cars in psychedelic colors. All those thirty cars have been purchased by some oil king in the Middle East.…But nothing belonged to me. I have never looked backwards.Why should these idiots be interested that I had ninety-three Rolls Royces? They want to prove that if a man has ninety-three Rolls Royces he cannot be enlightened – that is the rationale of the whole article. If that is true, then Vijayanand has to answer that if Krishna can be a perfect incarnation of God with sixteen thousand wives, what is the problem with ninety-three Rolls Royces? – at least they are not sex objects. If Krishna and Rama and Parasuram, Hindu gods, could have golden chariots, solid gold, and still be gods, what is wrong in having ninety-three Rolls Royces?And they were not mine at all. It is a strange thing that the whole news media goes on insisting that those cars were owned by me. If those cars were owned by me, then those cars should be here. The government of America has no right to my cars.Those watches were not mine. Now they are going to…They have exhibited first those watches all over America. One cannot think governments and politicians can be so ugly: in the first place not returning those watches to the commune – because it was commune property. If it was my property I could have claimed it; but it was not my property, so naturally I cannot claim anything. And now they are auctioning those watches on the sixteenth in Christie’s in New York.Vijayanand is trying to prove that I am not enlightened. But that should not trouble him…. Even if I am not enlightened, I am not a problem to him: I don’t harass him, I don’t haunt him. But for eight years continuously he has not been here, and he has been haunted by me. He seems to be something of a nutcase. He should just look into the Hindu scriptures, full of pornography; he should look at the highest Hindu trinity of gods: all have wives, and all are so infatuated with women that even to call them gods is simply nonsense.When Shiva’s wife died – he was one of the trinity – he proved himself almost to be an insane man. I will not call him a god; I will not call him even a sane man, because for twelve years he carried the dead body of his wife all around the country in search of some physician who may be able to cure her of death. Now, any idiot knows nobody is cured of death; death is not a disease, it has no medicine. This man must have been insane. Even ordinary people have more sanity. But these people are gods, they are enlightened by their very birth!One should always remember: people who live in glass houses should not throw stones at anybody else. I can destroy their whole Hindu mythology without any effort. It just needs exposure – it is so full of bullshit.And as far as I am concerned, I have declared myself to have gone beyond enlightenment just to get rid of all these idiots. So now there is no problem for them – I have already gone beyond. They don’t have to be worried about me. I have left enlightenment also far behind. I am just an ordinary man.But something goes on hurting their egos. What hurts these people? – my silence? my love? my blissfulness? Everything hurts them, because everything shows that they are living in gutters, and they don’t know the flight of an eagle in the sky across the sun.But when I find people here too behaving that way, then certainly I start thinking that I committed a mistake by becoming enlightened. I could have lived at ease without any idiot telling me that he cannot forgive me…and I have not done anything to him.I will tell Avirbhava to find this Sarjano; he needs to apologize to Avirbhava. It is just out of my love, and everybody knows it: whenever I see her, I like to scare her a little – and she enjoys it. Many times I wanted to pass without scaring her, and I felt, “No, it is not good, because she will be expecting it and I am going without doing it. It is inhuman….” But what Sarjano has the right to say any such thing to me?You should be completely aware here.If you are here, you are here to learn something, not to teach. First become capable of teaching something, then people will come to you. But don’t try to impose yourself and appoint yourself as a judge.This man Vijayanand had come to the ashram just to hide, and out of my compassion I allowed him. Otherwise I would have told him, “Just get lost. There is no place for you here”…because of what he had done. He was in love with his sister’s daughter, which is absolutely against Hindu culture, Hindu religion, Indian mind – and it is also wrong hygienically, scientifically, medically.I support the Hindu idea because not only is it morally wrong, it is scientifically wrong to be married with such a close relationship. Your sister’s daughter is your daughter: to be married to your daughter…That’s why he had left Mumbai – because he was harassed and tortured by his family and by others: “What are you doing…?”I gave him shelter – that was my fault – I told him he could remain here, nobody would bother here. Perhaps he has not been able to forgive me because I know the secret, and I know the real reason was not any spirituality, not any meditation, nothing but a shelter. He has not been able to forgive me; otherwise, for eight years continuously he goes on writing for no reason. This is for the first time…I thought it is better to say something, because this idiot is not going to stop without hammering his skull as hard as possible.And what did he do here? Out of fear he sent his sister’s daughter to England, because the whole family was against, and the whole community where he lived and the whole industry – he is a director in the film industry – was against. All his brothers are famous actors, directors – they were all against. So he sent the girl away, and here he married another girl just to cool things down, so the Mumbai people start thinking, “Now the problem is finished, he has married a girl.” And that was a pure deception, an ugly, inhuman behavior.He married the girl just to cool down the heat that was against him; and once the heat was cooled down he dropped the girl. He called the girl whom he really wanted to marry, his own sister’s daughter, and he married her – he committed bigamy too. The girl he married belonged to a very high-class family in Delhi. She had come here to meditate, but got infatuated with the idea…. He bribed her, he blackmailed her by telling her that he was a director – and he is a director, and a good director – that he will make her a heroine in his films.This idea was the bribe, so she was immediately ready to marry him. He got married to her, and after the marriage he sent her back to her home in Delhi saying, “I will come and take you back….” He never went there. On the contrary, the mother of the girl came to me saying, “We don’t want this third-rate man to be married to our daughter.” They were very rich people; the daughter’s father was ambassador in Russia. She said, “If her father comes to know, he will kill me. She is my one and only child.”I said, “I will try.” But there was no need to try. Vijayanand escaped from here. He married the other girl, and because the first marriage was not registered, he simply went to the priest who had married them, bribed him, and burnt the marriage certificate. So without a divorce he has married his own sister’s daughter.Now all this only I know. That is the wound that he is carrying against me. I have never told anybody…. But he has been insisting for eight years continuously; now comes the limit. Now I expose him. The family of the girl that he has deceived remains silent, because they do not want to create any stir. The father was a politician and an ambassador, and even to bring it to the court would have condemned the girl and would have created trouble for the family, for her marriage. It was already silent…because Vijayanand got married again, and he denied that he had married the first girl – because he had burnt the certificate.Knowing that I am the only person who can expose him hurts, he goes on and on writing against me, for no reason, just to create a defense around himself. I was not going to attack him: I know human stupidity, I know human insanity, I know human frailty and weakness and I have every compassion for it.But I will not tolerate anybody here in the commune behaving as if he owns the space. If ever again I get any letter like this, you will be turned out of the door. Whoever he is – because he seems to be very tricky – one letter he writes which is absolutely ugly, then another letter he writes praising me, and great poetry and great gratefulness…this Italian spaghetti cunningness will not do here!You are saying, “When you were talking about sex and meditation the other evening I got mixed up.” The statement looks as if you were trying to do what I had said before; otherwise, why should you get mixed up? What got mixed up? – sex and meditation?What got mixed up? Just one thought that you had heard before and another thought that you have heard now – only two thoughts. But this place is not for thinking; this place is for going beyond thinking. And if you had meditated, there would have been no mix-up.You are saying, “So often before I have heard you say…” So often! – you are saying exactly the same as the German sannyasin was doing: so often he became enlightened! “So often before I have heard you say: ‘Let your sex be your meditation.’” What have you done about it? Today I want to say to you, Let your meditation be your sex – no other sex, just meditation.“Also, how do your latest suggestions fit into the Tantra Vision?” Who bothers? – when I was talking on Tantra you did not listen. Now I’m talking on other things, you are not listening. Tomorrow I may not be talking about the same things: are you going just to listen?As far as I am concerned I have never contradicted myself. Certainly when I speak on Tantra, I speak not as a scholar on Tantra or about Tantra; I speak as an insider who knows what Tantra is. When I speak on meditation, I don’t speak about meditation; I speak about my experience of meditation.Whatever I speak, I never speak without the support of my own experience, and in my experience there is no problem: the Tantra vision, meditation, sex, enlightenment – all come into one single organic unity.But that does not mean…According to you, do you want me to say everything every day the same? Then what is the need for me to be here? Just a tape recorder will do.I am not a tape recorder. I am a living human being, growing continuously, and according to my growth my answers will grow, will become different, have different colors, will have more depth, will have new angles, new dimensions. I am not a system maker; I am simply an explorer of the whole field of consciousness.So I will make all kinds of statements. Whichever suits you, do it. Don’t be worried about my being contradictory, because that is my problem. If I am contradictory you are not going to be responsible for it. I will arrange on the last judgment day with God, who is contradictory: am I contradictory or is he contradictory? But that is my problem. God will not ask you about my contradictions, he will ask about your life, how you have lived it – have you lived it at all?Always remember it as a criterion: if there is a God and on the final judgment day he asks you, What is in your hands? – they will be just empty. You will not have even a few flowers to offer him, because your concerns are all absolutely unnecessary, irrelevant. Your concerns should be absolutely just you, and nobody else.First solve your own Gordian knot, first cut yourself asunder, first explode your own potentiality; and then you have the right to advise, you have the right to say something about these great things – meditation or Tantra or enlightenment. Right now you don’t have in any way, any right at all, to say anything.Do something! Be something! Then your very being will resolve many problems that right now you feel are great problems. You think this is a great problem, and you say, “I am puzzled.” Why should you be puzzled? I should be puzzled, it is my contradiction, not yours. But I am not puzzled…nothing puzzles me.A man was on safari in Africa, but he lost his guide and wandered deep into the jungle. Suddenly he was surrounded by hostile natives. He was at a loss what to do. But then he remembered a trick he had seen in an old movie.He dug into his pocket, pulled out his cigarette lighter, flicked it once and a big flame popped up.“It is a miracle,” shouted the chief, collapsing to his knees. “I have never seen a lighter that worked first time.”If you can enjoy me, that is enough. If you can celebrate me, that is enough.A traveling salesman, staying overnight in a hotel, found a Bible by his bed. On the front page was this inscription: “If you are sick, read page forty-two. If you are worried about your family, read page sixty-eight. If you are lonely, read page ninety-two.”He was lonely, so he opened to page ninety-two and read it. When he had finished he noticed on the bottom of the page the hand-written words: “If you are still lonely, call 62485 and ask for Gloria.”I call this kind of Bible really holy: this is the service of the poor, of the lonely, of the lost.Here, you are to rejoice. This is not an academical institute; it is just a divinely mad communion of people who know how to love, how to laugh, how to sing, how to dance. And you bring academic questions, that I said something and now I am saying something else….If you go on looking that way you will simply waste your life, because I will go on saying anything every day. But whatever I say is relevant to somebody. If you watch carefully, you should choose whatever is relevant to you, and not only keep it in your memory, but materialize into a realization.Just a joke to make this silence deeper…. First experience this silence, so that after the laughter you can experience the deepness of it…how laughter can make silence deeper, how laughter can make love deeper, how laughter can make meditation deeper. But first, feel it….A traveling salesman was passing through a small town in Virginia when he saw a little old man sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of his house. The little man looked so contented that the salesman could not resist going over and talking to him.“You look as if you don’t have a care in the world,” the salesman said, “what is your formula for a long and happy life?”“Well,” replied the little old man, “I smoke six packs of cigars a day, I drink, I enjoy a large bottle of whiskey every four hours, and six cases of beer a week. I play the guitar and I go out chasing women every night.”“My goodness,” exclaimed the salesman. “That’s just great! And how old are you?”The little man took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, “Twenty-five.”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I would like to be in synchronicity with you. Would you mind telling me what time it is, so that I can set my watch by yours?It is not difficult for me to tell the time. But keeping your watch in synchronicity with my watch is not the real thing; your heart has to be in synchronicity with my heart. The watch will not help. Just for your consolation, on my watch it is eight-ten. But you have to synchronize with my heart, with my being.And I know you are coming along, slow but steady…and the moment will come when your heart will beat with the same rhythm as my heart.Your question is, in a way, significant. Superficially, it is stupid…but there have been many cases of enlightened people whose watches stopped when they died. Perhaps their disciples could not manage to synchronize with the master’s heart, but their watch did.One famous Zen master, Bokuju even told the people that, “when my watch stops, you can understand I am gone. It beats with my heart.”But this is not the case with me. I am in every way eccentric. Automatic watches simply stop on my hand – because an automatic watch needs some movement, and I am so still. Finally, I had to change from automatic watches and turn to quartz watches, because whether I am dead or alive they will continue. A battery does not know how to synchronize, but the automatic watch needs movement.But I rarely make any movement and I don’t keep the watch on my hand twenty-four hours – just when I come to you, so that I remember now it is morning and I have to go to you; and in the evening when I come to you…just these four hours the watch is on my hand.The remaining time I don’t need to know what day it is, what date it is, what time it is. My people love me so much that they know at what time they have to serve my lunch; at what time they have to put me in the bed; at what time they have to wake me up and push me into the bathroom.And as far as days and dates are concerned, they are absolutely irrelevant to me. I have no need of any calendar. Even Neelam reminds me about the year, that it is 1987; otherwise, I have no concern. I am not in a hurry, not going towards a goal.Once in a while, while speaking, I look at my watch; you must be thinking that I am looking at the time, but really I am looking to see whether the watch has stopped or not. If it has stopped, it is better to stop now; if it is still running, I can manage.It was a great surprise to scientists why many people’s watches stopped when they died, exactly at that moment. Those watches were running in deep harmony with their heart; slowly, slowly those watches had become in a dance with the rhythm of the heart.But making your watch run exactly as mine will not be of much help. You have to put your heart with my heart, you have to learn to dance with my being – and that I cannot do. I can provide the opportunity, then it is all up to your intelligence, to take it or not to take it.If you want to be in synchronicity with me, you have to be as drunk with awareness as I am. It is a strange drunkenness: you are fully aware and still you are as drunk with joy, blissfulness as no drunkard can be. You just look at my eyes: anybody will think I am drunk. You just listen to my words: anybody will think I am drunk.I have not drunk even water for twenty years! I have been traveling around the country, and this country has such an ugly culture that in the same rivers buffaloes are enjoying their bath, donkeys are drinking, dogs are pissing and men are standing amidst them, chanting to God – and that water is being used. It is absolutely polluted.I have heard that America will destroy itself by its nuclear weapons, Russia will follow the same route, England will die because of its hypocrisy and its seriousness and France will die from its sexuality and sensuality. The person who was telling me, I asked him – “Because I am here now in India, tell me of what India is going to die.” He said, “Shitting all over the country!”India is a big toilet. This is the only freedom India has – freedom to shit anywhere. I wonder why they have not included it in the constitution? Where they talk about freedom of speech – although nobody has anything to say – they should have mentioned that everybody is free to urinate anywhere he wants; everybody is free to shit anywhere he wants. Those would have been realistic considerations.Freedom of speech in this country? – I have not seen a single person who can claim that he is a free thinker. They are learned, they are scholars, they can repeat scriptures, but free thinking? – that does not exist, has not existed since Gautam Buddha. He was the last free thinker in this country. For twenty-five centuries, nobody has bothered to think. In fact, nobody has time; raising children, creating more misery, more poverty, who has time to think?I am certainly mad, because I am telling you to go beyond thinking, and you have not even started thinking! Here my work is first to make you start thinking…just to drop it. You cannot drop anything if you don’t have it. A beggar cannot say, “I have renounced the world.” The fact is just the opposite: the world has renounced him. Only an emperor can say, “I have renounced the world” – and it makes sense.A few suggestions for you.Two drunks were staggering along the railway tracks. “My God!” said the first. “I’ve never climbed so many steps in my whole life!”“It’s not the steps that bother me,” replied the other. “It’s the low hand-rails.”Just get a little drunk! This temple belongs to drunkards…and I will know before you know whether your heart is in synchronicity with me or not. You have come a long long way – just a few steps more.The politician was trying to calm a group of angry farmers because he had not fulfilled any of his promises.“If you put a bull into a field of cows one night,” he declared, “you would not expect to get a lot of new-born calves in the morning, would you?”“No,” said a voice from the back of the hall, “but you would certainly expect to see a lot of contented faces.”Just looking at you, I know how you are growing. Just the contented faces, just the silence surrounding you…just the depth of your eyes going deeper, becoming oceanic…just your gratitude to existence reaching to its peak. This is the language that I understand.If somebody comes to me and says that he is absolutely in synchronicity with me – that won’t do, because that is not the language of synchronicity. Synchronicity speaks itself.There is an ancient proverb, “Lies have to speak; truth remains silent.” But lies deceive you forever, and the silent truth can become your eternal treasure. It has not said anything.In deep silence you all synchronize with me, because silence knows no distinctions. In laughing together you synchronize with me, because laughter knows no boundaries. In understanding what I am saying and where I am leading you, you synchronize with me.Watches won’t do. In fact, you don’t want to synchronize with the watch; you want to synchronize with me. That happens as your meditation deepens, as your love becomes unconditional, without any expectations. Once it happens, it has happened forever.And the synchronicity, the harmony with the master, does not think of contradictions, inconsistencies; those are all far below in the dark valleys. The moment you synchronize, you start rising towards the sunlit peaks, towards the stars.It will happen…. The way I have been watching you, it is already happening. Don’t bother about watches – because what will you do if I don’t have a watch? In fact, the watch I have is not mine. Even if you synchronize with it, you will be synchronizing with somebody else, whose watch I am wearing. People give me watches to wear while they are here, just to bless their watches, so they can rejoice when they go that they are going with something, some heartbeats of me. This is difficult for the outside world to understand.Gayan makes my clothes. She could have been paid highly anywhere; she is a perfect seamstress. Here she gets nothing except my love. She works day and night – but perhaps she has got the insight that there is nothing more valuable than the love of one who has arrived. His love will pull you also with invisible strings to the whole.Everything I have does not belong to me. My shoes, Arpita goes on making; my hats Veena goes on making. They rejoice that I am wearing their hats, their shoes, their dresses. Somebody brings a car and is grateful that I am using the car for coming to Buddha Hall. I could have come walking – it is not such a great distance, just from one house to another house – but then I would not have made somebody happy without any effort.It is difficult for the outsiders to understand me. They have never known such a thing – that anybody will give me their watches just to wear so that the watch starts vibrating with my heart, and then it becomes sacred to them.One of the best television interviewers in America, Ted Koppel, asked me, “I cannot believe why people should go on giving you watches to wear, Rolls Royces to drive in. And not one but ninety-three Rolls Royces, and thousands of watches!”I said, “You don’t know the ways of love.”He said, “But I have friends….”I said, “A friend is one thing – you don’t have a master. You have never loved somebody more than yourself. The moment you love somebody more than yourself, then you are ready to do anything.”It does not matter whether it is valuable or not valuable…people from around the world go on sending me strange things, knowing perfectly well what I will do with them. Just the other day somebody sent a beautiful stone from Mount Sinai, where Moses met God, according to the theology of the Jews, so Mount Sinai has become a holy place.I respect the idea, although the story may be false. The story may be just a story, but the person who sends a stone, packaged beautifully, has a tremendous love in his heart. What should he give to me? – everything is trivial. But this stone from Mount Sinai, which is the only place God has ever spoken to any man, is holy. Although it is just a stone, because it is holy, somebody sends it to me.I go on receiving all kinds of things, and I will go on distributing them to others. What will I do with them? – I have come naked and I will go naked from the world. And I am still naked under my clothes, I know it!I have been seeing you, watching you. Perhaps you need a few sutras: they bring you closer to me.Seriousness separates; laughter brings closer.…Never put off until tomorrow what you can enjoy today….If you enjoy it today, you can enjoy it tomorrow too. Why postpone it? Postponement is a disease of the mind; it always goes on saying, “Tomorrow”…particularly for significant things. Any trivia and rubbish it will do today, the significant can be done tomorrow. But that tomorrow never comes: all that comes is always today. And if you have become accustomed to postponing for tomorrow, you have postponed your life completely.…If you have two wives, that is bigamy; if you have many wives, that is polygamy; if you have one wife, that is monotony.To avoid all these troubles, I don’t have a wife! Polygamy will drive you mad; bigamy is enough to destroy your whole life – and even monotony is powerful enough….In my vision of a future humanity, there will not be polygamy, there will not be bigamy, there will not be monotony. Individuals will relate with each other, but will not create any relationship. They will remain free, independent individuals.Now, Chamanlal is sitting before me – he is from Amritsar – and he loves me immensely. Very few people have loved me so deeply. I used to stay in Amritsar in his house. He is suffering from monotony: it has taken all his life and all his juice and all his joy. I have stayed in many, many houses all around the country, and it is always monotony.One of my friends was rich enough…. I asked him, “What are you going to do with so much money? Whether you have nine crore rupees or ten crore rupees it won’t make any difference. With ten crore rupees you will not be happier than you are with nine crore rupees.”He said, “That’s right.”I said, “Now you are fifty. This is the time to turn towards the mountains.”He was a courageous man; he stopped all his businesses, all his factories. When he met me next time, he said, “You have put me in such trouble.”I said, “Trouble?…I was thinking you were troubled continuously – financing this, financing that, taking loans from the banks. I have put you out of all trouble.”He said, “That’s okay – but now I am suffering from monotony. I have only one wife and for thirty years…just seeing each other is enough torture!”I told him, “Take a beautiful bungalow in a hill station and move there.”He said, “I can – but you will have to come with me. If you are there then I don’t care. But if my wife and I are there, we will kill each other.” They loved each other – it is not that they were not loving people. They loved each other, but I could understand his psychology.Having nothing to do, he opened a dharmshala – a free house with two hundred bedrooms, for people who come to visit in his city to stay free of charge – just to create some work for himself and to avoid his wife the whole day. So early in the morning he would go out – and he was not earning anything…on the contrary he was losing, but he had enough to lose. He would return at ten or eleven in the night.His wife told me, “You have stopped him from earning money. Now he is losing money, but still the same trouble; in the morning he goes, and in the night he comes back.”I said, “It is not the factories, it is you. Do you really want him – be frank and sincere – to be twenty-four hours in the house?”She said, “No. I have taken a vow not to lie: it is good for an hour or two that we meet, but twenty-four hours…then it becomes heavy. Then we start torturing each other, knowing perfectly well that it is useless.”…Every small child wonders why his father did not go into the ice cream business….…The great truth is that women actually like men, and men can never believe it.Do you really believe your girlfriend likes you? When you see your face in the mirror, you cannot like yourself. Either the girl is an idiot, or…why should she like and love you?But the reverse is also true: no woman believes that her lover really loves her. She thinks his desire is to possess, she thinks his one-pointed goal is to have a sexual object, available twenty-four hours. Prostitutes are costly, and you cannot depend on them. They are temporary – temporary structures; you need a permanent, guaranteed relationship with a woman who cannot deny you. The women always suspect they are being used…. I cannot say that they are wrong, neither can I say that the men are wrong.Love can exist only after meditation, not before it.That is a simple existential law. Before meditation – only lust, only sexuality. Before meditation you are an animal and not really a human being. With meditation a transformation comes: you become human, and out of your humanness, love flows.And when the meditation reaches to the highest peak, the Everest of consciousness, then a new change happens. In science they say that a certain quantity brings a qualitative change. You boil water up to ninety-nine point nine degrees, and it will not start evaporating. It will evaporate only at one hundred degrees. Now, nobody can say why. This makes life mysterious.At a certain height, meditation – when it becomes so easy for you to move into it that no thought hinders – becomes as easy as breathing. Then comes a transformation, a second transformation: you are enlightened.And parallel to it, from sex through meditation you move to love. From enlightenment you will become love. It will not be a question of loving anybody; it will be simply a question of your presence. Your presence will be love.The moment one man’s presence becomes love, he has fulfilled his destiny. There is nothing more beyond it. He has come to the beyond.…Home is the only place where you can scratch where it itches.…A diplomat is a man who can make his wife believe she would look fat in a mink coat.…Women like strong, silent men because they think they are listening.…Never look back – something might be gaining on you.…I was twelve years old before I found out that “Shut Up” was not my real name.…It always pays to smile in the morning, because later in the day you may not feel like it.…Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second nature in a married woman.You need not worry. Although I may not be able to see all the faces who are around here, I can certainly feel their heartbeat, whether they are part of my silence or just spectators, or they have come here just out of curiosity, or they are government CID informers. I can feel at least the heartbeat.There are police officers, and naturally, they are the most afraid people here: somebody may recognize them. They have changed their dress…but you cannot change your heart. I don’t care about your dress and about your uniform; my concern is with your inner being. That you cannot change, because you don’t know about it.Osho,From some book I remember this sentence: “For the pilgrim to reach his destiny, it's essential to move instantly, but without hurry. It is so urgent that he reaches his destiny, that there is no time to hurry.”Could you please speak about if there is any urgency, and how that relates to waiting?You have got caught into a verbiage; otherwise the message is very simple. And it should be simple to you, because that’s what I’m saying in many, many ways.First…the situation is every moment urgent for the simple reason that you cannot rely on the next moment; whether it will come or not is not in your hands. So every moment we are living in urgency. If you want to do something, do it now and here, because how can you postpone it?Secondly, you say, “From some book I remember this sentence: ‘For the pilgrim to reach his destiny, it is essential to move instantly…’” Certainly if you want to come to yourself you should not lose a single moment, because there is always a possibility that death may interfere. But you must have got into trouble because the sentence certainly comes from some great mystic…“but without hurry.”Move instantly because it is urgent, but without hurry, because in hurry you are not together, in hurry you are always late, in hurry you forget the essentials, in hurry you need time. Just to be in a hurry you will require time – and there is no time. This moment is all and all, and the situation is urgent.You have been born without your agreement, without a contract, even without your permission; that was not in your hands. You will die without any advance information, without fixing a date and time – that is not in your hands. Once dead you cannot complain; and not yet born you are nowhere. To whom should existence ask, “Do you want to be born or not?”So what you have really got in your hands, solid and real, is only this moment, in which you can act intelligently or stupidly; in other words, in which you can act as a meditator or as a mediocre….But the statement is really beautiful. You got into a puzzle because you cannot think what kind of madness this is. First you say it is urgent, and urgency creates hurry; then you deny that there should be hurry, but the question is so urgent that you should start instantly. You got puzzled into the words. I will tell you how one can get puzzled into beautiful words.Two men met at a bar and struck up a conversation. After a while one of them said, “You think you have family problems? Listen to my situation. A few years ago I met a young widow with a grown-up daughter and we got married. Later, my father married my stepdaughter. That made my stepdaughter my stepmother, and my father became my stepson. Also, my wife became the mother-in-law of her father-in-law.“Then the daughter of my wife, my stepmother, had a son. This boy was my half brother because he was my father’s son, but he was also the son of my wife’s daughter, which made him my wife’s grandson. That made me the grandfather of my half brother.“This was nothing until my wife and I had a son. Now the sister of my son, my mother-in-law, is also my grandmother. This makes my father the brother-in-law of my child, whose stepsister is my father’s wife.“I am my stepmother’s brother-in-law; my wife is her own child’s aunt, my son is my father’s nephew and I am my own grandfather. And you think you have family problems?”Just don’t get caught into words!The statement is very clear: the situation is urgent because you have no guarantee for the next second. You have to start instantly because you cannot postpone – the future is not insured – and yet you cannot be in a hurry because hurry takes time.So silently, peacefully, without hurry, without any tension, without any anguish, move into yourself instantly. It is urgent. Unless meditation becomes urgent to you, it will never happen; you will die before it. Put meditation on your laundry list as the most important, urgent…number one.But meditation in your life is just at the very end of your laundry list – and the laundry list goes on becoming bigger and bigger. And before you finish your laundry list, you are finished, so the time for meditation never comes.So I take that statement, whoever has made it, as tremendously significant. Don’t try to understand the sentence; I have cut it into pieces clearly for you, so you are not confused.There is no time for hurry, there is no time for worry; in a single moment what can you do? Only one thing: you can settle within yourself. That will be the great transformation of your being. And certainly it is the most urgent thing – which we have been trying to postpone as long as possible.Osho,How is it these days that the men all seem to be going crazy, yet the women just go on becoming more beautiful, more silent, more graceful?Milarepa, it is so simple…that I am amazed that you have asked it. When men go crazy then anything is beautiful. The beauty does not depend on the woman, the silence, the grace; it depends on your craziness.But still it has some significance to be understood. It does not matter if you ask something stupid or idiotic, still I will give you a significant answer.You are asking, “How is it these days that the men all seem to be going crazy, yet the women just go on becoming more beautiful, more silent, more graceful?”A few fundamentals our men and our women all have to understand: one is that man’s sexuality is positive, women’s sexuality is negative. Negative is not a condemnation, it is just indicating the nature of their sexuality. Man is the donor and woman is the receiver.My own experience of old-style Hindu monks, Jaina monks, Buddhist monks, Catholic priests is that they don’t understand the nature of sexuality. They have a positive sexuality; they collect sperm and they don’t have much space for it. They go on eating, they go on nourishing their body, they go on exercising, they go on doing everything that creates more sperms – and the bag where the sperms collect has a very limited capacity. That’s why man can have only one orgasm at a time: just one shot, and his gun is empty!But the woman has a negative sexuality. She can have multiple orgasms, because she is not losing anything in orgasm – except she is getting tired of all the huffing and puffing, and the ugly beast on top doing push-ups! That’s another thing, they get tired…they keep their eyes closed and they lie down almost like stone statues: “Let him do it, it is just a question of a few seconds. One can survive.”Within a few seconds the man is finished, but those few seconds are aggressive. His sexuality is aggressive; that’s why if he cannot get a woman, he becomes crazy. What to do with his aggressive sex energy? It needs some outlet. That’s why he finds all kinds of perversions. Strange…he goes to a woman, to a prostitute, just pays her and loses his energy – a strange business!One prostitute can have many customers in one night, because she does not lose energy; on the contrary, the more people are attracted towards her, she starts becoming more graceful, more beautiful. And on the other hand the man is in such a hurry to get rid of his energy, which is becoming a burden, that his eyes go blind. He starts looking at anything resembling a woman – and suddenly he has found a Cleopatra or a Sophia Loren. His eyes are not clean and clear. A great fog is surrounding him because his sexual energy is so aggressive. It is bound to happen.And why is the man’s semen so overpowering? They have their own problems. In one sexual act a man releases nearabout one million living cells, and those one million living cells have a lifespan of only two hours. Once they are out of the body of the man, that is where politics is born: then one million cells are rushing, trampling over each other to reach to the woman’s cell. And the woman has only one cell….The woman’s cell is non-aggressive; it can wait, there is no overburdening. Moreover the woman has every month a menstrual period in which that cell is released. Then for one month she is completely free from sexual desire. In one month another cell will come, another egg will come, so her situation is far more non-aggressive. You have not heard of any woman raping a man.But man goes mad. He is going crazy because those cells want to get out. It is too crowded, they want a little open sky, a little air. Once they enter into the woman’s body, a great marathon race starts, because only one will be able to reach to the cell. The cell, the egg of the mother, is constituted in such a way that it is very loose and very available, but the moment one male cell enters it, it naturally closes, becomes hard. Now no other cell can enter into it.The passage of the woman’s vagina to us seems to be very small, but to the poor male cell it is almost two miles long in proportion to his size. They have never traveled that much, so everybody is an amateur.I have always wondered why the world is full of idiots and mediocres and fanatics, fundamentalists, fascists of all kinds and sorts – they come in all sizes. My understanding is that when the man’s cells start moving into the woman’s body, the wiser ones stand aside. The intelligent ones don’t want to mix with the crowd; only the boxers, football players, champions of all kinds of stupid games, wrestlers…they do their great job, rushing over each other. It is a question of life and death: if within two hours they don’t reach first, their life is finished, within two hours they will be dead.Only once in a while it happens that two wrestlers of equal strength reach to the woman’s cell at the same time; that’s why twins are born. Sometimes even seven children have been given birth – I think nine is the record – but it is very rare that out of a million people, nine will reach exactly at the same time, not a single minute, a single second, a split second behind. Then they all enter into the woman’s egg.The world is full of idiots and fools, bureaucrats, politicians, Don Quixotes and all kinds of stupids, competitors, competing in every field of life – it may be money, it may be power, it may be prestige, it may even be saintliness. It is expected…these are the people who have won the first race.The intelligent ones, the poetic, the silent, who could have become a Gautam Buddha, who could have become a poet like Rabindranath or Kahlil Gibran…. We know – it is a simple fact – that intelligent people will not compete with this crowd, and the crowd is not small: one million….Rabindranath was the thirteenth son of his father. We don’t know how many Rabindranaths we have lost, and how many Albert Einsteins are never born, and how many Picassos, van Goghs, Mozarts have never been able to make the race. There are things which only idiots can do. Have you ever seen any wise man participating in a marathon race? Have you ever seen any enlightened one being competitive, begging for votes so that he can become the president?The wise people keep aloof.The idiots rule.And the idiots are in the majority.I was thinking, Why are they in the majority? – but then I found that the first marathon race has created the whole trouble. And this situation will continue unless we are more intelligent and stop this accidental birth – what I call accidental birth.Now we are at a stage where genetic engineering can manage very easily to give us as many Rabindranaths, as many Picassos, as many Bodhidharmas, as many Nijinskys as we want, on demand, because in those one million cells all kinds of people are there.The point is we should drop the old idea that you have to produce your son yourself. Strange…you order your clothes from the best tailor, you purchase the best car, you make the most beautiful house – not with your own hands. You don’t insist that “I will make my car, I will make my house, I will make my clothes, I will make my food”…you will go insane. So why do we insist that the son should be ours? But just our old superstition continues.According to me, each hospital, each medical college should have semen banks, just like blood banks. You can go and ask for what kind of child, boy or girl, what kind of face, what kind of color you want, how long a lifespan, what kind of intelligence – poetic, scientific, mystic…you can ask for it. They will have categories sorted out, and your wife will be injected with just a single sperm.I don’t think there is anything wrong in it. You can go on making love, but you should use every birth control method. For birth you have to inquire to the medical authorities….It will change the whole face of the earth. There will be so many intelligent people, creative people, loving people. It will raise the standard of life, it will raise the standard of health, it will bring about more inventions, more poetry, more sculpture, and it will make man no longer accidental, at the mercy of blind nature.Then there is no need even to get married, because you will not be creating children of your own. The possibility is already accomplished that the child need not be raised in the mother’s womb; the child can be raised in a mechanical womb, far more scientifically. The best parents will be those who have chosen the best child, with the best qualities, with the best scientific womb, so when he comes out of the womb they can take him home.This will do two things: the children will become so beautiful and so intelligent, so healthy, so long living, and also the parents will be unburdened.Every parent is harassing the child to become great, to become Alexander the Great, to become Gautam Buddha. What can the child do? – it is not in the program of his basic cell. So parents are disturbed because children don’t listen to them, and children are unnecessarily harassed and hurt. They cannot forgive their parents their whole life for the way they have been treated in their helplessness, in their childhood.What you are demanding of them they don’t have in their basic program. Every human psychology is completely programmed, his physiology is completely programmed, and everything goes according to the program. There are no accidents. You can have as beautiful women in the world as you like; you can have as strong men in the world as you like.Now it is within our hands.Who is preventing it? Your priests and your politicians – because they will be the ones who will lose all glamour. Far more intelligent people will be there, so these stupid politicians who know next to nothing…I have seen education ministers who cannot even sign their names, and they are deciding the education for the whole country. I have seen finance ministers who don’t know the meaning of finance, who have not any idea how the economy runs. I have seen soldiers who don’t have any courage.This whole society is upside down.Milarepa, particularly amongst my people it is going to be this way. Man, unless he meditates, will go crazy – crazy after women. And man finds meditation more difficult than the woman. Experienced mothers who have given two, three births can be asked before the birth and can say whether there is a girl or a boy in their womb, because a girl remains silent, and a boy starts playing football. He starts kicking here and there.In meditation girls can enter deeper. On the one hand they can go deeper in meditation; on the other hand their sexuality is negative, it is not a compulsion on them.I was amazed in my experience moving amongst all kinds of monks and nuns, because no monk is really celibate, but nuns are celibate. They can manage to be celibate; they don’t have an aggressive sex, and moreover nature has provided that every month their sex energy goes out of their body automatically, they are clean again for one month. But man is in a difficulty. His sex energy can be subdued only by deeper meditation. Then he will not go crazy.You have to understand another basic law: the woman looks more beautiful the more she runs away from you. She does not want to run away; she waits for you to come closer, and then she starts running again. She wants to be caught, but she is not going to take the initiative so that later on, after the honeymoon, when there will be continuous struggle, she can always say to you, “You were after me. I had never intended to marry you.”After the honeymoon all beauty disappears, because your sexual energy has gone down the drain. Even the most beautiful woman will no longer look beautiful to you because you have used her. You know her whole geography, you know her whole topography; now there is nothing to explore. And man is by nature an explorer, a hunter, an adventurer.You may not have perceived that all the great cities, all the beautiful houses, all the beautiful gardens are not to man’s credit; they are to be credited to woman. She never wanted to be a hunter, she never wanted to run continuously after animals, she never wanted to move. She wanted to live peacefully in a beautiful house surrounded with a beautiful garden.But man basically is a nomad. That nomadness comes from his basic sexual cell. He is made of those sexual cells which keep telling him, “Go on, go on.” He will go to all kinds of strange places for no reason, just because he needs money…and once he has money he starts traveling. A home he does not have.You will see it in tourists: ninety percent are Americans, because they have so much money that what to do?…Go on, anywhere. And when they go on to the Taj Mahal or to Khajuraho or to Ajanta or to Ellora, they cannot stay there. They cannot watch the beauty silently, look at the great art that has taken thousands of years to make, thousands of people were involved to make it; they will simply go on running, taking photographs. Back at home they will make a good album and then they will see how beautiful are the things they have seen. And they have not seen…they have only photographed! Those photographs could have been purchased from the market; there was no need to go around the world.But man is a nomad. Woman is not.In Hindi we have a word for the wife, gharwali, one who owns the home. But that word we cannot use for the man, who really owns it; nobody can say to any man, “You are gharwala.” He has paid, he has earned the money, but the woman is called the owner of the home.But it is exactly right. Man may have earned, but the woman has made the house. Woman has forced man to live a life settled, silent, peaceful, not to go on running like stray dogs from one place to another.In my people’s world, Milarepa, unless you are meditating deeply you will not be able to transcend your sexual craziness. And I can see – I have been continuously observing – women get into meditation quickly. It comes to them easily. The more meditative they become, they will become more beautiful, more serene, more calm, more quiet, more graceful.But you, not doing meditation, not creating a state of no-mind, will fall a victim of jazz music or skinheads; you will do something stupid.The doctor was explaining to Paddy how nature makes up for a person’s deficiencies.“For example,” he told Paddy, “if a man is deaf, he may have very good eyesight, and if a man is blind, he may have a very good sense of smell.”“I think I see what you mean,” said Paddy. “I have often noticed that if a man has one short leg, then the other one is always a little bit longer.”Great thinkers, coming to great conclusions!The student demonstration had turned into a riot. Suddenly a man staggered out of the crowd carrying a limp girl in his arms.“Here,” shouted a cop running up to the man, “give her to me. I will get her out of this.”“The hell with you,” replied the man, “go and find one of your own!”Even in a riot, when people are being killed, shot, the man’s mind remains continuously thinking of sex.Sex is man’s greatest bondage.You have to make every effort for meditativeness, so that all your sexual energy, instead of moving downwards, starts moving upwards. Instead of finding a beautiful woman, start creating a beautiful man within you. Rather than finding a graceful woman, your energy can make you graceful.But man is more stupid than woman. The whole of history has been made up by man, and you can see the madness: it is a history not of mankind, but of madness, wars, rape, burning living people, destruction. And now they have come to the peak; perhaps Ronald Reagan will be the last chapter of history – although there will be no one to read it, and perhaps no one will be able to write it even.A married couple took their little boy to the circus. During the gorilla act the husband had to go to the bathroom, and while he was gone, the little boy nudged his mother and said, “What is that long thing hanging down between the gorilla’s legs?”His mother was very embarrassed and said quickly, “Oh, that’s nothing, dear.”When the husband returned, the wife went off to buy some popcorn, and while she was gone, the little boy nudged his father and said, “Daddy, what is that big thing hanging down between the gorilla’s legs?”The father smiled and said, “That son, is his penis.”The little boy looked puzzled for a moment and then said, “Then why did mummy just say it was nothing?”“Son,” said his father proudly, “I have spoiled that woman.”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Could dry leaves really be falling at such a young age? I am thirty, and I enjoy sex when it comes, though I don't come so often. I don't feel I am holding something down; on the contrary, I find I usually have to hold it up.Osho, it now takes me all night to do what I used to do all night. Am I missing, or is it missing?Nityanando, this is the difference between the Eastern evolution of consciousness and the Western mind.In the East, to get rid of sex is a blessing; in the West, it is the ultimate calamity, it is dying before death. The day one starts feeling that his sexual energy is getting down, he starts counting days – that death is not far away.In the East, the day one gets beyond sex, he rejoices – the earlier the better – because now the time has come to grow into a new dimension, into freedom from biology, into freedom from body, into freedom from mind. It is the beginning of the experience of your innermost self.Sex is continuously taking you away from yourself. Whether you are a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter: sex takes you away from yourself. The moment sex is not there, there is no drive to go away from yourself. You start settling within.So old leaves are really falling because new leaves want to grow. And old leaves have to go and give space for new experiences, new spaces. It is a blessing – don’t take it according to the Western, rotten mind.The West has everything, but it has forgotten itself. And once you are no longer aware of yourself, then sex becomes the ultimate reality. In the West, sex is God. Sex is now the only God worshipped in the West. But sex simply means you are no longer independent: you depend for your happiness, for your joy, on somebody else – and that dependence is the greatest misery.It is not incidental that men and women, husbands and wives, are continuously quarreling. Even if they are not quarreling, they are in the mood, and the reason is that nobody wants deep down to be dependent on the other. It brings many other diseases by the side: if you are dependent on the woman you love, you will be jealous, you will be continuously watchful…you will start becoming a detective, a CIA, a KGB, an FBI agent, upon your own wife! You will put your children on alert: Be careful, when I am away…what happens in the house.Why this jealousy…? The fear is that perhaps she may start loving someone else. And the fear is natural, because you are starting to think of other women: why should she not think of other men? This is a natural corollary that goes on in both the minds. So she goes on detecting you, she goes on looking into your letters, she goes on searching into your pockets, any address, any phone number…One night a phone rang, and as the bell was ringing Mulla Nasruddin went there, said “Okay,” and put it down.The wife said, “Who was there?”He said, “It was nobody. I have just been unnecessarily disturbed by someone phoning on the wrong number.”The wife said, “What is the number from where the phone came?”These kind of things go on continuously in every house, because the wife has already read the number in his diary. And when he quoted the number, the wife said, “Don’t lie to me that it was a wrong number. This is your diary, and this is the number…. Now tell me, what is her name?” – now it is no more his, now it is her: “Tell me, what is her name?”Under pressure – and every husband is under pressure – he said, “It is nobody, although her name looks like a woman’s name. Her name is Kamala…but this is only the name of a horse. And because it is the season of horse racing and I’m thinking to go to the races tomorrow….”Tomorrow morning again the phone rang, and Mulla was standing by it. The wife said, “Wait. This time I will take the call” – and she listened and told Mulla, “Come on, your horse is calling!” It is very difficult…one of the most difficult things is to deceive your wife. But man goes on making his efforts, and is defeated continuously.I have been going to ask one of my childhood friends, Sukhraj, who is sitting here…. For years it has been that whenever he comes, I never see his wife smiling. I don’t see in her that she has come with joy; it is as if she has come just to keep an eye on him, because here there are so many beautiful women, and he is a beautiful man. And this is a world of people who are absolutely free, who don’t live in bondage of anybody.She comes to me, she touches my feet, but I have never felt that there is any deep love, respect, feeling, emotion. She seems almost like a zombie, and the reason is clear to me. Perhaps it may not be clear to her or to Sukhraj, but I want it to be made clear to them. He would like to come every day; in fact, he would like to live here with me. What is he doing there? – there is nothing left there for him. And when I am here, and millions of people around the world are coming and going every day….He loved me when we were so young that now even the memories of those days are difficult to catch up…and he is the only one left. I had many other friends: they came and they are gone, but he has remained with me unwavering, because it was not a question of any ideological agreement, it was a question of love. It does not matter what I say, what I do, what he says, what he does; that is absolutely irrelevant.So he comes again and again when he can manage. The wife certainly comes reluctantly; otherwise she should be so joyful and she should enjoy all the people around who are living in peace, in love, in freedom, and each moment rejoicing. Here, sitting like a dead corpse simply shows that she has not come. She has to come: she has to come because she cannot leave the husband alone in this strange place.Let the dry leaves fall. You are fortunate that they are falling at thirty. And they are falling at thirty because, as I say, if you live intensely, totally, then the year forty-two…it is only the average, and in existence nothing is average. It all depends on you: there are people who will be at the age of ninety and still thinking of nothing but sex. All other things are finished…the only thing left is sex. That continues to the very end of their life, because they never lived it intensely; they have spread a thin layer of sexuality over all their life. If you live intensely, it is going to disappear sooner.The thirtieth year is perfectly the right time. That leaves you – because you are from the West – at least fifty to sixty years to work upon yourself, to find yourself, and to find the innermost mysteries of existence. In fact, now begins the real life; up to now you were a slave. Now, boundaries are dropping and the whole sky is becoming available to you with all its stars.But in the West it is certainly a very difficult problem. The whole conditioning of centuries has brought man to such a state that sex seems to be everything: it is money, it is power, it is position. Everything is sacrificed for sex, and everything is achieved only for sex.Nobody bothers that sex is not your reality, sex is not love, and nobody even bothers whether you are getting anything out of it or not. What are you getting out of it? – it is almost like people smoking cigarettes: one wonders why they are smoking, and once in a while they also wonder why. But just a habit…and it is only a mental habit. Sex is a biological habit, very deep-rooted.You say, “It now takes me all night to do what I used to do all night.” That’s why – you did well. Soon it will take you twenty-four hours to do what you used to do the whole night!Now, try to understand: you have lost the infatuation and the foolishness and the slavery, and this is the time to start meditating. If you cannot meditate now, then when will you be meditating? I will not prevent you…once in a while you can have your sex, but it will become more and more sparse.There is a saying in Tibet: If you feel tired, lie down. If you feel energetic, move over. But first, feel whether you are energetic, otherwise it is better to lie down.And from me the advice is:If you do not know what to do, at least laugh.Grandma was in her eighties. She tired easily, had little appetite, and was sometimes confused mentally. Her son called the gynecologist, who arrived shortly and was shown up to Grandma’s room, where he examined her thoroughly. Half an hour later he came down.“There is no need to worry,” he explained. “There is nothing really wrong with her except her age. She will be all right.”The son was very relieved and went upstairs to see her. “Well, mother,” he asked, “how did you like the gynecologist?”“So that was the gynecologist?” she said. “My god, I thought he acted very familiar for a priest.”Priests and monks and saints are in more difficulty than you think you are, because the time when they could have been deeply into sex is gone. Now only the thought goes on and on like a continuous record. And the needle of the record has stuck at sex; it does not move from there.Ronald Reagan gets into bed with Nancy. Ronnie is feeling very horny, so he turns to Nancy and says, “Oh, Nancy, I would like to launch my missile into your Gulf.”Nancy says, “Oh, Ronnie, you are so romantic, but you have not been able to bring your missile up since the second world war.”Ronnie pleads, “But Nancy, I think I can do it if you would only have faith in me.”Nancy replies, “But honestly, Ron, it has been so long since we made war that I would not know where to begin.”Frustrated, Ronnie says, “God, I hate peace!”Don’t be an old fool. And if you can become wise while you are young, just thirty, thank God. Be grateful to existence that he is allowing you so much time to explore much that is not available to any other animal, which is only available to man. And the more time you have to explore it, the deeper will be your insight, the greater will be your consciousness and tremendous will be your splendor. You will not die an ugly death; you will die with a grace and with a smile on your face.A life that cannot reach to enlightenment has been a sheer waste. It is good that your thirty years were passed in the West. Thirty years in the East are bad luck; thirty years in the West are good luck – but good luck only if after thirty years you can come into contact with the Eastern mysteries. Then you have more chances than the Eastern counterpart, because the Eastern counterpart has been repressing sex, so it will not be possible for him to meditate at the age of thirty. If he can manage to meditate even at the age of sixty, it will be a surprise.It is a tremendously fortunate moment, at least for my people, because the East is so orthodox, so traditional, so blind, so deaf, that they will not hear me. They can hear Morarji Desai and even can start drinking their own urine. That is possible because for centuries they have been drinking the urine of the cows, so in fact it is better to drink your own – self-sufficiency! Why be dependent on a cow? And who knows what kind of dirty water she has been drinking? As far as I know Morarji Desai has no need of any water. The same water goes on circulating, so naturally he never falls sick, because infections are difficult, pollution is difficult….But they will not listen to me. They cannot listen to any reasonable, logical, scientific truth.So it is a very strange situation. I am here in the East, but my people are going to be from the West, because only the Western youth can understand. Sex has become futile, he has lived with too many women; drugs have become useless, he has known too much…now what else? There seems to be nothing around which can keep the youth in the West interested, intrigued, still feeling that life may have some significance.All the modern, contemporary Western philosophers are talking about one thing only: meaninglessness. And they appeal to the Western youth because he can see himself: it is not a question to be convinced about, to be argued – he has lived everything and he finds everything falls flat sooner or later. He has lived with many women; the woman has lived with many men. They are all alike…you have just to put the light off! The question is only whether the light is on or off; that much difference and the most beautiful woman or the most ugly woman are the same.Because they have known many women and many men, the hope that still can be helpful in the East is no more for them. In the East everybody is caught up with one woman, and that means monotony. People call it monogamy, but that is not the right word. They are so fed up with the woman, the woman is so fed up with the man, but there is no other way. It is a lifelong contract.So they go on hoping that, perhaps what my wife does not have, other women have; what my husband is not able for, other people seem to be able…. But in the West, that hope has died. People have tried and found that it is all nonsense; every woman has the same physiology, the difference is just superficial. Every man has the same physiology, and everything comes to the same end.Then they tried grass, they tried marijuana, they tried hashish, they tried transcendental meditation. Now they are trying yogic flying and making themselves so foolish. But what to do? – they have to do something, otherwise life seems to be empty.You are fortunate that life need not be empty for you. If sex is going, say good-bye to it. It was good when it was there; it is better when it is gone. Now begins a totally different space of experiencing. Now begins a new adventure, more free, more individual, more unfettered. And the sky is so vast to explore…and on each step there are miracles and miracles.So sing and dance and meditate. And life is immensely beautiful: it has all that Gautam Buddha experienced and more, because twenty-five centuries have passed; man has become far more mature, and evolution has gone higher. We can produce greater Gautam Buddhas with more dimensions to them.In the past it was thought that a man can only experience himself or God – which are only different names – if he tortures himself. That was a primitive idea.I give you a sophisticated, cultured version, the latest edition: there is no need to torture yourself – it is absolutely absurd! You can be blissful, you can be ecstatic, you can be meditative, comfortably. I don’t see the connection that you can be meditative sitting in a bullock cart but you cannot be meditative sitting in a Rolls Royce. If you can be meditative sitting on a camel, then why can’t you be meditative flying in a jumbo jet – which is far more comfortable, far more silent, far more peaceful.Have you ever tried sitting on an animal like a camel? – sex is exactly like that! It is the ugliest vehicle…. I have suffered it, I’m not saying it without experience. And those two, three hours I was on a camel, I said, “My god, whether I’m going to survive or not…”Life has gone on – in spite of all hindrances from politicians, from priests, from traditionalists, from the orthodox. Life has gone on, although it could have gone far faster if all these hindrances were not there. But still, after twenty-five hundred years we are in a position to create better Gautam Buddhas, better Mahaviras. We know much more about human physiology, we know much more about human biology, we know much more about human sexuality.The ancientmost book on sex was written in India; that was Vatsyayana’s Kamasutras, sutras on sex. But looking at it, it looks as if a child is writing about sex. After Sigmund Freud and Masters and Johnson, and after so many discoveries in biology, in genetics, we are in such a position that we can create far greater giants of enlightenment, awareness, illumination. But if you are feeling too much attached to that which is gone, then your life will be a life of misery, continuously thinking of something which you cannot do. It is up to you.Being my sannyasin, I don’t think you will accept this despair. Less than ultimate ecstasy is not our concern.Osho,The other night you said that it is impossible to go into meditation until one has experienced sex to the maximum, and that it drops by itself.Osho, this is very disheartening to me. You must be well aware of the fact of how difficult it is to have girlfriends and experience sex in India.Marriage is no solution because then I have to forget meditation forever.Osho, isn't it possible to go beyond sex by being a watcher of our biology just as we can go beyond our mind by watching it?Manatit Bharti, I can understand your problem. But you have to understand something more difficult than your problem.You cannot watch your biology. You can watch your mind, because mind is available just like a TV screen before your consciousness. But your biology, your physiology, your chemistry – that is not available to your consciousness. You cannot watch how your food is being digested; you cannot watch how your food is being transformed into blood, into bones, into nerves. You cannot watch, because for a certain reason nature has not left any door for you to watch that which belongs to the body.I agree with nature that it is wise that it has closed all the doors: biology, physiology, chemistry – nothing is available to your consciousness, for the simple reason that there are things which change their nature immediately the moment you watch. I will have to explain to you….You are in your bathroom making faces in front of the mirror, and then suddenly you become aware of somebody – just a small child it may be – looking from the keyhole at what you are doing. Suddenly you change. He has not said anything, neither have you deliberately done anything; spontaneously, with the very feeling that you are being watched, you become a different personality. When you are alone you relax, you put your mask aside.Albert Einstein was tremendously mystified; he died in a great disappointment. He was one of the most successful men in the world…. But when he reached to the farthest inside of the atom, where electrons, neutrons and protons constitute its body, he simply felt he was going mad, because it was against all logic, against all mathematics, against all the science that we have developed in three hundred years. Those electrons were behaving in such a way that he could not have conceived even in the wildest dream.What he came to know was that the moment you watch – and you are watching through very sophisticated scientific instruments, not with naked eyes – they start behaving differently. He was thinking that they are dead particles of electricity – but they are not. They are in their bathroom…and now somebody is watching them, they start behaving differently, in a more gentlemanly way.He could not believe that watching can make a difference to matter. He said, “Perhaps the mystics are right, that everything is full of life, we are just not aware of it.”Secondly, he became aware that an electron can take a quantum leap. I have used that word many times…but perhaps most of you may not have understood it, because it is out of modern physics. It is a made-up word; it had never existed before Albert Einstein.One electron is called quanta, because that is the ultimate particle of quantity; you cannot go below it, you cannot divide it anymore. So according to the word ‘quantity’, he named it quanta. Finished, you have come to the end of the line; now you cannot, at least for the moment…Perhaps in the future, better scientific instruments may be able to cut it down more, but whatever happens, the end will be called quanta.That quanta dazzles every mind, because it takes a jump from place A to place B. It does not travel the distance; between A and B it disappears. At A point you see it, and then suddenly you see it at B point. What happens in the space between? Howsoever fast it can go – we have now instruments even to know the speed of light, the greatest speed – there is no problem of any speed. A tremendous discovery, a tremendous miracle…it simply dematerializes at one point and again materializes at another point. The space between is never traveled.It was very shocking in the beginning, but slowly, slowly the shock was absorbed. Einstein could see a tremendous possibility in it: the possibility of making a machine which can make a man disappear from one place and allow him to appear in another place without traveling the space between.That seems to be the only possible way if man has ever to reach to the stars; otherwise no vehicle can take him. The nearest star is four years away – four light-years away. So if you go to the nearest star it will take four years to reach, with the speed of light, not with the speed of your railway trains or your airplanes – these are now outdated. The speed has to be exactly the speed of light; that is one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second.And the problem is that at that speed everything will melt, because it will create such heat, such friction that we don’t have any metal to survive in that friction. So anything at that speed will become light, and all the passengers inside will also become light. So that is out of the question, that cannot be done.At first it had been thought that we may find or we may create some metal, synthetic, which will be able to survive the speed. But that has been dropped; it is impossible. At that speed everything will become light. That cuts our planet off from the whole universe completely. Then it will not be possible ever for man to visit the stars.But this quantum leap opened a new vista. Albert Einstein was so happy that night, he could not sleep. His wife said again and again, “Why are you not sleeping?”He said, “I am so full of joy! A tremendously new dimension has opened. One day – perhaps I will not be here, but one day some man, one of our children, our children’s children, may be able to find a mechanism which can transform a human being here…and he will appear far away on another planet, on another solar system, on another star, millions of light years away, within a second.”Always look at life as opening new doors.Never be hopeless, never be meaningless.Never for a moment settle down with the idea that all is finished because sex is finished. It is good that it is finished…it is good that you are not created by nature in such a way that you can disturb its inner mechanism. If you can look into your chemistry, suddenly your chemical elements will start behaving differently. They don’t like to be watched; they are naked, they don’t want to be watched! They have their own etiquette, their own culture, their own behavior. They are very traditional people.So one thing you should remember: biology cannot be dropped just by watching. But sex is not really oriented in biology. In biology is its manifestation; its orientation is in the brain, which can be watched.So there is no need to be worried because you are in India and girlfriends are very difficult. They are difficult because of your fathers, your grandfathers, and all the idiots that have preceded them. Otherwise there is no reason why they should not be available; the number is almost equal.But all your great seers have prevented you from getting rid of an ugly slavery, although they are thought to be people who have been teaching you to go beyond sex. I say unto you: They are the people who have been keeping you under the slavery of sex for centuries.The only way to go beyond it is either to experience it and be finished with it, or the second way, which is a little difficult, is to watch your mind. The center of sex is in the mind, it is not in your genitals – they are only branches. It shows there, but it is not there.This was discovered after the second world war, a very recent discovery. A man was shot on the battlefield, and was brought to the hospital. He survived, but his whole leg was to be amputated. His whole leg was hurt in an explosion and particularly his big toe. It was hurting terribly, and he was continuously complaining, “Do something about my toe, it is unbearable.”Finally, they had to give him anesthesia, and when they looked they found it was not only the big toe, but his whole leg had to be amputated, otherwise he would not be able to survive. It is better to have one leg and to be alive than the alternative….There was no time to ask the man, there was no time to ask his family; it was on the battlefield, and the doctor simply decided, “We have to do it; otherwise the man is gone.”They amputated his leg, and when he came back to consciousness after a few hours he said immediately, “Do something. My big toe is hurting very much.”The doctors laughed, because they knew now there was no big toe. The whole leg was gone, so how could it be hurting? But he was covered with blankets, so he had no idea what had happened. He insisted, and the doctors said, “You don’t understand. It is not possible, it is only your imagination.”He said, “What nonsense are you talking? I am suffering and you are teaching me about imagination…?”So the doctor threw the blanket off and showed him, “Now tell me, where is your toe?”The man could not believe it: his whole leg was gone! The toe was gone but it was still hurting! He said, “I understand now why you cannot understand me and why you are still unaware of the fact that my toe is hurting very badly.”The man was perfectly sane, and the doctors had to work out what the problem was. Then they found that it is not the toe, but some center in his brain which has been hurt, which is connected with the toe. So whether the toe is there or not does not matter; the toe will hurt, because the center continues vibrating in the same way.So a man can amputate his genitals, but don’t believe that he has gone beyond sex. His sexual center will go on vibrating. You can watch that sexual center: in your meditations it will come in sexual fantasies, just as it comes in your dreams. Don’t be disturbed, and don’t call it evil, sin….Don’t condemn it, it is natural, perfectly natural. It is just that your society has gone unnatural; otherwise there would not have been so much trouble. If your center of sex in the brain was exhausted by your genitals, there would have been no trouble. But your society has prevented, blocked the way, so the whole of sex has become cerebral. Now it is only in the mind. It goes on and on…and it has no outlet.Jean-Paul Sartre has written a very beautiful book, No Exit. He says, “Any situation in which you find no exit becomes hell.” How long can you go on and on, and you don’t find any door to get out? The situation may be comfortable….Jean-Paul Sartre’s story – it is a beautiful story: in a sitting room, on comfortable sofas, a few people are sitting, all strangers. Whatever they need is immediately supplied…but there is no exit; they cannot go out. How long can you remain? – it is comfortable, luxurious, whatever you need is supplied, but you don’t have any privacy, those people are always there. It is a very confined space; you don’t have enough space for yourself, and the ultimate problem is how to get out. There is no door at all, and there is nobody to ask. Everybody is a stranger, and they all said, “We are in the same trap.”This is his description of modern hell. But I understand that this is the situation of the modern mind: you are closed in your skull, there is no door, things go on and on….So your question is meaningful, but not impossible to solve. You will just have to be more meditative than the Western counterpart, Nityanando. Nityanando can meditate more easily, more relaxedly – in fact joyously: “This is perfectly good; otherwise the despair…”You will find it difficult – but I am not responsible for your difficulty. Your saints, your tirthankaras, your avataras, your mahatmas – all these whom you have been worshipping, all your jailers, have imprisoned you in such a way that you will never become enlightened.But if you make a real, sincere effort…and by sincere effort I mean you have simply to watch, not to judge. It will take a little longer time for you than for Nityanando, because he has done thirty years’ gymnastics before. So on the whole it won’t be much different: he has done much exercise before, but you will have to do it now. His exercise was with other women, your exercise will be with the woman inside your mind, just the image. In a way you will create less mess than Nityanando.So all in all, all things considered, things are equal. He has done his homework – you have to start. He is blessed because he is finished with it and he can take a quantum leap into meditation. You are blessed because you need not go through all the pushups that he has done, useless, ugly….Every morning one feels, “What an idiot I am” – but by the evening again one thinks, “At least one time more!” And one knows perfectly well that this has been going on for years: one time more. But every evening one becomes helpless; every morning one becomes wise, a sage, one can even teach others.Just the other day I was telling you about Vijayanand. In his article he says he can teach me one or two things….I have told my people to inform him, “You are too poor – just one or two? You come here and I will teach you one or two thousand, or as many as you want! One or two things? – just two bullets in your gun? Then you will look awkward standing there – what to do…?”That reminds me: I was a student, and there was in Nagpur University an all-India competition, a debating competition. And just as I spoke and went back to my seat, the second person…he belonged to the Sanskrit University of Varanasi. The Sanskrit University in Varanasi has nothing to do with English; it is pure teaching of Sanskrit, everything is taught in Sanskrit.He must have been feeling a little inferior to all the universities’ candidates, although the discussion was in Hindi. And it is psychological because there was no need for him to feel inferior. But unconscious man is unconscious…. Just to impress he started, “Brothers and sisters…” and went on. After just two minutes he said, “I will give you a quotation of Bertrand Russell” – and he did not know much English, so in the middle of the sentence he stopped, the needle got stuck…. He looked all around, and there was no help because there was no question of any help….But I could not bear to see his awkwardness – I was sitting closest to him, he was next to me – so I said, “Start again.” Finding no other solution he had to follow me. He started again…but I meant something else: I meant, “Start the quotation again; perhaps by repeating again you may remember….” But this is a problem with memory: if you have come with a memorized lecture, then you cannot start from the middle.He started again: “Brothers and sisters…” and it was such a hilarious scene: he was saying the same things that he had said! And Bertrand Russell…and again at the same point…because when the needle sticks it always sticks at the same point on the gramophone record.He looked at me, and I said, “Start again! There is no way out.” And people were laughing hilariously and there were almost ten thousand students of the university, all the colleges, professors, and it was such a tremendous chaos…. But he started again: “Brothers and sisters…” and came to the same point!He looked at me, and I said, “What can I do? Start again!” And he was such an idiot that rather than sitting down, dropping the whole thing, he tried one time more. Time was running out…because ten minutes only was the time allowed, and this was the last time.As the ten minutes were over he had come again to a stop. He looked at me, and I said, “Now it is finished!”He was very angry at me. When he came by my side he said, “You are a strange person. You made me a laughingstock.”I said, “You were looking at me. You were asking me for some suggestion, and whatever I could manage, I suggested. It was still up to you to follow it or not. I was not giving you an order, ‘You have to start…’ I was simply saying that this is one of the ways. If one gets stuck, start again. And it is not my experience, so I don’t know – because I have never crammed anything, so I never stop. If I stop, I stop of my own accord, not out of any compulsion. I can stop anywhere, and I can start from anywhere, I don’t go backwards. So don’t be angry with me, I was simply being helpful.”He said, “What, helpful…? I will not be able to show my face tomorrow to anybody. Everybody is laughing.”I said, “Anyway, your face is not such that anybody would like to see it!”It will be a little difficult for you, because you will come again and again to the point, sex, because that is your repression.But always remember: the responsibility goes to your forefathers, to Shrimad Bhagavadgita, to the Vedas, to all your so-called great seers. I am not responsible; I am simply giving you the only possible way. I cannot tell the women of India, “This poor Manatit Bharti wants to get rid of sex, so please help him” – they will kill me! They are going to kill me anyway, but I will try to continue as long as possible.And certainly I would not like to be assassinated just for this…your meditation. That is not my business. Either you find some woman or you meditate and be watchful – don’t be involved in your sexual fantasies. They will disappear, but they will take time. But Nityanando has also taken time, thirty years…. You may take not more than three years – that is the maximum, if you try.But if you are thinking that I will suggest to some woman, “Help this poor Indian” – I am not going to do that. The women that come from the West report to me again and again that these few Indians who come don’t seem to come for meditation. They come here just to stare at women, or just, if they can get a chance, to touch a woman. When everybody is meditating with closed eyes, they open their eyes. These people are not here for meditation.No Western woman likes this ugly repressive mind, so you have to suffer for your forefathers, your tradition, your religion. That is nobody else’s responsibility.Just meditate. Women will be coming…but don’t open your eyes, because then real women are all around. Those real women are not for you; you have to manage with your fantasy women. They are enough: within three years, if you can continue, you will be finished, they will disappear from your mind.But this is the difference between the East and the West. There are many other differences, but this is one of the most significant, because it is going to change the whole consciousness of man. But ways can be found. If I can help Nityanando, I can also help you.You are asking, “Is not it possible to go beyond sex by being a watcher of our biology, just as we can go beyond our mind by watching it?”Biology you cannot watch; you don’t understand what you are asking. Just watching the mind is enough, because mind contains all the centers – the seven hundred centers which control your whole body. Your whole biology, physiology, chemistry, hormonal system – everything is controlled by seven hundred centers in your small skull. You just watch that….You are carrying a whole load of films in your small head. Sit down anywhere and the film starts. Just don’t get involved, don’t get interested, don’t start saying, “Oh my god, this is the woman I have been looking for!” Don’t start saying such things inside you; otherwise you will miss the whole point, you will have to see the film again.When for the first time in India films started – those were the days of silent movies – a touring movie house came into a village. One villager purchased a ticket for the first show – that was the matinee show – and there comes a scene when a beautiful woman is undressing. The villager stands up, and many people shout, “Sit down!” – so he has to sit down.But he is alerted to what is happening, and just then, when she is going to drop her last piece of clothing, a railway train passes by. He has been trying to look from every angle, but he cannot see the woman. By the time the railway train has passed, the woman is swimming in the lake. He said, “My god, the real thing I missed!”The show was finished and everybody was gone, but he was still sitting there. The manager came and asked, “Why are you sitting there? The show is finished.”He said, “It is finished, but here is the money for the second ticket. I will see the second show, I will see the third show, I will not leave here unless I get the point.”The manager said, “What point?”He said, “Don’t talk to me; don’t disturb me. You just bring the ticket. I cannot leave this seat. From here the view is very clear.”The manager said, “This seems to be strange…but what is the harm?” And he brought him another ticket.The second show he was very alert, very watchful; he was watching almost holding his breath. But that goddamn train again came!The second show finished, the point was still missed. The manager came saying, “Now it is time, you have seen the same film twice.”He said, “I have seen it twice, but I will see it thrice, I will see it four times…I will see it my whole life!”The manager said, “You can confide in me. What is the problem? Don’t you understand the film?”He said, “I understand everything. Only one thing I don’t understand: will the train be late some day or not? In this country a train coming exactly at the same time every day is not possible!”You will have a little difficulty. The train may come at the right time and you may miss the point. Don’t be worried. If you can be silently watchful, the mind is enough – because the mind is exactly all that controls your whole body, the whole system.I was sitting by the side of the Ganges, near the Christian college in Allahabad. One of my friends was studying there and I was staying with him, but by the evening I had gone on the riverbank. And the Ganges at Allahabad is tremendous, oceanic, very beautiful. Two great rivers meet there, Ganges and Yamuna.In ancient times it seems a third great river used to meet there also, Saraswati, which has disappeared in the meantime. What happened to it? – because in the old scriptures it is mentioned, in all the old maps it is mentioned…. Something went wrong: it may have lost its sources of water, it may have changed its route, but it no longer exists. But still, because of the three rivers, Allahabad is called Triveni. Triveni means trinity, three; the English word three is nothing but the Sanskrit word tri.I was sitting there alone, just watching the beautiful river flowing so silently, you could hardly suspect the flow of it. At that very time a young man also came who was a Hindu sadhu, a monk. It may have been his place to come every evening to meditate, as it was very silent. He sat by my side in his lotus posture and started meditating.I was sitting by his side, so I started looking at him to see whether he is meditating or not. You will say, “How can you see from outside?” There is a small art: you can simply see from the eyelids whether the eyes inside are moving or not. If they are moving, you can see the movement from above, you can see the eyes are moving inside. That means he is seeing scenes – maybe railway trains are moving. If he comes to meditate, that movement stops, because there is nothing to see.His eyes were moving, so I shook him and I told him, “Whom do you think you are deceiving?”He said, “You are disturbing my meditation.”I said, “I am not disturbing your meditation. I am making you clear that this is not meditation.”He said, “How can you say from the outside?”I said, “That is none of your business. But I can say that you were seeing things – your eyes were moving.”He became afraid when I said that. He said, “That’s true. My eyes were moving, but I never thought that somebody could see that from outside.”I said, “I am in the same profession. You can deceive anybody else, but not me. Now tell me what you were seeing.”He said, “That is too much. You are a stranger, I don’t know anything about you!”I said, “And whom were you seeing? – they were all strangers….”He looked at me and he said, “That’s true, they were strangers. But you seem a strange man, why are you harassing me?”I said, “I am not harassing you, I am simply asking what you were seeing. Your being a Hindu monk I can predict that these cannot be male strangers, these were female strangers – because monks cannot avoid seeing women.”He relaxed. He looked at me and said, “You are right. But how could you manage…?”I said, “There is nothing to be managed; it is very simple. What will repressed people do? All their repressions will start like vomiting in their mind.”So you will have to go through a vomiting experience. Nityanando has already gone….It does not matter that you have become a sannyasin; it won’t change anything unless your sannyas triggers a meditativeness in you.“Oy Veh, to be a Polish Jew,” said Levitz to Joe Finklebaum. “We are persecuted and harassed, and all because we are the chosen people.”“Yes,” said Finklebaum. “That’s why I changed my name. I was just fed up with being harassed.”“You changed your name? What did you change it to?” said Levitz.“Well, I used to be called Joe Finklebaum, and now I’m Swami Joe Finklebaum.”But that will not help much! Just by changing your name…and still you remain Joe Finklebaum.You have become a sannyasin. Now it is a responsibility on you to fulfill the commitment of sannyas – and that is meditation.Without meditation there is no sannyas.It is only your pure consciousness rising upwards – slowly, slowly moving beyond the gravitation of lower things – that will make you a sannyasin.I can define sannyas as a flying experience to the stars.You should always remain mindful of one thing: that I cannot be deceived. I know how many people are meditating. I know how many people are simply imitating. I know how a few people are simply hanging around. But don’t waste your time – because time is not money, time is life! And if you have taken a step to change, to transform, then don’t try to deceive, because you will be deceiving only yourself, not me.A husband complained that his wife was a liar.“What makes you say that?” asked the friend.“Well,” said the husband, “she came home this morning and told me she spent the night with Mary.”“Well,” replied the friend, “maybe she did. How do you know she was lying?”“How do I know?” cried the husband, because I spent the night with Mary!”It is better to be truthful than to be caught lying. Lying is so undignified. But millions of people are pretending to be what they are not. At least I hope my people will simply express what they are.I told you about this Vijayanand. In his article he says that I preach what I don’t practice. I was amazed – because I practiced first, then I preached. But these people have their own expectations, and they think their expectations should be fulfilled. For example, a man who is enlightened should be poor, as if poverty is something spiritual. Those who preach it, they should be it. I have no objection about it – but I have never preached it, so why should I practice it?I am preaching just the opposite. I have been preaching that the richer you are, the more possibility there is of transformation. And I don’t see that comfort is any hindrance to your being meditative: that being in a beautiful garden you can be less meditative than being in the forest; that being naked you can become enlightened more easily than having comfortable clothes.I think otherwise. I think when it is cold and you are naked – rather than being enlightened, you will suffer double pneumonia. It is better to have enough clothes, enlightened or not enlightened, then at least double pneumonia will not happen!But this has been my experience my whole life: people have been condemning me for their teachings. They are not my teachings…I have never said, “Blessed are the poor because they shall inherit the kingdom of God.” They are enough blessed if they can even inherit the kingdom of the devil! All religions have evolved only when society was comfortable and rich enough. The twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas were all sons of kings; Gautam Buddha was the son of a king; Rama and Krishna were both kings. And all these idiots go on saying that I should live as a poor man – then only can their mind be satisfied.I am not here to satisfy any idiot’s mind or his expectations; neither do I expect anything from anybody, nor am I going to fulfill anybody’s expectation. Who is Vijayanand? What does he know about my teaching, and what does he know about my practice? I am exactly doing what I am saying. I say only afterwards…. Unless I have done it and experienced it, I never say it, because who knows, it may not be right – and I would not like my people to be deceived. I have not uttered a single word to you which is not out of my own experience.But I am not here to fulfill somebody else’s preachings. I am not here to fulfill the preachings of Mahavira and be naked, I am not here to fulfill Krishna’s teachings and have a garage for sixteen thousand women. I am not going to follow Rama’s preachings and kill a poor young untouchable because he has heard the brahmins reciting the Vedas.Sudras are not allowed to read, are not allowed even to hear the holy scriptures, because their hearing will spoil the holiness of the scriptures. I don’t see any relationship. Who is hearing cannot make any difference to the holy scripture. Rama poured hot melted lead into the ears of the poor young fellow, and he died. This was the punishment so that sudras should not come near any temple where the holy scriptures are being recited. That may have been the preaching of Rama, and that may be Vijayanand’s God – God’s incarnation – I don’t care.If I see this fellow Rama I’m going to ask him, “What right have you got, on what grounds…? You are a criminal, you have committed a murder.”If I meet Krishna, who is thought to be the perfect incarnation of God, the whole God come only for the first time…. A very strange idea, as if God comes in parts also, installments. Rama was a partial incarnation, perhaps a hand or a head or a leg or something else…you can understand, et cetera. Of what was he the incarnation? what part?Only Krishna is a perfect incarnation – which means God comes complete. Then what happens in paradise? And this complete incarnation teaches absolutely wrong things: he teaches violence, he teaches war, he teaches bloodshed.I am not going to fulfill these people’s teachings.I live according to what I preach.I challenge Vijayanand to come here and tell me on what grounds he is making such stupid statements. In fact, he is feeling guilty. He was not an ashramite; I have given him refuge here, because he was condemned in Mumbai and he would have been condemned all over India. It is absolutely ugly, unnatural, unscientific, immoral, to marry the daughter of your own sister. It is not only against religion, it is against science. It is not only against this generation, it is against future generations – because their children will be blind, may be retarded, may be born with AIDS…anything is possible.The closer the blood, the uglier the children; the farther the blood, the better the breed. That’s the whole science of crossbreeding. We bring English bulls for Indian mother cows, and nobody even bothers, “What are you doing? English bulls for your mothers? Have you gone mad?…”But if you want beautiful bulls yourself, you will have to bring as faraway males and females as possible together. The crossbreed is always better than the father, than the mother, both. Otherwise there was no need…everybody could have married his own sister. That would have been the easiest and simplest and cheapest way: no cost, no problem, no dowry – just marry your sister and, just as every story says, they lived happily ever afterwards.No society in the whole world allows it. Even before the scientific discovery that close blood breeds distorted children, people must have become aware long before, thousands of years before…. But the logic should be taken to its full consequences: no Hindu should marry another Hindu, no Mohammedan should marry another Mohammedan, no Christian should marry another Christian, no Indian should marry another Indian, no Russian should marry another Russian, and no American should marry another American. Just by this simple formula we can bring about a tremendous revolution all over the world.Insist on faraway blood, and you will have a generation of highly superior beings, intellectually, physically, in every sense.As far as I am concerned, whatever I am teaching, I am doing. And if anybody has any objection, he is welcome just before my people to present the case, so they can understand. I may not even need to answer; my people can answer, “What stupidity are you talking about?”Here things are simple and sincere. Whatever I am saying, I am doing; my preaching and my practice are not different.Such beautiful silence…This is what I preach,And this is what I practice.Just a little story to end up this beautiful peace with laughter.A salesman is forced to share a room with a rabbi in a crowded hotel. He enters the room and finds the rabbi kneeling in a corner, murmuring his prayers.“Hi,” says the salesman. “I’m your new roommate.”The rabbi nods without interrupting his prayers.“Well then, which bed shall I take?”The rabbi points to one bed, continuing to pray. The salesman nervously unpacks his bag, then all of a sudden says, “Say, rabbi, do you mind if I bring up a girl?”The rabbi, still praying, shouts, “Two, not one!”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Could you please give me a few sutras and jokes for the nourishment of my poor soul?Devageet, there is no problem in giving you a few sutras and jokes – but I will not give them for the nourishment of your poor soul for the simple reason that soul needs no nourishment. The soul is never poor.The only really poor people in the world are those who are unaware of their soul and the treasures it contains.There is a poverty of the body, which is man-created. Science declares definitively that we can produce enough food, enough nourishment for more than five billion people; by the end of this century the population of the world will be five billion. Who is preventing them…?Every six months America is drowning so much food in the oceans that just the cost of taking it to the ocean comes to two billion dollars. And the same is happening in Europe: every six months they have so much food that they don’t have customers for it – mountains of butter, and they don’t have any more warehouses. Keeping it in the warehouses is costly; they have to drown it in the ocean. The last installment in Europe also took two billion dollars…just to drown the butter, cheese and other nourishing food.At the time they drowned it, one thousand people in Ethiopia were dying of starvation every day. By the end of this century – if this stupid politics and these ugly lines on the map don’t disappear – then half the population of the world is going to die. Of course, that half will not be in the advanced, scientifically and technically equipped West; it will be in the East.I am always surprised at what the Eastern politicians are doing: I cannot deny the simple fact that they are trying to gain more nuclear weapons without bothering that their own population will die in such large numbers – one in two. That means every house will be surrounded by corpses; there will not be even people to bury them or burn them. The by-products of so many people – for example, in India fifty million people will die – their death and their rotting bodies will create millions of diseases, about which nobody is bothering at all.The Indian prime minister goes to Russia to get more military power; he goes to America to get more uranium so that he can also make nuclear weapons. It seems so stupid and so mad…if we could get rid of all the politicians there would really be peace in the world.And the same applies to the religious people. Now the Vatican pope comes to India, and goes to Mother Teresa’s orphanage, where only seven hundred orphans are. He is very much interested in saving them, but he says not a single word when the European market, where he lives, drowns millions of tons of nourishment which could have saved Ethiopia.What is true about political leaders is also true about your so-called religious leaders. Their concern seems to be that it will be better that the East is finished…but their part of the world should become more affluent, more rich.There is also poverty of the mind. That too is man-created, and in that the religious leaders are far ahead of the political leaders. They have stopped all sources of man’s intelligence and its growth. All the religions, without exception, have been trying that man should not have intelligence; on the contrary, they are teaching that you should have belief.Belief is anti-intelligence.They have been teaching that you should not have doubt – and doubt is the mother of all invention. Doubt is the foundation of the whole of science, technology. Any search begins with doubt, and disbelief. If you believe and you don’t doubt, you stay where you are, and your position goes on deteriorating because the population goes on growing.You are becoming every moment more poor than you think, because millions of children are born every day. But the pope did not condemn America for destroying food, did not say a single word to the European governments and the European Common Market against destroying nourishment – which is absolutely ugly when people are dying. With the same money the food could have reached to Ethiopia. But it reached into the deepest ocean, where it will disappear and be eaten by sea animals. It seems there has suddenly arisen a great love for sea animals….Man has been kept half nourished as far as the body is concerned, because a half nourished man cannot revolt. His sole concern is at least one meal a day – and that meal is not scientifically nourishing: just to fill the empty stomach is not to have a nourishing meal. You need certain amounts of vitamins, you need certain amounts of minerals, you need certain amounts of chemicals. Nobody seems to be awake, but an undernourished body is weak, in the state of a beggar – and beggars don’t revolt.A retarded mind cannot even think that the world can progress, that there can be some evolution possible. The retarded mind has been told by all the religions: Be contented as you are. This contentment is not the real contentment; this contentment is to repress any rebellious situation, to protect the rich and to let the poor die. Be contented….Marx was right when he said, “Religion is the opium of the people.” I want to add a few more compliments to religion: it is not only opium, it is poison, it is suicide, it is murder, it is war, it is rape. It is keeping man continuously in slavery, it does not allow any freedom of thought – and if there is no freedom of thought, consciousness has no possibility to grow. But the soul is beyond these idiots’ hands. They don’t know anything about it; otherwise they might have tried to keep it also undernourished.Devageet, your soul is as rich as any Gautam Buddha or as any Jesus or as any Lao Tzu. Your soul does not need anything – except discovery. Never think for a moment that the soul is poor; it is the richest exploration. The finding of it will make you far richer than the richest man in the world. Emperors will look like beggars.Today in America, which is the richest country, the richest men have only four and a half billion dollars; in Japan, the richest man in the world has twenty-one billion dollars. But their souls are completely forgotten. They are only counting their money, knowing perfectly well that all that money is soaked in blood; all that money is out of exploitation of the starving, of the retarded. The retarded and starving have been kept retarded and starving; otherwise it would be difficult to exploit them.You cannot exploit an intelligent man.You cannot exploit a man of understanding.You cannot exploit a man who knows his own eternal being.Devageet, your soul needs discovery not nourishment. Soul is not material, it is your eternal energy. It was before your death, it will be after your death.But for your mind, the first sutra:…A smile is the shortest distance between people.But even smiles have disappeared. People have fallen so far apart that nobody truly smiles; all smiles have become Jimmy Carter smiles. It is very difficult to find a smile which is not plastic. Just stretching your lips from ear to ear does not mean you are smiling; you may be exercising your lips…!And have you seen any photograph of Jimmy Carter since he was no longer president of America? I have seen many. I have been watching: the smile has simply disappeared; he looks a sad, defeated, frustrated man. The smile was not his, it was political, diplomatic. This is really ugly, that people cannot even smile at each other. So I can certainly say it is a significant sutra: a smile is the shortest distance between people.…A statesman is a politician who did not get caught.They are all thieves, they are all cheats, they are criminals. But when they are not caught, then the politician raises his status: he becomes a statesman.…Life without wife is better than wife without life.…While attending a baseball match, the American president, Ronald Reagan, was accidentally hit on the head by a baseball. Next day, the newspaper headlines read: “Reagan’s head X-rayed – reveals nothing.”…A salesman knocks on the front door of a house and a little boy opens it, turns to his mother and calls, “Hey, Mom, it’s a live commercial.”…There is always something about your success that displeases even your best friends. I have been asked again and again why America destroyed our commune, and I have answered, “Because we were so successful.” If we had not been successful nobody would have cared. But because we were successful in transforming a desert – which had never produced anything green – into a beautiful oasis, even friends became enemies.Nobody can tolerate your success. When you are a failure, everybody has the upper hand; he sympathizes with you, he says, “Poor fellow…” But nobody goes to the successful man to congratulate him; it hurts.I am happy that the richest country in the world became jealous of a small commune of five thousand people. It has proved indubitably that money does not change people, or their mind.I could have understood it if our commune in India would have been as successful as it was in America…but I am certain in India we would have been destroyed exactly on the same lines. In fact, they are trying, because we are still gathering, things are returning…people are coming again, and the fear in New Delhi is great. It is strange: they have all the power, but still they cannot see people happy, joyous, creative, loving and living their own way, living their own style, living in freedom.Because the whole world is living in slavery, the free man cannot be tolerated. The whole world is a failure. Even the richest are still beggars because they want more. What is the difference?…A beggar wants more, the emperor wants more – their minds are functioning in the same way.The commune became the target of the whole of American politics, and particularly the fundamentalist Christians – because they were not so successful in two thousand years in bringing a smile to people’s faces, bringing light to their eyes, bringing silences to their hearts. I had never thought that they will become jealous. I thought they had everything – why should they be jealous of our cars or our airplanes, our roads, our turning the desert into an oasis? They should have been happy and helpful.But this is not the way insane people function. They became afraid that an authentic communism is happening – a communism which is not imposed from outside, which has no dictatorship. Just out of the joy of creation, people are creating. This became more dangerous to them than Russia. It is absolutely out of all proportion…. But success hurts even your best friends, and failure even brings your enemies to sympathize.One hopes one day things will be totally different. Success will receive its reward, and failure will receive all the support that can transform it into success. But that is not the thing: sympathy is empty. And destroying success is absolutely necessary, because people start comparing: What has the government been doing? – the richest government, the most powerful government, which could have changed the whole of America into a paradise.But even in America, though they don’t talk about it, there are thirty million beggars. Their news media people come to India to photograph beggars, to propagate to the whole world that India is a beggar. But nobody knows that America has thirty million beggars – and by a very strange coincidence, thirty million people who have been eating too much, they are hospitalized. Thirty million are dying on the streets, and exactly thirty million are eating their food…and dying.And on those thirty million who have become overfed, millions of dollars are wasted because doctors, nurses, medicines…and nobody is bothering about the thirty million people who don’t have food, who don’t have shelter, who don’t have anything, who can’t think that tomorrow will be any different. If tomorrow they can get some food to eat, they will be immensely happy.Anybody who has a little intelligence can change this whole world within ten years, not more than that.I provoked Ronald Reagan and his company, because I absorbed three hundred beggars into the commune. And those beggars were surprised and shocked because for the first time they were treated as human beings. Letters were written by beggars to me: “We had been treated almost like stray dogs. We had forgotten completely that we are human beings. You have revived our respect, our dignity; you have made us again human.”Nothing was different for them, they were not treated in a different way; they mixed in the commune. That was my fault…and Ronald Reagan began a whole strategy to destroy this commune. Now three hundred, tomorrow three thousand…and these people will create a situation that the American government will not be able to cope with, although they have all the weapons. They can kill, but they cannot cope.And their democracy – I have seen – is such a hypocrisy, so ugly, that everything against the commune and me has been done illegally, so obviously illegally that although I don’t know any law, even I could say to them, “This is absolutely illegal.”I was asked in the jail not to write my name, but to write instead the name, David Washington. I said, “I don’t understand. That is not my name. You are forcing me into an illegal act. I will not write that name…. Do you think I am an idiot? Can’t I see your whole plan? I write David Washington and tomorrow you poison me, and the world will not be even able to trace where I have disappeared, because your register will not show that I ever entered, so the question does not arise that you have killed me.”I said, “Forget all about it. You write whatever you want to write. If you want David Washington, write David Washington.” And that law-imposing authority they call marshal in America was asking me to do such an illegal act….I said, “You should have at least removed your coat on which a great seal shows: Marshal, Department of Justice. Be ashamed, at least, of your coat. You write, I will sign.”He thought that was a good compromise, so he wrote my name, David Washington – and I signed my name. He looked at it…and my signature is such that even a man who knows Hindi cannot understand it. He said, “What is it?”I said, “It must be David Washington. If my name is David Washington, this is David Washington.” I said, “I have made it clear. My signatures are world-known. Don’t try to be clever and cunning. If anything happens to me you will be caught for two reasons: my name is written in your handwriting, and my signature is well-known. It is not something personal; it is almost copyrighted in all the countries. Everybody knows my signature, and nobody knows what it means.”Their plan failed. Just before sunrise I was shifted to another jail, because what was the point? – now they could not kill me in that jail, and to keep me there was dangerous, because a young woman was also brought on the airplane, sitting by my side. She had seen me speaking on the television many times, so she said, “I am immensely glad that I have the chance for a few hours to sit by your side. I know everything is being done to you illegally. They have not issued any arrest warrant, and they arrested you; they have not shown any reason, any cause, and they have not bailed you.”For three days the government attorney continued to argue, and finally his last statement was, “We don’t have any proof, any evidence, and we cannot legally ask the magistrate to prevent this man from being bailed out. But the government wants that he should not be bailed out.” And America has been proclaiming to the whole world that their justice department is absolutely separate from their administrative bureaucracy.And I was not given bail, although they could not prove any reason why I was arrested, why no arrest warrant was issued from the court, why I should not be bailed out. Still, the government wants that I should not be bailed out….Only in very few moments have I felt my respect for women falling. I have always respected women, and I have given them superiority. But once in a while women have done such ugly acts against me that I had to think twice whether to continue to give them respect or to withdraw it.The magistrate was a woman, and she did not allow the bail. Even the jailer on the way back to jail from the court told me, “I am surprised…this is the first time. There was no reason at all for anything, they had nothing against you. I had prepared all your clothes and everything so that you can be released; there is no reason to prevent you. But now I know why you have not been given bail: that woman has been blackmailed, she has been told that she will be made a federal judge”…she was an ordinary state judge, and becoming a federal judge is tremendously prestigious. I used to think that women have heart. That day I hesitated a little.Now they have turned the desert again into a desert; they did not allow us to sell the property. One man was ready to purchase it at forty million dollars – which was nothing, because the property was worth at least three hundred million dollars. Even the government has appraised it at one hundred million. We were ready to give it to him for forty, but the government did not give us the permission to sell it. The man was suffering from cancer and doctors had said he could not live more than one month. If it can be stopped for one month, it will be easy…then the property cannot be sold.The man died within a month, and even to the last day he was trying hard. The moment he died, immediately the permission was given, but the permission was given in such a way that any buyer of the property…. The government has been preventing, creating a thousand and one difficulties. In one year the desert has settled slowly back. Strange – they will be happy only when it becomes a desert.Success is never forgiven.If you see so many people against me around the world, that is nothing but a measurement of my success. If all the prime ministers and the presidents and the popes and the shankaracharyas are against me, the reason is that they are local, ordinary people. I am the first world citizen – and that hurts them very much. I have been loved by all races, all religious people from every nook and corner of the world.Just now there is an exhibition going on in Russia. I have sannyasins in Russia; of course, they have to remain underground – they cannot declare that they are sannyasins – but there are a large number of sannyasins. Our stall of books is overcrowded; it is the most successful stall even in Russia. But the people don’t have money, so they are stealing books. I have informed my people, “Don’t pay any attention – let them steal. At least those books will reach to millions of people, and if you catch somebody red-handed, just tell him, ‘I’m not against stealing; what can you do if you don’t have any money? Just keep one thing in mind: when you have read it, pass it on. That is the price.’”They confiscated first all our videos, all our audios – because they were worried, one never knows what is in them…. Now they have released the audios and videos. They must have seen them first, the KGB must have watched everything!The president of the exhibition was so surprised that an unknown man, who has never come to Russia…and you cannot send any book into Russia, you cannot send any newspaper, you cannot even correspond with people; everything is censored or confiscated. They could not believe that such a crowd would be there on our bookstall the whole day. All the other bookstalls were empty.The president came to Lani, who went from here, saying, “What is the matter?” Looking at my beard in one of the pictures he said, “Is this man something like Leo Tolstoy?” – because Leo Tolstoy had a big beautiful beard. “Why are so many people around here the whole day?” They don’t know that most of them are my sannyasins! I am the only underground movement in Russia…and there was trouble. The KGB thinks that I am an American agent, and America thinks I am a Russian agent – and the Indian government thinks it is unfortunate that I was born here, because they cannot deport me. That is their trouble!Success brings so many troubles. If I had known…There is a beautiful song of Meera which says, “If I had known before that love brings so many agonies, I would have informed the whole world that nobody should fall in love.” I can say to the world that success is not a bed of roses – not even mixed with thorns; it is completely thorns.“I have got insomnia really bad,” complained a man to his doctor.“Insomnia,” said the doctor, “is insomnia. How bad can it be? What do you mean? Insomnia is insomnia – how can it be bad? What do you mean by saying ‘really bad insomnia’?”“Well,” said the man, “I have got it really bad. I can’t even sleep when it is time to get up.”The trouble arises…he cannot sleep when it is time to get up! If you look in people’s minds, their bodies are starved, their minds are retarded.A patient was making his first visit to the doctor. “And whom did you consult about your illness before you came to me?” the doctor inquired.“Only the druggist down at the corner,” replied the patient.The doctor did not conceal his contempt for the medical advice of people not qualified to practice medicine. “And what sort of ridiculous advice did that fool give you?” demanded the doctor.“He told me,” replied the patient innocently, “to see you.”Ronald Reagan was grooming himself in front of the mirror before leaving to make an important speech on television.“I wonder how many great men there are in the world?” he mused.Nancy looked up and said, “One less than you think.”Osho,Too many times I come across women who have given up sex. I don't have the feeling that they have transcended sex. Could you please say something to them?Veetdharm, your question shows the essential Indian mind. You may be Indian or not, it doesn’t matter. It is a great question! Why should you be worried about anybody else’s sex? Are you some kind of sex expert?You say, “Too many times I come across women who have given up sex. I don’t have the feeling that they have transcended sex.”In what way can you feel whether anybody has transcended sex or not? Is there any kind of thermometer? If they are saying they have given up, who are you to doubt them? and on what grounds?Your question shows more about you, not about the women you have come across…. “Could you please say something to them?” This is a strange question! Is it your question or their question? If they have any problem, they will ask. What concern do you have? Why are you worried about somebody’s sex? And you want me to tell them, not to tell you…and it is your question!If you had gone to any shankaracharya, he would have condemned those women. I condemn you; it is your repressed sexuality. Your eyes are blinded with your sexuality, so you cannot see anybody else who is beyond sex.Just watch your own state.You have suppressed so much sex. I can say definitely without knowing you or who you are, that your eyes have a thick layer of sexual repression. This colors everything into sex.A psychotherapist was treating a patient. Just to check on his mind, he drew a line on the paper and asked him, “What does this line remind you of?”The patient said, “It cannot remind me of anything else; it reminds me of women. It is so clear…what is the point of asking?”The psychologist drew a triangle and the man said, “This is too much. It reminds me even more…!”The psychologist drew a circle. The patient stood up and he said, “Are you some kind of sex maniac or what? This is absolutely woman…. I thought you were a psychoanalyst – you need psychoanalysis.”The psychoanalyst was at a loss about what to do. Just then a camel passed by, and he said, “Just one last question. What does that camel remind you of?”He said, “Don’t provoke me, or it will be your responsibility. I may do something for which you will repent your whole life. That is a pure, beautiful woman!”The psychoanalyst said, “Just the last question, the very last. What else reminds you of women?”The patient said, “What a nonsense question! Everything reminds me of women, there is no question of any exception.”Now, does what he is saying reflect the psychoanalyst or his mind?You are a sex maniac. Those women may have transcended; if they have not transcended, just seeing you they will be immediately transcending – fast, quick, urgent…emergency! You are drunk with your repressed sex. It is the most intoxicating thing, and accumulating over many years – and that’s what happens in this country.Here everything reminds people of sex: a straight line, an animal…it defeats all intelligence. One cannot conceive even in a dream that a camel, the ugliest animal in the world, reminds you of a beautiful woman. Even Sophia Loren may never have thought that somebody will see her in a camel. There are people here from Italy, they can inform her….A drunk was standing watching a man enter a revolving door. As the door swung round, out stepped a pretty girl.“Unbelievable!” he muttered. “Absolutely unbelievable!”You don’t see that you are drunk. In fact, nobody looks at himself. People are looking at others, judging others, and these are the real criminals. Without any doubt, I say that these are the sickest people in the world – those who judge others. In the first place, it is not your business. In the second place, you are interfering into somebody else’s space; you are going against his individuality and freedom, and you are without any cause suspecting his truth, his sincerity.The day I left America I received a letter from a bishop of Wasco County, who had been for almost five years condemning my Rolls Royces. In every Sunday sermon he was not preaching Jesus Christ, he was preaching me and my Rolls Royces. The day I was leaving he wrote a letter to me, “Now you are leaving, it will be great kindness on your part if you can donate one Rolls Royce to this church.” Now, this shows the man….I informed him, “Would you like all ninety-three, or only one?”And a letter came, “If you can give all ninety-three, that is just the right thing. You are really great. I’m very sorry that I condemned you for five years. You are a man to be worshipped.”It is a very strange world if you understand people: whatever they are saying shows more about them than it shows about the person they are talking about.“I have brought a frog,” said Professor Bradley, beaming at his class in elementary zoology, “fresh from the pond, in order that we might study its outer appearance and later dissect it.”He carefully unwrapped the package he was carrying, and inside was a neatly prepared ham sandwich. The good professor looked at it with astonishment.“Odd,” he said, “I distinctly remember having eaten my lunch.”And these are the idiots who are professors, who are judges, who are police commissioners, who are governors, who are prime ministers, who are presidents….My own understanding is that a man who does not know himself…this should be the only criterion of man’s idiocy. According to that criterion, only the self-realized people are saying something that is coming from their very heart. Others are just befooling you. They may be learned, they may be clever, they may be able to deceive the whole world, but they cannot deceive themselves.Just watch your own mind, and see what I am saying.I have saved another question from this man, to prove…because I don’t want to say anything without proof. I don’t know the man…but now I will read his second question. That will prove what I have told you.I am forty-seven years old and my mind is still full of sex. Can I see this just as ripples of the mind or is my sexual energy still life-energy? Do I have to live it all out? Is there any chance for me to not end up as a dirty old man?Now, do you need any other proof? This man writes these two questions and is not able to figure out himself that it is his problem he is projecting on others. And he is forty-seven – it is time not to be foolish. But it seems as age grows, foolishness also grows. Old fools are really fools. Young fools have a possibility to transcend, but old fools – where will they transcend? What is the alternative?The old boss had managed to get a date with his secretary, but was worried about his diminished potency. So he went to the doctor and asked for something to pep him up. The doctor gave him two pills and said, “Take these with your dinner tonight and you should not have any trouble performing later on.”So the old man and his date went to a beautiful restaurant, and when they had ordered their soup, the old man took the waiter aside and asked him to put the two pills into his soup before he served it.They waited for twenty minutes, and still the waiter had not brought their soup. So the old man angrily called the waiter over and said, “What the hell has happened to the soup?”“I’m sorry, sir,” said the waiter, “but I did what you ordered and put those pills into your soup, and now I’m just waiting for the noodles to lie down again.”It is time! Let the noodles lie down.But I know the repressed sex will continue in your mind. Now the only way is to go deeper into silence and meditation. Become more watchful. Drop all this idiotic judgment about others. Your responsibility is to transform you, not the whole world. Don’t try to be a savior. If you can save yourself, that’s enough.You have passed almost two-thirds of your life, but you are just in time, forty-seven…. Perhaps thirteen years are available for the whole of humanity to live, and thirteen years are also available for you to live – so you are exactly synchronizing with existence. Nobody else is going to have more time, so don’t be jealous. Even the youngest child will live only thirteen years, most probably. There seems to be no reason to expect otherwise, because the so-called wise are suggesting, “Stop cow slaughter and there will be no world war”…”Learn yogic hopping and there will be no world war.”A Jew was caught in Adolf Hitler’s Germany before the second world war by a police officer, who said, “Listen, Jew, do you know the real reason why Germany is not as rich as it should be, is not the world’s greatest power? Why did Germany get defeated in the first world war?”The Jew said, “I think it is because of the bicycle riders.” The policeman looked around. There was a crowd listening to what was happening, what the Jew says.He said, “Bicycle riders? What is the connection between bicycle riders and Germany’s defeat?”The Jew said, “What connection is there between Jews and Germany’s defeat? It is the same. Destroy bicycles and I promise you, Germany will start rising in riches, power, it will become a world power.”The policeman said, “You seem to be absolutely mad!”He said, “If I am mad, then what is Adolf Hitler and the people who are following him?”Adolf Hitler lied completely saying that it is the Jews – which is absolutely irrelevant – because of the Jews, Germany is not getting on, it is being defeated, damaged. And in fact, the Jews were the only people in Germany who were productive and creative. If he had not been against the Jews, there is every possibility that now Germany would have been ruling the whole world. Because Albert Einstein was also a Jew, working under Adolf Hitler, but seeing that millions of Jews were simply slaughtered…Of course, he would not have been killed; he was their only hope of conquering the world, because he was going to produce the atom bomb. But he escaped from Germany and wrote a letter to President Roosevelt of America saying, “I can create atomic weapons which can destroy on such a large scale – the biggest city within a few minutes – that if you want to win the second world war, I’m the man. I give you the guarantee.” Roosevelt was immensely happy, because Adolf Hitler was winning continually. For five years he had not known any defeat, he went on winning. Wherever he entered he was winning.It was a Jew, Albert Einstein, who produced the atom bomb. It might have been produced in Berlin, but it was produced in Washington, and that changed the whole of history. But any idiotic idea…and people have been forced to remain so retarded that they go on following it.For example if you are a Hindu, then most probably everything that you are doing is going to lead you to an ugly old age, full of sexuality. Hindus believe that cow milk is the purest thing, the most spiritual. In fact, except for man no animal drinks milk his whole life. Milk is only drunk in the beginning, for a few weeks, a few months at the most, before he starts eating and digesting solid food – it is just a temporary measure. It is only man who goes on drinking milk his whole life.You don’t understand: the milk you go on drinking is not a woman’s milk, it is the milk of a cow, which has the chemistry and alchemy for the bull, not for the man. These Hindu monks go on drinking milk thinking that this is a great thing to keep them celibate. They become bulls! – because that is the food for bulls, and it has the capacity to create that much sexuality. This is the greatest danger.Strange things have been suggested to you by stupid people. They tell you, “Take a cold bath before sunrise, and it will keep you celibate.” That is pure nonsense. If you want to be celibate, take a good hot bath after sunrise, so the noodles can lie down. In a cold bath noodles will stand up.But this is for the first time I am saying this…I wanted to say it always, but I avoided it. Why unnecessarily wrestle with idiots, very ancient idiots? Cold water is certainly going to make you more sexual. Ice cold water is suggested – and before sunrise, so the water does not become even lukewarm. Hindu sannyasins go at three o’clock in the morning to take a cold bath, shivering, but they don’t know what they are doing. They will feel more sexual – and then a good cow’s milk…that will make them a bull. And a bull with noodles standing up – you are finished!Osho,Never the earth and the sky have been so beautiful…. Never the existence has been so vibrating, dancing its mysterious dance, pregnant to the fullest with joy, silence, love and your divine giggles….It is so much…. Yet I can only whisper the silent joy of being, while I would like to celebrate you to the fullest. Thank you so much, Osho, again and again for killing me so lovingly.It is true: my work consists in killing you lovingly, because that is the only possibility of bringing you back into a new light, into a new life.I kill only that which is not yours, but you believe it is you. I kill, in short, your personality, and leave only that which cannot be destroyed: your eternal being.The moment your personality drops, you will certainly feel like dancing and celebrating and enjoying. And suddenly this universe will become totally different, because now you have fresh eyes, utterly innocent, uncorrupted by any society, any religion, any politician, any kind of ideology.Once your personality can be taken away from you – and it is not you – then you are left in your utter nudity, in your existential being…the beauty of it, the luxury of it, the festivity of it, will start functioning. It will bring great creativity to you, great intelligence to you, great love to you. You will forget how you lived so long in misery, so long in jealousy, so long in ambitions, all kinds of desires which made you a beggar. You will not believe that this eternal freedom was always available for you, just you had to look into it.I have called you all here. Perhaps you may not know that I have called you here. It is not that you have come on your own; that would be very difficult. On your own you would be doing something stupid somewhere – giving birth to more children, worshipping before a stone statue which is made by man, praying to a God which does not exist, which is only an unproved hypothesis, afraid of hell, desiring for heaven. And all is just fiction…. But the personality needs many fictions to support it. Itself, it is a by-product of all these fictions.Your individuality needs no fiction.It is your authentic existential being.I give you that which you already have, and I take away all that you never really had, but you believed you had. I destroy your belief, and that is my way of destroying your personality.And once your personality is gone you will become contagious. Your joy, your celebration, your song, your dance will spread into other people’s hearts. You will become a catalytic agent. Without knowing, people will start joining you in your dance, in your laughter, in your joy.What you are saying makes me immensely happy. I would like all my people to come to the same space.The worried father telephoned the family doctor and said that his teenage son had come down with gonorrhea. “He says,” continued the father, “that he has not had sex with anyone but the maid, so it has to be her.”“Don’t worry so much,” advised the kindly doctor. “These things happen.”“I know, doctor,” said the father. “But I have to admit that I have been to bed with her myself, and I seem to have the same symptoms.”“That is unfortunate,” said the doctor.“Not only that – I think I have passed it on to my wife.”“Christ,” said the doctor. “That means we all have it.”Just go on passing…. Just as disease can be contagious, health can also be. Just as misery can be contagious, blissfulness can also be.One lighted being is bound to create an urgent, instant longing in others to have the same light. One person dancing and singing with abandon is bound to affect people, because they are also carrying the same song hidden, the same dance. They have been crippled by their society. They also have the same eyes for beauty, but they had been blinded by the society. They have also the energy to celebrate, but this society does not believe in celebration.This society is absolutely insane. It believes in money, it believes in power, it believes in violence, it believes in rapes, it believes in murder, it believes in all kinds of crimes, and it believes in all kinds of fictions, but it does not understand even a little bit about itself.The moment a small window opens into you, you are a transformed being. The new man is born in you.Enjoy this celebration as much as possible, because whatever remaining falsities, personalities, parts here and there may have remained, they will be thrown away by your dance. Enjoy…this existence is for your enjoyment. It is our existence, it is our home.Nobody is a sinner except those who don’t celebrate.To me, celebration is the only virtue.A man was visiting his friend George, who was in hospital dying. The friend said, “Well, anyway George, you have lived a good life. For sure you will be going to heaven.”George replied, “Yes, I have lived a good life, but there is something I never told you.”“What is that?” asked his friend.“Remember that time I went to Chicago on business last year? Well, I made love with a beautiful woman there.”Shocked, his friend replied, “I can’t believe it. I mean, your wife, your kids – did you not think about them?”“Yes, I did,” replied George, “and then I thought I might as well see what heaven is like, since I already knew what hell was like.”You have known hell; now you are entering into heaven. Everybody has suffered for many lives in hell. Hell is nowhere in the geography of the world, of the universe; it is in your distorted mind. It is another name for a distorted mind, and heaven is another name for a mind which has transcended itself and reached into a space of no-mind. Hence my insistence continuously for silence. If you cannot reach to silence through music…because music is next to silence….To create silence I have been giving you all the meditations, all these small gaps…not that I am short of words, not that I have forgotten what I was going to say, but just to allow you to have a little experience of silence, which on your own you find difficult. But in the communion of so many silent people, and in the communion of a man who has reached to the ultimate center of being, it is possible to be infected.Blessed are those who allow themselves to be contagious to festivity, to love, to peace, to silence, to celebration.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Am I really getting old, because everyone is gossiping about it?Devageet again! Just two days ago you had become old, and I had to take so much trouble to bring you back. And you slip again! One time is okay, but twice is too much – it is becoming really a serious problem.And don’t listen to gossip; you are here to listen to the gospel!But I have also heard the gossip that is making you worried. So first the gossip:One day at the Pune drugstore, Milarepa, Sarjano and Devageet come in to buy some condoms. Milarepa goes first and says he would like a week’s supply, which is six. “Why only six?” asks the druggist.“Well,” says Milarepa, “these days I like to have Sunday off.”Next, Sarjano walks up and asks for eight condoms. “Eight?” says the druggist, “why eight?”“Mama mia,” says Sarjano, “I-a always like-a to do it twice-a on Sundays.”And last Devageet walks up and asks for twelve. The druggist, looking at his size and age, is astonished. “Twelve?” he says. “That is pretty impressive for a man of your age. But tell me, why twelve?”Devageet replies, “January, February, March…”That is the gossip that is going all around. And I have to suffer from all these gossips; now I have to bring Devageet back to his senses.First thing: feel happy that you have friends. The old saying is:…The person who does not gossip has no friends to speak of.You have so many friends; everybody is gossiping about you. So it is not unfortunate – just for the gossip’s sake, just for the friends’ sake – if once in a while you become old.But remember one thing:…The only sure thing about youth is that it will change, and about old age, that it will never change.Old age has something more than youth: it ends, but it never changes. People are too much worried about old age. Anybody can become old; only a great man can inquire about it. It needs some intelligence to inquire about it.…Old age is when you have learnt to yawn with your mouth closed.So let that be the criterion for the future. Don’t be bothered by any gossip.…People who complain they don’t get all they deserve, don’t realize how old they are.Just remember one thing: old age or no old age, one should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry. And it keeps one always young, at least for the appearance’s sake. There are so many ways to appear young; the simplest is:…Always fall in love with an older woman, and you will be always young. One just has to find a way – these are problems intrinsic to life.…Or become a monk: start preaching brahmacharya, celibacy, and you will forget all about old age; you will start making the young feel guilty. These are well-tried methods, for thousands of years. Only one thing is bad about being old and unmarried:…Married men don’t live longer than the single men, it just seems longer.…One marriage out of every three ends up in divorce – the other two fight it out to the bitter end.In India, a marriage is arranged by the parents and the couple don’t know each other until after the marriage. The arrangements in the West are considerably different, but the results are identical. Whether in the East or in the West, you come to know each other only after marriage, but it is too late by that time; nothing can be done about it.…The one who sleeps does not commit sins. The one who commits sins sleeps better afterwards.…To find out a girl’s faults, talk to her girlfriends and say how wonderful she is!…Marriage is a romance in which the hero dies in the first chapter.…Never marry a beautiful girl, because she might leave you. Of course, an ugly girl might leave you too – but so what?…All marriages are happy. It is the living together afterwards that is tough.Devageet, everybody here is sooner or later bound to become old. We have to understand the beauty of old age, and we have to understand the freedom of old age. We have to understand the wisdom of old age; we have to understand its tremendous detachment from all foolish things that go on in the lives of people who are still young.Old age gives you a height. If this height can be joined with meditation, you will rather feel miserable – why did you waste your youth? why have your parents destroyed your childhood? why was meditation not given to you as the first gift the day you were born?But whenever you get it, it is still not too late. Even just a few moments before your death, if you can get the meaning of your being, your life has not been a wastage.Old age in the East has been immensely respected for the simple reason that in the past it was thought almost a shameless act – when your children are getting married, when your children are giving birth to children…and you are still infatuated, you are still in the bondage of biology? You should rise; this is time to leave the ground for other fools to play football. At the most you can be a referee, but not a player.I loved one cartoon in a Dutch magazine. It was strange, because it all consists of world presidents, prime ministers, great leaders, dictators, kings – I am the only person in that group who is nobody. And I am the first – unfortunately Ronald Reagan is the last. They have called it a football team, and I am the referee. I was happy, very happy. I would have sued that newspaper if I was part of the football team, but to be a referee is a totally different matter – let the fools play!But it is a great insight: I am nobody, I do not count in any way, I have no power…Whoever made the cartoon must have great insight.Devageet, unless you can accept everything that life brings you with gratefulness, you are missing the point. Childhood was beautiful; youth has its own flowers, old age has its own peaks of consciousness. But the trouble is that childhood comes on its own, youth comes on its own; for old age you have to be very creative.Old age is your own creation: it can be a misery, it can be a celebration; it can be simply a despair, and it can also be a dance. It all depends how deeply ready you are to accept existence, whatsoever it brings. One day it will bring death too – accept it with gratitude.This gratitude I call religious. This deep acceptance of everything with no complaint, with no desire for it to be otherwise, is the only religion there is.Osho,You have told us that the mind becomes more and more quiet if we meditate regularly. Last year, when I was living in Europe outside of a commune, thoughts became stronger and stronger during my meditations until I began to dread sitting.Now that I am with you again, this problem has gone away. But I wondered: How can one be a sannyasin for ten years, meditating every day, and have a mind which becomes more and more noisy?The question you have asked has many implications. First, one has to understand that your mind is very ancient – twelve years are nothing compared to the mind’s history; it is the history of the whole universe from the very beginning.It has been working so long, so efficiently that scientists say they have not yet been able to create a computer which can compete with human mind. And human mind is placed in a small space, in your skull; their computers are placed in big rooms. One scientist has calculated that it would need almost a one square mile space for a computer comparable to the human mind. Human mind is a miracle.Sitting with me, you are sitting with a greater miracle. You are sitting with no-mind. Naturally, silence becomes easier; meditation comes on its own, just like a cool breeze. When you are left alone, your mind is all that you have. Unless your meditation goes to such depths that you have something more valuable than the mind, this problem will continue to happen.With me you can have a glimpse, just for a moment. And that glimpse creates the longing to have that moment stretched to eternity. It is so peaceful, so cool, so calm, who would not like it?But as you go back into the world, there are just computers walking all around; you have to communicate with computers. One physiologist has defined man’s body as nothing but a mechanism to facilitate the mind’s functioning. You think you are carrying the mind. The physiologist is saying just the opposite: it is the mind that is carrying you; your whole body is functioning just for the mind’s sake.So the moment you go into the world – this is not part of the world; we have been trying to create small islands where mind as a computer is no longer required. But in the world you will need the mind. And the problem will continue until you have something more than mind. Just having a glimpse of silence is not enough.You need a centering, you need a realization, you need exactly enlightenment – only then can you remain in the world, without your mind functioning unless you want to use it.Mind is a tremendously valuable mechanism, one of the greatest miracles in biology, in the evolution of man. Mind is simply unbelievable, the way it works…because you don’t know anything about it, although it is your mind. You don’t know how it accumulates millions of memories.The scientists have calculated that a single man’s mind can contain all the libraries of the world. He can memorize everything that has been ever written, down the ages. That is the capacity; you may use it, you may not use it.And you don’t know about the libraries. Just the British Museum Library has enough books that if you go on putting one book by the side of the other, just as you put them on the book shelf in the library, it will take three rounds of the whole world. And that is only one library! Moscow has perhaps a bigger library, and all the big universities of the world have similar libraries. Just India has one hundred universities with tremendously big libraries.And the very idea that a single human mind has the capacity to memorize all that is written in all the books that are in existence in the whole world…it simply baffles, it looks unbelievable.You don’t know what your mind is doing for you. Your mind is regulating everything in your body. Otherwise, how do you think that for seventy or eighty years, or even a hundred years – and there are people who have even passed that; they have reached their one hundred and fiftieth birthday, and there are a few hundred people in Russia who have passed the age of one hundred and eighty.Scientists say there is no reason for the body to die for at least three hundred years. It is just an old hypnosis, autohypnosis, which has made the idea prevalent that you have only seventy years to live. It goes so deep in your consciousness that by the seventieth year you start thinking you are sinking, you are gone.And anyway by the time you are retired at the age of sixty there is nothing to do. Death seems to be a relief, not a danger. We have not been capable enough and human enough to provide a situation where our old people can have some dignity, some self-respect, some pride. We have not been able to find dimensions where they can contribute to the world. And they are experienced and certainly capable of contributing enough – enough for their self-respect, enough for them to live and not to feel like a burden.When George Bernard Shaw became seventy years old, he started taking trips to small villages around London. His friends were surprised, “What are you doing? For days you disappear. In this old age you should rest.”He said, “I am searching for the place to rest in this old age.”They said, “What do you mean? You have a beautiful house, you have everything that you need.”He said, “You don’t understand. I am going around all these villages looking in their cemeteries, at the gravestones, in search of a place where many people have lived at least a hundred years.”And finally he found a village where on a gravestone was the inscription, “This man died at the untimely age of one hundred and twenty.” He said, “This is the village worth living in, where people think that at the age of one hundred and twenty it is an untimely death.” He lived in that village, and he lived beyond a hundred years.Perhaps it has some significance…not just accidental. He was a man of tremendous wisdom; and if the villagers believe it then the atmosphere is bound to change his own conditioning.In Pakistan there is a part of Kashmir which belonged to India; Pakistan has occupied it for forty years. Perhaps that part, because of its secludedness, hidden behind the mountains, has not come in contact with people who die at the age of seventy. They are uneducated people; in fact they cannot count when they are seventy, so how to die at seventy? They don’t have a calendar. They don’t know when they were born; they don’t know how old they are.They are the most primitive people who have been found living behind the Himalayan peaks, in a valley – in a beautiful valley, self-sufficient, and they have never gone out. And there have been people found, according to the doctors, who are two hundred years old. And they are young; they are working in the fields, in the gardens, in the orchards, and when you ask them about their age they say, “We don’t know. Nobody here knows; there is no school here.”And now Pakistan is opening schools and hospitals and you can be certain that soon people will start dying exactly at the age of seventy. Those people have just forgotten to die, because they don’t remember when they were born, and they cannot count.Scientists say that man’s body has the capacity at least – that is the minimum – to live three hundred years. But why does man not live so long? Perhaps man does not know how to live; perhaps man does not know how to use his body, how to use his mind.You have to understand two things very clearly: first, mind is a great miracle.Existence has not been able to create anything higher than your mind. Its function is so complex that it baffles the greatest scientists. It manages your whole body, and it is such a complex system. Who manages that a certain part of your blood should go to the brain? Who manages that only a certain amount of oxygen should reach to the brain? Who manages what part of your food should become bones, should become blood, should become skin? Who manages that part of your skin should become nails and part of your skin should become eyes and part of your skin should become ears?Certainly you are not managing it, and I don’t see any other manager around. So first you have to be grateful to the mind. That is a first step to go beyond mind, not as an enemy but as a friend. Listening to me continually saying that you have to go beyond mind, you can fall into a misunderstanding. I have tremendous respect for mind. We are obliged so much by the mind, there is no way to return our gratitude.So the first thing is: meditation is not against mind, it is beyond mind. And beyond is not equivalent to against.That misunderstanding spreads the more people talk about meditation, particularly people who don’t understand meditation – those who have read about it, those who have heard about it, those who know the techniques…and techniques are simple; they are available in many scriptures, you can read them. And now there are books on how to do anything – car mechanics, electric engineering, anything – you ask, and the bookseller is ready to give you a book about how to do it.My people in Europe have been thinking to make a book with a cassette. The book will give all the background of the meditation and the cassette will give all the instructions, so you need not go anywhere. Just sitting in your room with your tape recorder and you have a master! Gautam Buddha is no longer needed….A master will never become irrelevant for a simple reason: who will teach you to love the mind and yet go beyond it? to love your body, to respect your body? to have gratitude towards your mind, its tremendous, miraculous functioning? That will make a great friendship, a bridge between you and the mind.With this friendship deepening, whenever you are meditating, the mind will not disturb because your meditation is not against it. It is in fact its own fulfillment, it is its own ultimate flowering. Going beyond it is not an antagonistic attitude, but a friendly evolution.So this should be the background of all meditators: not to be a fighter. If you fight you may be able to make the mind quiet for some time, but it is not your victory. The mind will come back, you will need it. You cannot live without it; you cannot exist in the world without it.And if you can create a friendly relationship with the mind, a loving bridge, rather than being a hindrance to meditation it starts becoming a help. It protects your silence because that silence is also its own treasure, it is not just yours. It becomes a soil in which the roses of meditation will blossom, and the soil will be as happy as the roses. When the roses will be dancing in the sun, in the rain, in the wind, the soil will also rejoice.My approach is totally different from the approach that has been taken up to now. For thousands of years, all the religions have been teaching something against body, against mind.And just today I came to know that there are even idiots who are teaching against meditation. The parliament of Israel has passed a law that meditation in private or in public is a criminal act. You cannot believe it!And these politicians don’t know even the ABC of the mind, what to say about meditation. But why are they so much worried? One of their worries is me, because out of my sannyasins fifty percent are Jews. Sooner or later I am going to take over Israel, there is no problem about it – before the Palestinians take it over, I am going to take over.Why should the politicians be concerned? And if they are concerned they should consult people who know what meditation is. To make it a criminal act is an unbelievable thing; nowhere ever…Religions have taught against the body. That was so ridiculous – you have to live in the body, you have to nourish the body; you have to keep it healthy, it is your home. They have been talking against mind. Now this is the latest thing – Israel has done a pioneer work! The parliament of Israel seems to be consisting of really first-class idiots.I don’t think they know even anything about meditation, but the fear…. Jews are afraid, Mohammedans are afraid, Hindus are afraid, Jainas are afraid – they are all afraid of meditation. Even though they talk about meditation they are afraid of it. They talk because without talking about meditation their religion seems to be incomplete, but they are basically against it because a man who becomes a meditator simply slips out of any organized religion. He is no more a Hindu and he is no more a Jew and he is no more a Mohammedan. He cannot go on believing in all kinds of superstitions and stupidities that every religion is full of.Jews think that they are the chosen people of God. Now, no meditator can do that. To think that “Only we, the Jews, are the chosen people of God, and the whole humanity is in some way inferior to us”…. But it was not only the Jews who have committed that sin. They have suffered much for it; they are still suffering. They will continue to suffer, because the very idea is so stupid that it creates antagonism, particularly in a world where Nordic Germans think that they are the chosen people, where Hindus think that they are the chosen people, because their holy book is the most ancient and first God-written holy scripture. They cannot tolerate any ideas like Moses telling his people that “You are the chosen people of God; you have a basic right to be superior to everybody else.” Who can tolerate it? Hindus think they are superior to everybody.Jews and Hindus are the only two religions in the world which don’t believe in conversion, because how to convert inferior people into a higher religion? And because they cannot convert, they are absolutely against Christianity, Mohammedanism, who are after converts continuously.Now, because of the fear that the number of Mohammedans and Christians goes on growing and Jews and Hindus go on shrinking, there are small trends among Jews…and there is a small group of Hindus called the Arya Samaj, who have introduced conversion. But it remains a very half-hearted thing. Deep down they know what they are doing: they are bringing inferior people into their fold. It is just out of sheer necessity; otherwise those inferior people will outnumber – they have already – the superior people.Now Christians have the greatest numbers in the world; second are the Mohammedans – and these two are the converting religions.The fear of meditation has roots. In the law passed by the Israeli parliament it has become exposed, but it is there in every religious mind: if people start meditating, if people start loving their bodies, loving their minds, and out of love peacefully transcending towards a state of no-mind, they will not belong to any stupid ideology.And all ideologies are so full of stupid things that it is almost impossible to count how many superstitions, and what a variety of superstitions. Some day when humanity has become one, we will need great museums to collect all the superstitions to remember our forefathers by. Just the way Darwin thought of monkeys as his forefathers, the coming generations of man will remember you and your forefathers in the same category.I would like you to be reminded of a few superstitions…just samples, because the whole lot is too much.Jainas think that unless your earlobes touch your shoulders you cannot become enlightened. Now I cannot see what the relationship can be between the earlobes, which are almost dead parts of your body…have you ever noticed? Can you do anything with your earlobes? Can you wave them? They are just hanging there, not doing anything. You cannot do anything with them because there is no nervous system; they are just pieces of flesh without nerves, pure flesh. And without nerves you cannot turn them up or down, here and there.I have come across only one person – and I have been around the world – and strangely enough he was my classmate in first grade when I entered school. Now he is a doctor in the same town. He is the only man…some freak! He can make his earlobes move this way, that way, back, forward. He was a miracle; for some accidental reason his earlobes have grown nerves inside. Just as a few people are born with six fingers, a few people are born with three eyes, a few people are born with two heads – just freaks – he has really big earlobes.I have been watching to see when he becomes enlightened. He is just a poor doctor – he knows nothing about meditation, nothing about enlightenment. And because he is an ayurvedic doctor, patients don’t come to him. Only his children go on growing, and he goes on growing poorer and poorer. Each time I have seen him I have seen him reduced, thinner, more worried. I said, “What is the matter? You are supposed to be enlightened!”But stupid ideas…and it is not one religion but every religion. And they cannot tolerate each other.Mohammed went to heaven sitting on his horse; the horse also went – without wings. Neither Mohammed had wings nor the horse, but they flew to heaven. This was happening for the first time. Jesus left his donkey here, Francis left his donkey here; only Mohammed was able to take his horse. Mohammedans think it was because he was the real prophet….Now everybody is claiming – Mohammedans claim that the Koran, their holy book, is the only authentic, God-written book; all other books are man-written. Because Mohammed was uneducated, he did not write it; whatever he was saying has been collected by people.But Mohammed claims to be the last prophet of God: after him there will be no prophet because God has sent his final message through him, and that is the Koran. All old messages are canceled – The Bible, the Vedas, are all canceled, because when the new message has arrived it cancels all the old. It is the most developed, the most evolved message; it is so perfect that there is no need of anybody else to bring a message to the world.Now, all these religions are claiming such things. Mohammedans say that when Mohammed used to move in Arabia – which is a desert and really becomes burning hot when the sun comes to the middle of the sky – God used to send a beautiful white cloud which used to move just over Mohammed’s head, keeping him under shadow…a divine umbrella!If meditation becomes more prevalent, then you will get free from all these prejudices; hence no religion wants meditation, although they may talk about it.To me, neither God is important nor heaven nor hell nor angels – all those are just hypothetical. To me, meditation is the very soul of religion. But it can be attained only if you move rightly. Just a single step in a wrong direction…and you are always moving on a razor’s edge!Begin with love of the body, which is your outermost part. Start loving your mind – and if you love your mind you will decorate it, just the way you decorate your body. You keep it clean, you keep it fresh; you don’t want your body to smell horrible to people, you want your body to be loved and respected by others. Your presence should not be simply tolerated but welcomed.You have to decorate your mind with poetry, with music, with art, with great literature. Your trouble is, your mind is filled only with trivia. Such third-rate things go on through your mind that you cannot love it. You think of nothing which is great. Make it more in tune with the greatest poets; make it in tune with people like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Turgenev, Rabindranath, Kahlil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy; make it filled with the greatest heights that mind has reached.Then you will not be unfriendly to the mind. Then you will rejoice in the mind; even if mind is there in your silence, it will have a poetry and a music of its own, and to transcend such a refined mind is very easy. It is a friendly step towards higher peaks: poetry turning into mysticism, great literature turning into great insights into existence, music turning into silence.And as these things start turning into higher peaks, beyond mind, you will be discovering new worlds, new universes which we don’t even have a name for. We can say blissfulness, ecstasy, enlightenment, but no word really describes it. It is simply outside the power of language to reduce it into explanations, into theories, into philosophies. It is simply beyond…but mind rejoices in its transcendence.That’s what my unique contribution is to you. With absolute humbleness I want to tell you that I am far ahead of even Gautam Buddha, for the simple reason that he is still fighting with the mind. I have loved my mind, and through love I have transcended it.It is a totally new beginning. Naturally I have to be condemned; my people will be condemned. Many will come to me but will not be able to walk along with me even for a few steps, because soon they will find that their prejudices are preventing them from going with me.Their prejudices are ancient, and naturally – I can understand – they cannot think that anybody can go beyond Gautam Buddha, just as the contemporaries of Gautam Buddha could not believe that he has gone beyond the Vedas and beyond the seers of the Upanishads, just as contemporaries of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu could not believe that they have gone far beyond Confucius.And if just out of humbleness I don’t say the truth, I will be committing a crime against truth. I don’t care about such humbleness; I want exactly what is the case to be explained to you.My approach towards meditation is absolutely new, absolutely fresh, because it depends on love – not on fight, not on war. Mahavira I have left twenty-five centuries behind. His name was not Mahavira – mahavira means ‘the great warrior’. His name was Vardhaman, but people changed his name because he was a great warrior. A warrior against whom? – against his body, against his mind. And I don’t think that anybody who is against his body and against his mind is capable of reaching the beyond.Only love is the path.Make your mind as beautiful as possible. Decorate it with flowers. I am really very sad when I see that people don’t know The Book of Mirdad, that they have never looked into the absurd stories of Chuang Tzu, that they have never bothered to understand the absolutely irrational stories of Zen.I cannot conceive of how you can live beautifully if you don’t know Dostoevsky’s books…Brothers Karamazov to me is more important than any Bible. It has such great insights, that The Bible should not be counted at all, even for comparison. But The Bible will be read – and who is going to bother about Brothers Karamazov, in which Dostoevsky has poured his whole soul? or Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, or Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, or Offering of Songs by Rabindranath? And these are only a few names; there are thousands who have reached the finest flowering of mind.First let your mind be decorated. Only beyond this perfumed garden of the mind will you be able to go silently, without any fight; mind will be a help, not a hindrance. I have not found it to be a hindrance; hence I can say with absolute authority: it is not a hindrance. You just don’t know how to use it.It is beautiful that when you come here you feel meditative. At least these few gaps, these few days, will slowly start becoming stronger, deeper. One day you will be gone and these moments will be with you even in the marketplace, and that will be a day of great rejoicing.But it takes time. I have to say to people that it can happen instantly. Not that it is untrue – it can happen instantly, but where to find the genius who can understand it instantly?When I say it can happen instantly, people simply think, “This is impossible for us.” If I say to them it can happen in a few lives’ time, they feel, “That seems to be perfect,” because that gives them the time to do all their stupid things meanwhile. It is a question of a few lives, so what is the hurry? First take care of your boyfriend, your girlfriend; first go to see all kinds of ruins in Rome, in Greece, in India; first do every foolish thing that is expected of you by the whole crowd. And as far as enlightenment is concerned it is not going to happen now, it will take many lives, so what is the hurry? You can go on postponing.That’s why people love all these religions which talk about many lives – not because they understand the significance of it, but because they want to use that as an excuse.It can happen this very moment, but it will not happen. The reason is not in its nature; the reason is you. It will not happen because you don’t want it to happen right now.Just think for a moment: if I were going to make you enlightened this very moment, you would start thinking, “But I have not asked my husband. What about my children? I have to get my daughter married. And I have just met my girlfriend, my god! and this is going to happen just now? he cannot wait? – just let me finish my honeymoon.” Thousands of thoughts will arise in your mind: “My god, I have started a new business, invested everything in it. If he had told me before, I would not have got involved in all this mess.” Everybody, without exception….I have told you the story of a great Ceylonese master who had millions of disciples, and who had been telling them for nearabout fifty years only one thing: Meditate. The day of his death came and he announced, “After seven days I am going to leave my body, so let all my disciples gather so that I can see them one time more, because I will not be coming back again.”So all the disciples gathered; it was a great gathering. And before dying, the old man said, “I have always told you to meditate, but you have not listened. I give you another chance. This time you have not to do anything. I am going to die, I can take you with me. Is anybody ready to come with me?”Everybody looked at each other: “You have been long enough with him, you can go.” People looked at each other, whispered, “What are you doing? All your children are married, everything is finished, nobody needs you….” But nobody was standing up.He said, “Just stand up, and I will take you with me.”There was great silence and people were looking downwards – how to face this old man? It is so embarrassing. But they were all unmoving, because he may misunderstand even the movement – he may see that somebody is moving and say, “Get up!”Finally one man raised his hand. He said, “First please understand this: I am not standing, I am just raising my hand to ask you a question.”The old man said, “Fifty years I have been answering your questions and still you are asking questions? And this time I am giving you the opportunity to come with me.”He said, “I’m sorry. Some day I will come. Just tell me the secret of how to come and find you.”He said, “What have I been telling you for fifty years?”The man said, “Just one time more…”It is possible in this very moment to drop all your prejudices, cleanse your mind. It simply needs absolute decisiveness, ultimate trust, and a love that knows no bounds.But if it cannot happen this moment, I don’t want anybody to become sad and fall into a state of despair. It can happen tomorrow. You can relax, there is no hurry. But please understand the process clearly: Love your body – against all the religions. Love your mind, refine your mind – against all the religions.And I say to you that fight is not the way; love is the way. Love your body, love your mind, and that very love will create the energy, the atmosphere to transcend the mind, to create what I call meditation or the state of no-mind. It will come. It has to come. Nobody has to go from this temple empty-handed.But you will have to understand one thing: that I don’t represent any old tradition, I don’t represent any old religion; I don’t represent any Gautam Buddha or Mahavira or Mohammed or Jesus or Moses – I simply represent myself.And if you can love and trust a stranger who does not belong to any orthodox organization, then with me, meditation will be happening…and soon, without me also it will be happening. It will take a little time. It will take a little time because it needs to grow roots.So whenever you can find time, come. And don’t be concerned with what happens outside; that is just rubbish. What happens here, count only that as your real life. The moments that you are with me will be with you even after your death, and the moments you are wasting in the world are simply gone down the drain.But there is no need to be worried. If even a few moments of meditation start becoming seeds in you, start growing roots in you, the day is not very far away when you will have the first flowers of your consciousness growing within you.And I understand you; I understand you and your trust and your love. Very few people have that much love and that much trust.But drop all antagonism towards the mind. There is some streak of fighting with the mind, maybe unconscious – mind is just a poor and beautiful thing….Modern police departments are beginning to use computers to help fight crime. One night a man telephoned the police and said, “Police, come quick! There is a burglar downstairs and he is putting all our valuables in a sack.”The voice on the other end said, “Keep calm. Keep calm, sir, hang up the phone, stay where you are and a police car will be right over…right over…right over….”A computer can go wrong any moment. And mind is nothing but a computer, but created with such perfection by nature. But you have not valued it at all.The enormous computer took up all of the huge room, completely dwarfing the two tiny mathematicians standing before it. A sliver of paper had emerged from the computer and one mathematician, after studying it gravely, turned to the other and said, “Do you realize that it would take four hundred ordinary mathematicians two hundred and fifty years to make a mistake this big?”There are many people in the world who are becoming interested in meditation, but ninety-nine percent are in the wrong hands, and if you say this it hurts them.Just today I have received a letter. The letter says, “The other night you spoke of Goenka’s Vipassana. You blamed Goenka for being a businessman and professionalist of Vipassana. Osho, I have experienced Vipassana here at the Pune ashram, and also Goenka’s Dhammapeeth at Igatpuri. I think your comment is wrong.”And this is from a man, Anand Piyoosh, who has just become a sannyasin two days ago. In another letter before this, he says, “Due to uncertainty and indecisiveness of mind I have taken sannyas after twelve years. Due to this inability of mine I have suffered much. How can I get freed from it permanently? – Anand Piyoosh.”It took him twelve years to decide to take sannyas, and it took him only twelve hours to find that I am wrong in what I have said about Goenka – no indecisiveness about this. And if Goenka was right, then what is the need of coming here? If Goenka can teach you meditation, then why are you wasting your time here, and my time and my people’s time? And if you have such an understanding that you can simply call me wrong, then this is not the place for you.What do you understand about meditation?The difference between Goenka’s meditation and the meditation that is happening here is immense, and for you it will take at least twelve lives to understand the difference!Goenka is only a technician. I am not a technician. I have never followed anybody, I have simply searched on my own. It was difficult, it was dangerous, but I went on searching my path alone, finding my own ways to reach to my being.Goenka is just a poor follower of a twenty-five hundred year old tradition of Gautam Buddha. In twenty-five hundred years – carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies! Do you want to compare me with these carbon copies?And if Goenka had understood meditation, he would have come here. His meditation would have shown him that something far higher than Gautam Buddha is in existence. Igatpuri is not far away from here…but the coward has no guts.And if you are so clear about my statement being wrong, then you don’t understand anything of what is happening here.Here, all the meditations are just preparing the ground, just taking out the weeds, the grass roots, the wild growth, the stones – just cleaning the garden for me to sow the seeds. The people who are teaching meditation here, different kinds of meditation, are just preparing the ground. I am the gardener.Goenka can prepare the ground, but from where is he going to find the rosebushes? He does not have the experience: he is not enlightened or awakened even in the ancient sense of Gautam Buddha. Just go to him and ask – has he the courage to say that he has the same consciousness as Gautam Buddha? And I say to you that I have left Gautam Buddha twenty-five centuries back.My therapists, my people who are preparing meditations for you, are just doing the primary groundwork. They are just preparing the ground. The ultimate and final touch I have to give.I have my own ways to sow the seeds in you: through my words, through my silences, through my eyes, through my gestures – just through my silence, just through my presence; it has a living field of energy.And unless you have a living awakened being amongst you, all your therapies and all your meditations are just futile exercises; they won’t help much.For Piyoosh I would like to say, Go back to Goenka. This is not the place for you. And you have to leave right now. I am tired of idiots of all kinds. For thirty years I have suffered from idiots and I have tolerated them, but now I have decided no idiot will be allowed here.You took twelve years to decide to take sannyas; I don’t need even twelve seconds to take it away. You are no more a sannyasin. Return your sannyas papers, and you perfectly know the door. Just get out this very night, and never come here again. Go to hell – with anybody, Goenka, or find some other idiot. There are many in India.I exist only for those who can understand me and who can be totally with me. A man who knows nothing about me, who just within twelve hours of his sannyas starts finding that what I am saying is wrong, certainly cannot be allowed to be here. A single rotten fish can destroy the whole lake. So you will be very compassionate to all these people by leaving this place forever.And I am always surprised…if you have found Goenka to be right, then why are you here? When somebody finds something that is helping his growth, he remains there. And if you have found Goenka to be right and still you have not remained with him, how are you going to remain with me, whom you find wrong just within twelve hours?No, don’t waste time. I am not interested in collecting crowds and retarded people. Just go to Goenka and tell him everything that I have said. And if he has guts, bring him here, so I can show you that he knows nothing about meditation as far as experience is concerned, that he knows nothing at all of what enlightenment is. All that he knows is a poor technique. But a technician is a totally different thing.A technician can work with electricity, but that does not mean that he is Edison, that he has discovered electricity. Don’t ask the poor technician about electricity – don’t ask any question about its intrinsic character; don’t ask of what it consists – he is not an Edison. But he can do perfectly well: you don’t need Edison when one of your bulbs goes out; just any idiot can do that.The same is the situation about meditation. There are technicians and there are realized people. Unless you find a realized being, all your efforts are in vain.Three French youngsters, respectively six, seven and eight years old, were skipping along the street.The six year old who was in front, looked in through an open window he was passing, stopped, and waved excitedly to the others: “Come, come quickly,” he said. “A man and a woman are fighting in there.”The seven year old, coming up, looked in and said, “No, you fool, they are making love.”The eight year old came up, looked in and said, “Yes, and what a terrible technique.”…Feel this peace, absorb that silence. And as you absorb it, it becomes deeper…it starts touching your heart.There is no movement, but you will feel a dance.There is no word, but you will feel a song.It is as if there is nobody, but a tremendous oneness…all personalities gone and only one consciousness, throbbing in synchronicity with each other.Just to end up this beautiful moment….I always like to leave you laughing, singing, dancing. This is just an indication that the day when I ultimately leave you, I would like you to sing, dance and celebrate.In fact, no man in the whole of history would have received such a celebration when he dies as I am going to receive. A few have received celebration only from enemies, because when one dies, enemies celebrate. The friends mourn.I am the only person…in my death my friends will celebrate, my enemies will celebrate. In my death they will come together in celebration. There has never been such a man before.A black lady in New York received a phone call from the school that her little boy Leroy attended. The head teacher wanted to see her as soon as possible about her son’s behavior.“Your boy, Leroy,” began the teacher, “is a disruptive influence.”“Just like his father,” said the black lady.“He steals from other children,” continued the teacher.“Just like his father,” said the mother.“He is always getting into fights,” continued the teacher.“Just like his father,” replied the mother.“He chases the little girls and makes them cry,” said the teacher.“Just like his father,” said the black lady, “and, Lordy, am I glad I never married the man!”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is taking the role of a therapist dangerous to my own spiritual growth?Is it possible to help people and still let my own ego dissolve at the same time? I feel that a subtle fight goes on inside me between one part that is clear and another part that wants nothing to do with clarity.Under your guidance I have learned not to dominate others when I use my capacity to see, but am I still dominating myself?The role of a therapist is a very delicate and complex affair.First, the therapist himself suffers from the same problems that he is trying to help others with. The therapist is only a technician. He can manage to pretend and to deceive himself that he is a master – that is the greatest danger in being a therapist. But just a little understanding, and things won’t be the same.First, don’t think in terms of helping others. That gives you the idea of being a savior, of being a master – and from the back door the ego enters again. You become important, you are the center of the group, everybody is looking up to you.Drop the idea of help. Instead of help use the word sharing. You share your insight, whatsoever you have. The participant is not someone who is inferior to you. The therapist and the therapee are both in the same boat; the therapist is just a little more knowledgeable. Be conscious of the fact that your knowledge is borrowed. Never for a moment forget that whatever you know is still not your experience, and this will help the people who are participating in your group.Man is a very subtle mechanism. It works on both sides: the therapist starts becoming the master, and rather than helping he is destroying something in the participant, because the participant will also learn only the technique. There will not be a loving, sharing friendliness, an atmosphere of trust, but “You know more, I know less…. By participating in a few therapy groups I will also know as much as you know.”The participants slowly, slowly start becoming therapists themselves, because there is no degree required – at least in many countries. In a few countries they have started to outlaw all kinds of unaccepted therapies; only a man who has a university qualification in therapeutics, in psychoanalysis, in psychotherapy will be able to help people in therapy groups.This is going to happen in almost every country of the world, because therapy has become a business, and people who are unqualified are dominating it. They know the technique, because technique they can learn; by participating in a few groups they know all the techniques, then they can make a concoction of their own. But there is no way of controlling….But remember: the moment you play the role of a helper, the helped is never going to forgive you. You have hurt his pride, you have hurt his ego. That was not your intention…your intention was just to inflate your own ego, but this can happen only if you hurt other people’s ego. You cannot inflate your ego without hurting others. Your bigger ego will need more space, and the others have to shrink their space and their personality to exist with you.From the very beginning an authentic loving person…and I make it an absolutely necessary point that there is nothing more therapeutic than love. Technique can help, but the real miracle happens through love. Love the people who participate in therapy and be one amongst them, with no pretensions of being higher or holier.Make it clear from the very beginning: “These are the techniques I have learned, and a little bit is my experience. I will give you the techniques, and I will share my experience. But you are not my disciples; you are just friends in need. I have some understanding, not much, but I can share it with you. Perhaps many of you have their own understanding coming from different areas, different directions. They can also share their experience and make the group richer.”In other words, what I am saying is a totally new concept of therapy. The therapist is only a coordinator. He just tries to make the group more silent, serene; he keeps an eye that nothing goes wrong…more of a guardian than a master.And you have also to make it clear: “I am also learning while I am trying to share my experience. When I am listening to you, it is not only your problems; they are my problems too. And when I am saying something, I am not only saying it, I am listening also.”Emphatically make it clear that you are nobody special. This has to be done in the beginning of the group, and this has to be carried on as the group goes deeper, exploring. You just remain an elder, who has gone a few steps ahead; otherwise you will not be able to help people. They will learn the technique and they will become therapists on their own. And there are enough fools – five billion fools – on the earth; they will find their own followers.It is a human weakness that when people start looking up to you, you start thinking, “There must be something great in me if people are looking up to me.” They are in trouble, they are suffering from human frailties. But you are also human, and to err is absolutely human. Without any condemnation, with great love, help them to open themselves – and this is possible only if you open yourself.I have come to know a strange fact: strangers tell each other things that they can never say to people they know. In a railway train you meet somebody; you don’t know his name, you don’t know where he is going, from where he is coming, and people start sharing. I have been traveling for twenty years non-stop in the whole country, watching a strange phenomenon: that people give their secrets to strangers, because the stranger is not going to exploit it. Just the next station comes, and the stranger is gone; perhaps you may never see him again. And he is not concerned to destroy your reputation or anything.On the contrary, sharing your secrets, your weaknesses, your vulnerabilities makes others more confident and more loving and more trusting in you. Your trust provokes their trust in you, and when they see you are so innocent and so open and available, they start opening up: it is a chain reaction.But if you become a master…a few idiot therapists from this commune have become masters. They know nothing about their own being, they know nothing about any mystery of existence; all that they know is a certain mind game. That mind game can be of help, if ultimately you are under the guidance of a man who has arrived. A little clarity, a little less confusion a therapy group certainly can create.But a therapy group is not the end.It is only the beginning.It is a preparation for meditation, just as meditation is a preparation for enlightenment.If you understand things in their simple arithmetic, you will not find it difficult – and you will enjoy the group more, because the group will be able to go deeper with you. You will not be only a teacher in the group; you will be also a learner.Kahlil Gibran’s prophet Al-Mustafa has a beautiful statement. When somebody asks, “Tell us something about learning…” he says, “Because you have asked I will speak. But remember – I am speaking and I am also listening with you.”I am here on the podium and I am also sitting amongst you. I am not in any way special. That brings people close. Any bragging of speciality creates distance, any ego fulfillment destroys the atmosphere of love. And I repeat again: There is no therapy which is greater than love.Love the people who have become participants in your group. Love them as they are, not as they should be. They have suffered their whole life from all kinds of religious, political, social, theological, philosophical leaders who would love them if they follow, who would love them if they become just images according to their idea. They will love you only when they have killed you completely, demolished you and put you together according to their idea.All the religions have done that to humanity.Nobody is left undamaged.And these people have been thinking that they are helping, consciously. They were giving you ideals, ideologies, principles, commandments with the certain fixed attitude that they want to help you; otherwise you will go astray. They cannot trust your freedom and they cannot respect your dignity; they have reduced you so badly – and nobody even objects.When Jesus told people, “You are the sheep and I am the shepherd…” certainly those people must have been sheep, because not a single one stood up and said to Jesus, “This is too much! You are putting yourself on such a high pedestal, and you are calling us sheep; you are degrading us even from human beings.”And Jesus said, “I am the savior, I will save the whole humanity. The only condition is that they should believe in me.” But that condition destroys all that is beautiful in you, all that is your right to grow into a beautiful unique being.I have had suspicions always that Jesus was not saying any revolutionary things, neither was he in revolt against Judaism. But the problem has haunted me: Then why was he crucified? His whole emphasis without exception was, “I am a Jewish prophet, son of a Jewish God” – a prophet, a messiah for which the Jews have been waiting. Their scriptures were telling them: Soon the messiah will come, the last messiah who will save you all. And on your part only a very small thing has to be done: just believe in him.My suspicions why Jesus was crucified are not just suspicions; they have enough evidence and proof and argument behind them. Socrates was certainly poisoned for his revolutionary thoughts, for his lifestyle which the Greeks could not allow him. Certainly his influence over the Greek youth was immense, and the older generation was absolutely afraid: soon they will be gone and the whole country will be under the influence of a man who is against tradition, who is against God, who is against heaven and hell and all other nonsense, who insists only on one thing: truth. And that truth is within you, not in the scriptures, not in any savior, not in any messenger.Socrates was certainly poisoned by the society because he was a tremendous revolutionary – a man in revolt. Of course, whatever he was saying was for the benefit of the whole of humanity, but it went against the past. Anything that is going to enhance your future, make it richer, more beautiful, more humane, is bound to be against the past. The past is barbarous, ugly, condemnable. But Jesus was not doing any such thing. Why was he crucified? He was fully in agreement with the old past, he accepted all that Judaism proposed as fundamentals.My understanding is: Jesus was crucified because people finally became fed up hearing that they are just sheep and he is the shepherd. He hurt so many people’s egos, he destroyed so many people’s self-respect, a certain dignity of being human beings. That was the reason of Jesus’ crucifixion; otherwise he was utterly innocent. He had not committed any visible crime.But this crime is far more murderous, although it is invisible, it does not appear on the surface, you cannot catch hold of it. But you can understand: you cannot forgive anybody who pretends to be higher than you, holier than you. He is the only begotten son of God and you are all orphans? – bastards? What are you? If God is the father of all, then who is this man who pretends to be the only begotten son? The emphasis is on only; he takes away the whole humanity’s right to nourish his own ego.Otherwise whatever he was saying and doing would have been ignored. There was nothing special in it. He was simply repeating the old prophets of the Jews; he was quoting old prophets of the Jews – and not even correctly, because he was not educated and he could not read. He had never been under a rabbi – and the Jews had a long tradition of thousands of years of learning. They had a great university in Jerusalem, where people devoted their whole lives to studying. They were very rich as far as knowledgeability is concerned.Jesus was not a man of knowledge, and certainly he was not a man of experience either, because a man of experience will not talk such nonsense as, “I am the only begotten son of God.” God is simply a hypothesis, and I have never heard that hypotheses produce children. Only Indians do that, not hypotheses; hypotheses are absolutely barren.The idea that somebody else has to save you, hurts you; he does not allow you even the freedom to save yourself. Jesus has to be understood very clearly: he is one of the men who is against all freedom for man. He talks sweetly, just like any salesman, but the intention is to take away your basic fundamental birthright of growing as an individual, unique – not a carbon copy of somebody else, but just yourself.He did not accept people as they are and insisted that they should be according to his teachings. He did not allow them even to doubt or argue; you cannot argue with the son of God – what he says is truth. But it accumulated just in three years…. He was not a teacher in the world for more than three years. People could not tolerate him; it was becoming too insulting, too humiliating.The reason for Jesus’ crucifixion is not – as Christians go on telling to the world – that he was a great revolutionary. The reason is that he was one of the anti-humanitarians, and people crucified him as a revenge. It was becoming too heavy on their heads. Just an uneducated carpenter’s son who has been cutting wood and dragging logs to his father’s shop, suddenly becomes the savior…and savior of each and everyone with his simple cheap condition – that you believe in him.He does not give you even the freedom to think, the freedom to meditate, the freedom to search, the freedom to seek…no freedom at all. He has created the greatest slavery in the world – Christianity. Now half of the world is Christian, and the responsibility for all these slaves – Catholics or Protestants, it does not matter…he is responsible. But his slavery is very subtle and very psychological.Now the reality is that he could not save himself, and he pretended to save the whole humanity. And when asked before his death, “How long will it take for you to come back and save humanity?” he said, “Don’t be worried, I am coming soon.” Two thousand years have passed. I don’t think…I can also stretch ‘soon’, but not that much! Two thousand years is just such an exaggeration.And still there is no sign…. We don’t see where there is a Virgin Mary; at least before he comes, a Virgin Mary should appear. The carpenter Joseph should appear; he should get married to Virgin Mary, and before he can consummate his marriage, the Holy Ghost should appear: it is a simple case of the rape of a virgin girl. Then with all these difficulties will come Jesus Christ – and how can he save you?I am reminded of one statement of a great doctor who is my friend. I don’t know whether he is still alive or not, I have not heard anything about him for these last six years. He was the most prominent doctor in the city where I lived before I moved to Mumbai and then to Pune.He said to me, “My whole life’s experience is that the function of the physician is not the cure of the patient. The patient cures himself; the physician simply gives a loving atmosphere, promising. The physician simply gives the confidence and revives the longing to live longer. All his medicines are of secondary help.” But if the person has lost the desire to live, his whole life’s experience was that no medicine, nothing, helps.The same is the situation for the therapist. The therapist is not the person who is going to cure people’s psychological troubles. He can only create a loving atmosphere, in which they can open up their repressed, unconscious imaginations, repressions, hallucinations, desires, without any fear that they will be laughed at, with absolute certainty that all will feel compassion and love for them. The whole group should function as a therapeutic situation.The therapist is only a coordinator. He brings psychologically sick or disturbed people together, and just watches that nothing goes wrong. And if he can support them with some idea, some insight, some observation, he should always make it clear that “This is only my knowledge, not my experience” – unless you have the experience.If you are sincere and truthful and honest and authentic, you will never fall into the trap of becoming a master, a savior – which is very simple to fall in. The moment you become a master and a savior…and you are not – you are not even helping those people, you are simply exploiting those people, their weaknesses, their troubles.The whole psychoanalysis movement around the world is the most exploitative experiment that is going on. Nobody is helped; everybody is exploited tremendously. And nobody is helped because the psychoanalyst, psychotherapist…. Psychology has bifurcated in many branches, but they all do the same work: they reduce you into a patient and they are the physicians.And the trouble is that they themselves are suffering from the same diseases. Each psychoanalyst goes to another psychoanalyst almost twice a year to be helped. It is a great conspiracy. Listening to all kinds of insanities, unless you are beyond mind and its problems, you are going to be insane yourself. You are going to start suffering from the same problems your patients are suffering from. Rather than making them cured, they are making you sick. But the responsibility is yours.Bring love, openness, sincerity…. Before they start opening the doors of their heart – they are keeping them tightly closed so that nobody knows their problems – the first function of the psychotherapist is to open his heart and let them know that he is also as human as they are. He suffers from the same weaknesses, the same lust, the same desire for power, the same desire for money. He suffers from anguish and anxiety, suffers from the fear of death.Open your heart totally.That will help others to trust you – that you are not a pretender. The days of saviors and prophets and messengers and tirthankaras and avataras are completely gone. None of them will be acceptable today. And this time, if any of them reappears, people are not even going to stone him to death. People are just going to make fun of him. People are simply going to tell him, “You are stupid. The very idea that you can save the whole humanity is mad. First save yourself, and we will see your light and we will see your grandeur and we will see your splendor.”And trust comes on its own accord.It is not to be asked.It comes just like a fresh breeze from the mountains, a tidal wave from the oceans. You have to do nothing for it. You have just to be available at the right time, in the right place.Nobody can save you except yourself.I say unto you: be a savior unto yourself.But help is possible, with a condition: that it comes with love, that it comes with the gratitude that “you trusted me and opened your heart.”The function of a therapist is certainly very complex – and idiots are doing it! The situation is almost as if butchers are doing surgery; they know how to cut, but that does not mean they can become brain surgeons. They can kill buffaloes and cows and all kinds of animals, but their function is in the service of death. The therapist is in the service of life. He has to create life-affirmative values by living them himself, by going to the silences of his heart.The deeper you are within yourself, the deeper you can reach into the heart of the other. It is exactly the same…because your heart or the other’s heart are not very different things. If you understand your being, you understand everybody’s being. And then you understand you have also been foolish, you have also been ignorant, you have also fallen many times, you have also committed crimes against yourself and against others, and if other people are still doing it there is no need of condemnation. They have to be made aware and left to themselves; you are not to mold them in a certain framework.Then it is a joy to be a therapist, because you come to know the interiority of human beings – which is one of the most secret hiding places of life. And by knowing others you know yourself more. It is a vicious circle; there is no other word – otherwise I will not use the word ‘vicious’.Allow me to coin a word: it is a virtuous circle. You open to your patients, participants, and they open themselves to you. That helps you to open more, and that helps them to open more. Soon there is no therapist and there is no patient, but simply a loving group helping each other.Unless the therapist is lost in the group, he is not a successful therapist. That’s my criterion.Sagarpriya, you are saying, “Under your guidance I have learned not to dominate others when I use my capacity to see, but am I still dominating myself?” They are not two things. Domination is domination, whether you dominate others or you dominate yourself. If you are dominating yourself, then in some subtle way you will dominate others too. How can it be otherwise?The first domination that you have to drop is not over others…because it is not certain that they will accept your domination. The first domination you have to drop is over yourself. Why become yourself a prisoner, with great effort create a prison around yourself, and then carry it wherever you go?First learn the utter joy of freedom, of a bird on the wing in the vast sky. Your very freedom will become a transforming force for others.Domination is so ugly.Leave it to the politicians, who don’t have any sense of shame at all. They live in the gutters and they think they are living in palaces. Their whole life is a life in the gutters – they will live there and they will die there. They are prime ministers, they are presidents, they are kings, they are queens….One of the most significant Egyptian poets was asked once, “How many kings are there in the world?” At that time…he said, “There are only five kings. One is in England, and four are in playing cards.” Now it can be changed: there are five queens, one in England and four in playing cards…. But they don’t have anything more. They are just trying to achieve more and more power simply to fill their inside which they feel is empty.Looking from the outside, the inside is empty.Looking from the inside, the whole world is empty.Only your inside is overflowing, but the things that are overflowing are invisible: the fragrance of your being, the love, the blissfulness, the ecstasy, the silence, the compassion – nothing can be seen with eyes. That’s why if you look from the outside it seems everything is empty. And then a great urge arises…how to fill it? – with money, with power, with prestige, by becoming a president or prime minister…do something and fill it! One cannot live with an emptiness inside, a hollowness inside.But these people have not gone inside; they have looked from outside. And this is the problem: from the outside you can only see objects, and love is not an object, bliss is not an object, enlightenment is not an object, understanding is not an object, wisdom is not an object. All that is great in human existence and life is subjective, not objective. But from the outside you can see only objects.That gives a tremendous urgency to fill your hollow inside with any rubbish. There are people who are filling it with borrowed knowledge; there are people who are filling it with self-imposed torture – they become saints. There are people who are beggars to become the prime minister, to become the president. Everywhere the hollow people are in tremendous need to dominate others. That gives them the feeling that they are not hollow.A sannyasin begins by inquiring into his subjectivity, from within, and he becomes aware of tremendous treasures, inexhaustible treasures. Only then do you stop dominating yourself, and you stop dominating others. There is no need at all. From that moment your whole effort is to make everybody aware of his individuality, of his freedom, of his immense, inexhaustible sources of bliss, contentment, peace.To me, if therapy prepares the ground for meditation, therapy is going right…ground for the patients and ground for the therapist, both. Therapy should turn at a certain point into meditation. Meditation turns at a certain point into enlightenment. And to have such tremendous potential and just remain a beggar…I feel so sad sometimes when I think of others. They are not beggars, but they are behaving like beggars, and they are not ready to drop their begging – because they are afraid that is all they have got. And unless they drop their begging, they will never know that they are emperors and their empire is of the within.If you have stopped dominating people but you are suspicious that perhaps you have started dominating yourself, then nothing has changed. You misunderstood the whole message.Becky and Solly Feigenbaum are in bed. “Listen, Becky,” says Solly, “do me a favor and close the window, it is cold outside.”“And if I close the window, will it be warm outside?” Becky asked.Try to understand me correctly.Little David, who was six years old, was beginning to ask embarrassing questions that his Mom and Dad could not get themselves to explain. So they asked their older boy, Martin, to explain to him about the birds and the bees.That night in bed Martin gave David his first lesson. “Look, David, do you know what it is that Mom and Dad do at night in bed?”“Sure, I do,” said David.“Well,” said Martin, “it is just the same with the birds and the bees.”It is human to err, to misunderstand. But Sagarpriya is an intelligent woman and can manage the new idea of therapy. She can become a pioneer therapist. But there are so many idiots all around: you just start any stupid thing and you will find followers are coming.Just a week before in Rajasthan an eighteen-year-old girl became a widow – perhaps she may have been married six months before, or a year before – and she jumped into the funeral pyre to perform the ancient Hindu ritual of being a sati. The word sati is beautiful; it means ‘one who can die for truth’. It comes from sat, and sat means truth. The connotation is that she loved the man so much that the man has become her god; without that man life is meaningless. But it is really committing suicide openly.It is against the Indian constitution, it is against Indian law. But millions of people are going there, and already a big village has become established. Tens upon tens are coming to worship, because the woman has done a great spiritual act. And rather than creating some legal action against the family, the government is making arrangements for the millions of people that are pouring in. Shops have opened, restaurants have opened, hotels have opened, caravanserais have opened. Soon it will become a big city, a memorial city, because an uneducated, highly conditioned young girl committed suicide, following ideals which are simply stupid.There is no spirituality in it. If there was spirituality in it, then why in ten thousand years has not one single man jumped into the funeral pyre of his wife? And these men are writing in the scriptures that this ritual is a great spiritual act – but only for women?It is not a spiritual act. It is a very cunning strategy to dominate. The man watches his wife continuously, keeps her a slave while he is alive. He is afraid…when he is dead, who knows? – the wife may fall in love with somebody and he will not be able to do anything. It is better to create an ideology so that the wife also jumps in the funeral pyre; then that fool feels immensely contented because now there is no fear.And I am surprised…newspapers report it, the government officials are making arrangements, and nobody is bothered that it is illegal, it is unconstitutional, it is illogical. It is male chauvinist ideology. It is a domination beyond conception. You even want to dominate when you are dead! But misunderstanding goes on and on….A little girl was in the park crying when an old gentleman asked her why.She said, “I want one of those things like my brother’s got, that sticks out, then lays down and then sticks out again.”The old gentleman began to cry too.One night a man is stopped on a dark street by a ragged looking figure, clutching something in his hand.“Please sir,” the figure mumbled, “please spare a few dollars for a poor man who has lost his job, his wife, his home, everything.” Then lifting his hand he added, “And all I have got left is this gun.”Try to understand yourself as deeply as possible. Therapy comes second. And unless you have refined your being through meditation and silences…I am not saying, stop the work; I am saying, transform its quality. Make it real work. Open your heart, tell them your weaknesses, tell them your problems, ask their advice – can they help you? And once the participants understand that the therapist is not an egoist, they will come with absolute humbleness, opening their hearts. Then you can help them.But always and always remember: therapy in itself is incomplete. Even the perfect therapy is just the first step. Without the second step it is meaningless.So leave the patients on the point from where they start moving towards meditation. Your therapy is complete only when your patients start inquiring about meditation. Create a great longing in their hearts for meditation, and tell them that meditation too is only a step – the second step. In itself that too is not enough, unless it leads you to enlightenment; that is the culmination of the whole effort. And I trust in you, that you are capable of it.A Jew from Odessa was sitting in the same compartment as a Czarist Russian officer who had a pig with him. To annoy the Jew, the officer kept calling the pig Moishe. “Moishe! Keep still! Moishe! Come here! Moishe! Go there!”This went on all the way to Kiev. Eventually the Jew got fed up and said, “You know, Captain, it is a great shame your pig has a Jewish name.”“Now why is that, Jew?” smirked the officer.“Well, otherwise it could have become an officer in the Czar’s army.”There is a limit to everything!Make it a point that the limit of therapy is where meditation begins, and the limit of meditation is where enlightenment begins. Of course, enlightenment is not a step to anything: You simply disappear into the universal consciousness, you become just a dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean. But it is the greatest experience…. It makes life finally meaningful, significant. It allows you to become part of the universe from which your ego has separated you. And it is so easy, as easy as this silence….Nobody can think that there are thousands of people sitting here….You just have to move in the right direction. A sense of right direction, and everything can become a steppingstone towards higher states of consciousness. I have been using everything, but the direction is the same. I have used many kinds of meditations. On the periphery they look different. There are one hundred and twelve methods of meditation. They look very different from each other, and you may think, “How can all these different methods lead to meditation?”But they lead…just as a thread running through a garland of flowers is not seen, you see only the flowers, those one hundred and twelve flowers have a running thread: that thread is witnessing, watching, observation, awareness.So help the patients as much as you can to understand their problems, but make them clear that even if these problems are solved, you are the same person. Tomorrow you will start creating the same problems again – perhaps in a different way, with a different color.So your therapy should become nothing but an opening for meditation. Then your therapy has a tremendous value. Otherwise it is just a mind game.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I am very outraged that people are gossiping about me.Devageet, you need not be worried about the gossip. The difference between gospels and gossip is whether you are telling it or hearing it; it is not much…and whatever is gossip today will become gospel tomorrow.Just thinking about your question, I remembered a report that has come to me today about a man I have always respected. He is a great scientific mind, a genius; he has worked his whole life with a total energy and intelligence. His name is John Lilly.Just today in a press interview it was asked of him – he is seventy-five years old – he was asked that if he finds himself on a small island, nobody else is there, and for miles and miles there is no sign of human life, what he would like to have with him. And he said, “I would like the five most sexy women of the world.” At the age of seventy-five…! This man must be crazy.So if people are gossiping about you, that you have become old, don’t be worried about it. Gossip has a way of functioning of its own….…Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.Gossip does not need thinking. It is a very strange fact that nobody ever doubts gossip; even the very skeptical minds simply believe in gossip. People have to be forced for centuries to believe in the gospel, but gossip…people are just waiting to hear something, something juicy. And you should be proud that you have become almost a hero; everybody is deep down jealous of you. Your old age is going to go down in history. It will be remembered for ages to come that “Once upon a time, Devageet became old – and not only once, but twice within two days!”Here is a commune of absolutely free people. The only difficulty is:…When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.Please, Devageet, don’t feel in the gutter. Everyone is in the gutter. At least you are looking at the stars – that’s what is making people think you are becoming old, because only old people stare at the stars. At the age of seventy-five, John Lilly, a man of tremendous intelligence, is still in the gutter – not looking at the stars.Devageet, it is creditable that you have become old earlier than you should have; you have done a fast race from young age into old age. This is what I call a “quantum leap.” And remember:…Those who try to serve both God and women soon discover there is no God.And about your outrageousness…I am also outrageous, because the principle is:…Whenever in doubt, be outrageous.What else can you do?Perhaps the gossip is right. I hope it is right! – because to me, it is very creditable to become old so soon. It is the beginning of wisdom. I am waiting for the day when people start talking about you, saying that you have become ancient. Old age is nothing compared to being ancient.…Truth is stranger than fiction, and also harder to make up.So naturally people make up gossips; it is easier – very easy!Bernard Shaw used to say, “I don’t know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using this earth as their lunatic asylum.” And I agree with that old man, George Bernard Shaw. He was, in this century, one of the men who had tremendous insight into human foolishness.Once when he was in America for the first and last time – because he never went again…when the federal judge told me that I cannot enter America for five years, I said, “Why bother about years? I am not going back ever! One time is enough.” And that’s what happened with George Bernard Shaw.He went once on invitation to America. In the first meeting he was addressing the people who had invited him – very well known people, respectable people, rich people – and he said, “Looking at you I can almost take it for granted that fifty percent of the people in America are idiots.” Of course the whole gathering was outraged: “We are here to welcome you, we have invited you, you are our guest – this is not the way to start!” There was silence, but great anger in people’s eyes. Bernard Shaw said, “Forgive me, I just said the opposite of what I was going to say.”People relaxed. He said, “I was going to say that fifty percent of people in America are very intelligent, but now I have to change my statement. That was my first impression. And this is my last impression, it is final: one hundred percent of the people are idiots.”Bernard Shaw had a certain insight into our so-called sane humanity. He was not right only about America, he was right about the whole earth: it is a mental asylum.But still…a few sutras will be good, either for now or tomorrow when you will be getting older again. Now it is very difficult to say when you will be young and when you will be old. It is going to be up and down, up and down…. That’s what some sannyasin was complaining about: “Whoever I meet and I ask how things are, they say ‘up and down’…everybody says the same thing: up and down!” But nobody is going up and down so much as Devageet.…Old age is when a girl gets on your nerves rather than on your lap.Just so you can figure out where you are:…Middle age is when you can feel bad in the morning without having fun the night before.…Intuition is what enables a woman to put two and two together and come up with an answer that suits her.So beware of women’s intuition – particularly in old age!…A really old man is a man who tries never to stand between a dog and a lamppost.I am just giving you some hints. If you start behaving like that, you are old!…An old man is a man who knows tomorrow why the things he said yesterday did not happen today.His wisdom is as bogus, as hollow as his old age is.Just to encourage you, Devageet…you are in the dumps:…The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.Don’t be worried! You have got a new idea that you are old. You will be thought a crank until you really succeed to be an old man. Then all this gossip will disappear.I don’t think you are that old, but I certainly think that you are old enough…but still you will see the time, if pollution continues, when walking on water will no longer be a miracle; anybody will be able to do it. And if you can see this happening, this miracle of everybody walking on water, what more do you want? Old age or young age, you have seen the last miracle on the earth.But I hope that people will go on gossiping about you. They are finding…they are almost researching about you!Devageet’s old Jewish mama…I never knew that he is a Jew! People are really doing an in-depth search…. Devageet’s old Jewish mama met an old friend who she had not seen for years. “And how is your son getting on?” asked the friend.“Oy veh,” said his mama, “don’t ask. He has grown his hair down to his shoulders, he never shaves from one year to the next, he left the university and all day long he is doing nothing but transdental medication.”“Ah well,” said her friend, “what is the use of worrying? Transdental medication is fine. It is better than sitting around all day doing nothing.”And here is a question from Devageet:Osho,When your cheeks grow round with laughter and your eyes are bright with mischief, my heart tries to burst free from this poor chest. I used to wonder at the amazing accuracy of your answers, trembling like a virgin as your seeds fell into my waiting heart. Now I tremble even more awaiting your questions too. Sitting silently, the joke comes and my noodle vaporizes all by itself.Devageet, this is the sign that you are passing old age and entering into ancient age. You have even forgotten poor Basho’s haiku. You are saying, “Sitting silently, the joke comes and my noodle vaporizes all by itself.”If Basho hears it, he will hit you so hard that neither you nor the noodle will be ever able to rise again. You are not supposed, just in old age, to forget the haiku, one of the most famous and one of the most beautiful things ever uttered. In ancient age it is of course okay, because one goes senile.Basho’s haiku…I have to remind you again, because it is the very foundation of all meditation:Sitting silently, doing nothingThe spring comesAnd the grass grows by itself.As far as I know, Basho may have never heard about the word noodle. These strange things are brought here by Sarjano. He is feeding people noodles, spaghetti and all kinds of creepy things…. Avoid that fellow! God never made – as far as I know, in any description in the whole Bible – noodles, spaghetti, pizza. It is absolutely the devil’s invention.Just come back down to where you really are; don’t believe this gossip. And if the gossip continues, I will manage to bring you down again and again.A beautiful woman and a young man both went for the same lion tamer’s job at the zoo. The manager said he would give them both a chance, and told the girl to go into the cage first.The girl, wearing a long fur coat, did so. A huge lion immediately started to charge at her. Suddenly, she opened her fur coat and stood there completely naked. The lion stopped dead, spun around, and went meekly back into the corner.The manager was amazed. He turned to the young man and said, “Well friend, do you think you can do better than that?”“I would like to try,” the young man replied. “Just get that crazy lion out of there first.”Osho,This may be the most important, the most fundamental question of my whole life. My longing for freedom is so deep, so strong, more than anything else I know. In fact my whole life energy is given to this matter. But somehow I'm not clear in it. Do I have to do something for freedom? Is my longing for freedom just a mind game?Please, Osho, tell me what freedom is.It is certainly the most important and the most fundamental question one can ever ask. I have been talking to you about freedom continuously – from every possible angle, every possible implication…. It seems you are hearing me but not listening to me.You are saying, “My longing for freedom is so deep, so strong, more than anything else I know…” and I have been telling you, there are things which you cannot desire, which you cannot make an object of your longing.Freedom is your intrinsic nature – swabhav. It is your very nature; you don’t have to attain it. You don’t have to make any effort for it. You don’t need even to desire or long for it – it is already there.You are born free, but you are living in chains. Those chains you have accepted, and you have accepted them very willingly, very joyously, because those chains are made of gold. Those chains are made of power, prestige, respectability; they are covered with beautiful flowers. So not only have you accepted them, you go on desiring more and more because you think they are ornaments. You think they are the very aim of your life, the very meaning and significance.This is the trouble: freedom is not a problem such that you have to achieve it; the problem is how to get rid of the chains. And the first thing you have to encounter is to recognize chains as chains not as ornaments, a prison as a prison not as a home, a marriage as a bondage and not love. And there are a thousand and one chains all around you.You are dragging them; your life has become a drag, a burden, somehow hoping to reach to the graveyard. Each moment seems to be so long, one wants relief and rest. And it seems in this world you can find relief and rest only in the grave – anywhere else you will find yourself again in the chains, in the prisons. The names will be different, the shape of the chains may be different, the forms may be different, almost opposite to what you used to have…. A Christian becomes a Hindu, a Hindu becomes a Christian; they only change jails – nothing changes, no transformation in being and no freedom of the soul. They have only changed old chains for new chains.And remember: new chains are more dangerous than the old, because the old can be broken more easily than the new. The new are more sophisticated, more technologically perfect. The old were not so perfect, they had loopholes; you could have easily slipped out of them. But the new, the imprisoners who are your parasites, have closed all possibilities, all windows, all doors. Even the small cracks from where you can see the open sky…everything seems to be absolutely closed. And you go on suffering.It is so strange to think that man, who is born to celebrate, lives only to suffer. Even trees are more fortunate, wild animals are more blissful, birds in the sky are more ecstatic. Only man goes on dragging his heavy chains, and every day the load goes on becoming more and more heavy.Freedom is not the problem at all.Don’t ask how to attain freedom; that will give you a wrong direction. You will start thinking what efforts to make for freedom – you are asking from a wrong direction. Ask how we have lost our freedom. You were born free – then how did you become a slave? You were born just as a human being – then how did you become a Mohammedan or a Hindu or a Christian?One of the most important novelists of America has asked me a question: “Osho, what do you think about the Jewish and Arab conflict in the Middle East? What is the solution, and what are the implications for the future?”I had to write to him saying, “Before I can specifically answer your question, I would like to give you my bird’s-eye view of the whole human situation, because what is happening in Israel between Jews and Arabs is nothing new. It is happening all over the world, in different names – between Hindus and Mohammedans, between Christians and Jews…just the names are different, but the same violence, the same murder, the same suffering. And people are clinging to their suffering….”So I told him a few significant points. First: as long as there is a God, man cannot be at peace. It is God who is dividing man. He is the ultimate enemy of humanity; otherwise what is the difference between a Hindu and a Mohammedan and a Christian and a Jew? – just their idea of God. And that idea is nothing but an idea, just an empty hypothesis.There is no God anywhere; there is no evidence anywhere, there is no proof. And if somebody says he has seen God, he is simply a madman. He is deluded; he has been hallucinating and he needs psychiatric treatment. If we had treated our saints through psychiatry, humanity would have been in a peaceful state.Now God is your greatest chain. Are you ready to throw it away?Your holy scriptures are dividing you, because every scripture demands that it be the only holy scripture. That necessarily creates conflict: Hindus cannot believe that The Bible is holy…great competition. The Vedas are holy because they are the ancientmost scripture in the world; God himself wrote them. It is so stupid to talk this way.I have talked with learned Hindu scholars and asked them, “Have you ever thought about your Vedas, which you claim that God has written? Just look at the content…the very content shows that it cannot be written by God; there is an intrinsic impossibility.” And I was surprised – great scholars like Omkarnath Maharaj, who was thought to be the authority on the Vedas, were shocked by my question. He said, “I have never thought about it.”I said, “You are the greatest authority. Open the Vedas anywhere, at any page. I don’t insist on a certain page – open it at random and read the content. The content will give you the proof that it cannot be written by God.”He had a copy of Rig Veda by his side. He opened it at random, and what was the content? He was so shocked. The content was: “A brahmin is praying to God…” Now, how can God write it? – “A brahmin is praying to God, saying, ‘I pray so much, but you don’t listen; there is a limitation to patience. This year you have proved it: just let your clouds rain on my fields, and not on the fields of my enemies.’” This kind of rubbish is written by God? It is intrinsically an absolute proof that some stupid brahmin is writing it.But even after that he continued. After two years I saw him again. I said, “You have not stopped.”He said, “To encounter you…I feel such a deep fear in me.”I said, “Why should you be afraid? Just because you have been preaching nonsense…”The Bible is full of pornography, five hundred pages of pornography. And when I said it, immediately ten Christian associations forced the magistrate of Kanpur to issue an unbailable arrest warrant. I have my people everywhere to fight for me; they immediately took a stay order from the Allahabad high court. It is absolute nonsense; the judge should first see The Bible – and I am ready to point out the exact five hundred pages which are pornographic.But strangely, Christians and Jews both go on calling the Old Testament a holy scripture, written by God. It seems…is God just a pornographic writer, just on the board of editors of Playboy?These are the problems. Every prophet, every messiah, every avatara, every tirthankara is claiming that only he is the right one. You think only ordinary people are competing with each other? – that is not true. Your so-called great men are so ugly in their competition, you cannot believe it.In the times of Mahavira, twenty-five centuries ago…Mahavira and Buddha were both contemporaries, and there were six others; eight people were contending that they were the twenty-fourth tirthankara of Jainism. Even Gautam Buddha was one of the candidates. And because Mahavira proved to be more orthodox, more in tune with the Jaina ideology of self-torture and masochism, he won the battle. Even Buddha lost the election. Frustrated because he lost the election and Mahavira was accepted as the twenty-fourth tirthankara, he started a new religion.If you look without prejudice, you cannot believe it – why are there so many wars, why is there so much lunacy, why is there so much insanity? Even your great peaks, your highest suns behave like children.Jesus goes on declaring that he is the only son of God. Naturally, he cannot accept Gautam Buddha or Confucius or Lao Tzu or Basho or Bodhidharma – not even as cousins. The family is very closed, and a very strange family at that! There is no woman in the family. And in fact the woman is the very center of a family; without a woman you can have a house but not a home. Strange company: God the father, Jesus Christ the son, and a strange fellow – nobody knows who he is, whether he is male or female – the Holy Ghost. These three people go on dominating the whole world. This is their trinity.For centuries intelligent Christians have been asking, “At least give one place to a woman,” but such is the macho male mind that he will not allow it. Even the mother of Jesus is not allowed in the holy family. A woman cannot be accepted high on the ladder of hierarchy.Christians cannot accept Mahavira or Buddha as people of real religious importance. These are the problems that have been dominating humanity for centuries. In particular in Israel the problem has become a very burning issue, because the whole of the Middle East is Mohammedan. But Mohammedanism is only fourteen hundred years old, Christianity is two thousand years old. So before Mohammed was born, Jews had already entered the Arabic world, and they had their own settlements. Then Christians came and they started making their own settlements….The problem is this special rock, which is said to be the central piece of the great Jewish Temple of Solomon, which was destroyed by the anti-Jewish elements long ago. Only the rock which was the central piece remains; it is called the “Rock of the Dome.”Now, Jews claim that it is their holy place, because it is the site of their great temple. And Christians claim that this is the place where Jesus was crucified, so it is their holy place – not Jewish but Christian. And then comes another contender, and in a very strange way…Six hundred years after Jesus, Mohammed established a new religion – because the Arabs had no religion of their own. They were a nomadic race, wanderers; they had no organized religion. Mohammed collected those Arabs under the name of Mohammedanism. He himself was an Arab, and naturally had great influence. For his whole life he was fighting – war and war, not a single day of rest – and on his sword was his message: “My message is peace.” It was written on his sword!George Bernard Shaw is not wrong: this world seems to be dominated by lunatics of all kinds. If peace is your message…and certainly he believed that peace was his message, but it had to follow his conditions: if the whole world becomes Mohammedan there will be peace. But how is it possible? He has named his religion…Mohammedanism is not the name given by him to his religion; the name that he has given is Islam, and Islam simply means peace. A strange kind of peace! – the prophet of peace fought his whole life, murdered and butchered.And he left the ultimate problem behind him – the story is really hilarious – when he died. Many prophets, many saviors, many avataras, many tirthankaras, many buddhas have died before, but he found his own style. He died not in an ordinary way. In fact, he never died. He simply went to heaven alive – and not alone, but sitting on his horse! And just as he was going towards heaven, sitting on his horse, just to take a little rest he descended on that rock. He could not find anywhere else to rest.So now that rock has become the contention of three religions. Judaism claims it as theirs. Jews are ready to kill and die for it; millions of Jews have died for it. Christians have been sending crusades, having religious wars continually, to take possession of the Rock of the Dome. And the whole area is an ocean of Mohammedans, who claim that this is their holy rock because Mohammed stayed there to take some rest before he left finally, with his horse, towards heaven.For these fourteen hundred years it has been war almost every day. And at the end of the first world war Britain and America, both Christian countries, played the most ugly game against the Jews…. Jews are one of the races which have suffered most. Of course, they have their part and their contribution in their suffering. They have suffered most because they were the first to claim, “We are the chosen people of God, and it is our basic right to rule over the world. Other human beings are inferior human beings.”Because this idea irritated everybody, without exception, Jews have been continually murdered, butchered. Adolf Hitler alone killed six million Jews, and it goes on…. But the ultimate meanness has been committed by America and England – and even Jews could not understand the strategy.After the second world war, the American and British forces were in control of Jerusalem, where the rock is, and the small country of Israel which had never before been in existence. For many centuries Mohammedans had lived there; it was part of the country of Palestine. But after the second world war, Jerusalem and Palestine were under the control of American and British forces, and America played the ugliest politics that you can conceive. It created, under an armed force, a new nation for the Jews. It called the new nation Israel, for the Jews.It had not been in existence for many centuries. Once it had been a land for the Jews, in the days of Moses, then it was lost to Mohammedans for centuries. Christians had been trying to recover it but they could not, neither were the Jews successful – they could not be! Only six percent of the land belonged to the Jews and ninety-four percent of the land belonged to the Mohammedans. How can you make Israel a sovereign nation? But under pressure of arms they managed to create a new land. It was great strategy, and perhaps nobody else has pointed it out….I find myself standing alone in many situations; sometimes I think I should not unnecessarily bother about things when nobody is even thinking about them.My understanding is that America and Britain conspired to create the Jewish state so that now Jews will be in trouble for eternity. This is a very sophisticated diplomacy. And the Jews were happy; they thought that America and England were helping them, that they were favorable to them, that they were giving them the homeland for which they had been hankering for centuries.And America had killed two birds with one stone. In America, Jews are among the richest people, so they have great power over the American congress. They have a lobby of their own, and because politicians depend on contributions from rich people for their elections, they cannot avoid the Jews. They cannot ignore them; their presence is too important – they have cash money. So this was a good chance to have their money contributed to American politicians.The American politicians managed to create the state of Israel for the Jews, but the state was forcibly imposed on the Mohammedans. Now, they cannot tolerate it – Mohammedans are very fascist, and this insult they cannot tolerate – so there is continuous war.Israel has to purchase war materials from America, and American Jews continuously have to send millions of dollars for the survival of Israel. In this way, America has destroyed more Jews than Adolf Hitler – and has created not just a single-blow slaughter, but a continuous situation that will go on and on for centuries till not a single Jew is alive in Israel.And any day the American politicians can pull out their support. They have done that in Taiwan. They were supporting Taiwan against China, and Taiwan depended absolutely on American support – but for how long?Taiwan is a small island. It was the private property of Chiang Kai-shek, who was the dictator before Mao and the communists took over China. The old name for Taiwan was Formosa; Chiang Kai-shek had made it his holiday resort, a private property. And as the communists took over China, Chiang Kai-shek, with his family and friends, escaped to Taiwan and changed its name from Formosa. They created a new nation with the help of America – Taiwan. America helped, and with billions of dollars and new factories, it became a nation.But how long can you manage against mainland China, the biggest country in the world? Finally, you have to give up. America dropped Taiwan and joined hands with mainland China – because that was China’s condition: “Unless you stop supporting Taiwan, China is not going to support you.” They needed China’s support immensely – because China and Russia together could become such a great force, it was a beautiful and necessary step for America to bring China towards them. But Taiwan was lost, and Taiwan is very angry.But what can you do? Now China is making every effort to absorb Taiwan back into China, and Taiwan cannot fight, it has not the power. The same is going to happen to Israel, any day.It has happened the same way in Iran: it was American support that kept the shah of Iran in power. He had no hold on the people; the people are fanatic Mohammedans under the control of Ayatollah Khomeini, but because of American support, American army bases…Ayatollah Khomeini was living in France and directing his people in Iran to be ready any moment, because how long can America support the shah? Sooner or later it becomes a burden.One day it did become a burden. And the moment America left Iran to itself, the shah of Iran had to run away, because he knew that he could not survive. Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran with flags flying, and Iran is now in the hands of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Mohammedan priests. They have created in Israel a hell for the Jews, and with such beautiful tactics that even the greatest Jews like Martin Buber could not suspect it.I am the one-person majority who wants to say to the world that this is cunning politics. America and England are not favorable to the Jews, and the proof for it is that the Vatican pope has not accepted Israel as a sovereign nation; they have not given their recognition. So on the one hand Christianity gives no recognition to the nation; on the other hand they created the nation in a place where they are surrounded from all sides by Mohammedans, and they will be killed and crushed.Just for crucifying one man, Jesus, for two thousand years millions of innocent Jews have been crucified – just as Jesus was innocent but killed by his contemporaries. Now these people, after two thousand years, have nothing to do with those people who crucified Jesus. But they are being tortured in Russia, they are being tortured in Germany; they have been tortured everywhere, wherever they have been. And now Israel is the ultimate strategy: they will keep being tortured for eternity until Israel disappears again.So I have given my answer to Tom Robbins, because he is going to write a book and he wants my opinion. I know he must be surprised, because nobody has ever said this, that Israel is a strategy of Christian politics to destroy Jews – not directly, but by creating a situation so that Mohammedans can do the job and Christians can keep their mask that they have been so helpful, even to the enemies. They have followed Jesus’ philosophy: Love your enemies. They have been pouring money and help in the form of outdated arms – armaments which are of no use, which have to be thrown out, either into the ocean, or in Israel.And at the same time American Jews go on helping American politicians because they are helping Israel. So the American politicians exploit their money, they exploit their support.Just by chance, yesterday when I dictated my letter to Tom Robbins, I received the message…we were fighting in the Supreme Court of Oregon to prove that our commune in Oregon had been destroyed absolutely illegally, and that the government had taken control of the land without any reason or rhyme. And we have won the case in the Supreme Court: the Supreme Court has specifically made it clear that the government has been absolutely illegal in restricting the use of the commune’s land, its other properties. So now it is again in our hands.I have said to Tom Robbins that my suggestion is that if you want to help the Jews, Oregon should be given to them as a new Israel. Move the Jews from Israel and give Israel to the Mohammedans; it belongs to them, it is ugly to keep their land.And as for me and my people, we offer our commune land as a beginning. It is enough for at least one hundred thousand people. We give all our assets – all our houses, hotels, roads, dams, fields – everything that we have in Rancho Rajneesh we give them as a friendly gesture, without taking any money for it, with the condition that Rancho Rajneesh should be the capital of the new Israel.And let America show its real face. If they want to help them…half of the state of Oregon is already owned by the federal government, and it is very sparsely populated so there is no problem. Half the land already belongs to the federal government; give that land to the Jews.And Jews are in a new trouble in Israel. There were a few Jews who have remained in Israel forever, since the days of Moses, so they are very orthodox – utterly orthodox. They have not seen the outside world, they are still four thousand years back; their mind is of that type. The second layer has come from European countries. That layer is a little different, because it is no longer so orthodox. It has seen the developed countries of the twentieth century; it has forgotten all the old traditional ways. And the third layer, which has completely forgotten what Judaism is, has come from America.Now they are fighting amongst themselves. Full-scale riots are going on in Israel amongst the Jews themselves. Mohammedans are killing them from all around, and Jews are killing other Jews because the orthodox Jews say to the European and American Jews, “Go back! You are no longer Jews.”For small reasons…for example, on the Sabbath every week, the orthodox Jews stop working by the evening on Friday. They want the new Jews who have come from Europe and America to close their discos, their restaurants, their movie houses, on Friday night. They cannot conceive it. I have heard:Three rabbis were talking about whose synagogue was the most advanced. One rabbi said, “Of course it is my synagogue. We allow smoking inside the synagogue; we allow drinking, drugs, anything, in the name of God.”The second rabbi said, “That’s nothing, forget all about it. You are still old-fashioned. These things we have been allowing for centuries. We allow you even to bring your girlfriends; we don’t even ask whether the woman is your wife or not. Bring your girlfriends; the synagogue is just a religious kind of movie theater where you will not find people with their wives. If they have to be with their wives, then what is wrong with their house?”Those movie houses…and do you know why it becomes dark? It is not for the film, it is because so many stories go on inside the movie hall. All those stories are possible only in darkness.So the second rabbi said, “We allow girlfriends and dancing, and if people want to make love, they can even make love. We ignore it, we don’t create any interference.”The third rabbi said, “You are both idiots. You don’t know. In our synagogue we are living in the twenty-first century.”They said, “What more can you do?”He said, “What more? On our synagogue there is a signboard: ‘On Jewish holidays the synagogue is closed.’”This is the ultimate form of religiousness!So those three layers of Jews are cutting each other’s heads.My suggestion is not just to make a joke of American help; I mean it! I am sending the message to Israel: “You enter into the commune; let that be your beginning. And tell the American government – and you have every right to ask because you have been giving all those politicians money, they are all paid servants to you – that you want a New Israel in the New World.”And why bother about a rock? Make a beautiful Temple of Solomon again! The new is always better than the old. Why should you bother? Do you think religion is like wine, that the old is better than the new? Don’t condemn religion that way. Just fresh, new, with modern architecture – make a great temple, the greatest in the world. Once it was the greatest temple in the world, but why unnecessarily get into trouble which cannot end? – there is no possible way.And then you will know America’s real face. Then you will know how friendly they are to Israel and how friendly they are to the Jews. They are fundamentalist Christians. Ronald Reagan is a fascist Christian; he will not allow it. This will be a good test of their friendship.I don’t believe in any religion, but I certainly believe that people should not be put into unnecessary misery, slaughter, massacre, every day trembling with fear. And now it has become much more dangerous, because Jews are fighting with Jews, and Mohammedans from all around have become terrorists; they are destroying in every possible way the very foundation of the Jewish state. And just see: the Vatican has not even given formal recognition to the sovereignty of the state of Israel; that shows the real Christian mind.But this is our world. Perhaps my people are the only people who are free from chains. God is your chain, religions are your chains; the idea of sin, the idea of virtue are your chains.Freedom consists in a single thing, and that is your awareness. Act out of awareness and you will be acting out of freedom – and without interfering in somebody else’s freedom. Freedom knows how to respect others’ freedom.You don’t have to do anything to attain freedom. It is already there within you. Just drop the chains.And those chains are such that you have started loving them; you have become accustomed to them. It will be a little painful to depart from your miseries, a little painful to depart from your old sufferings, familiar friends, and enter into a new area of freedom, awareness. But except that, there is no hope for humanity.All that is needed is just a little intelligence. You have been deprived even of that.And the pope is angry with me, the shankaracharyas are angry with me, the imams are angry with me, for the simple reason that I want you to be intelligent. They want you to be absolutely fools, idiots, retarded, so you can be enslaved, tortured, harassed, sacrificed, and you will not revolt against it.Paddy goes into a pub one day and sees a very well-dressed man sitting in the corner. But what he notices most are his beautiful shoes. So he goes over and asks about them and the man tells him they are crocodile shoes.But Paddy has never heard of a crocodile, so he goes over to his friends and asks them. They tell him that it is a very dangerous animal that lives in the swamps of the Amazon jungle.Paddy is determined to have a pair of these shoes, so he sells his house, his car and his wife, and sets off for South America. Once he is there he eventually finds a man with a boat, who is willing to take him up the Amazon.After many weeks they reach the heart of the jungle and Paddy sees a crocodile, swimming around in the swamp. So he immediately dives in and has a terrific fight with the beast. They are thrashing about in the water for over an hour until, tired and bleeding, Paddy manages to haul the dead crocodile into the boat.With his last strength, Paddy turns the crocodile over onto its back, takes one look at it and shrieks: “My God! It has got no shoes on!”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Many times sitting in your presence I am overwhelmed by a very childlike feeling. It seems so familiar, yet from a long time ago. In these moments there feels no gap of you and me. I am like a child playing in your beautiful garden.Osho, is this significant or am I already moving into my second childhood at the ripe old age of thirty-five?PS. You can scare me any time.This great experiment through which you all are passing is basically to achieve your lost childhood again.When I say “your lost childhood,” I mean your innocence, your eyes full of wonder, knowing nothing, having nothing, but yet feeling yourself at the top of the world. Those golden moments of wonder, joy, no tension, no worry, no anxiety, have to be regained, rediscovered. The sage is nothing but the circle that started in your birth coming full way, complete, back to the same point.Of course the second childhood is far more valuable and significant than the first. In the first the innocence was there because of ignorance, so it was not pure and clear and in your possession; it was just a natural thing that happens to every childhood. The second childhood is your greatest achievement – it does not happen to all. The second childhood makes you innocent without ignorance, the second childhood comes through all kinds of experiences. It is mature, centered, ripe.You should be blessed that you are feeling like that. The second childhood is just exactly the existential meaning of meditation, and from there on is the great pilgrimage of coming back home – which you have never really left, which is impossible to leave, because it is you. Wherever you will go, you will find yourself there.It is not even a shadow which follows you because that will disappear if you are sitting in the shade. It will appear only when you are standing in the sunlight. Your shadow is not an eternal companion, and in times of darkness even your shadow itself leaves you. But in the times of light your shadow is back.The same is the situation with friends, lovers: in the days of darkness they leave you just like the shadow; in the days of success, richness, they all come back. They are not really companions.There is only one essential being in you which will be everywhere with you, without any condition. Even if you are in hell it doesn’t matter, it will be with you; if you are in heaven it doesn’t matter, it will be with you.To find that essential core of your being is on the one hand utter innocence, and on the other hand is the greatest wisdom that has ever existed on the earth.So your body may be becoming old, but if you are learning ways of being silent and peaceful and meditative and loving, you will not grow old. You will remain as young and as fresh as early morning dewdrops shining in the beautiful sunrise, looking far more precious than any pearls.You should be happy and rejoice in your childhood. This is what Jesus meant when he said again and again, “Unless you are born again…” Even Christians have not got the meaning of his statement. They think literally that “unless you are born again” means that first you will have to die, and then you will be born, and on the judgment day Jesus will take you into paradise. That is not the meaning of the man.What he is saying is: Unless you die right now as a personality and emerge as an innocent individuality, unscratched, unpolluted by the society and the people…. This is your new birth, this is resurrection.Enjoy your divine childhood, and when it is the right time I will scare you! You are too new; the childhood is not yet absolutely settled, and you can misunderstand if I scare you. Just wait…! That moment will also come. Right now your whole concern should be getting deeper into childhood.I don’t scare anybody except Avirbhava, because she has a quality of a child. I don’t know why. Perhaps her father is dead, her mother is dead…I feel a tremendous feeling for her – and she is utterly innocent. So once in a while – not once in a while, almost every day – whenever I have the chance and she is close by, I try to do my best.“I don’t want your son, Ernie, swimming in our pool anymore” says Mrs. Meyer to her neighbor, Mrs. Jones.“But what has my poor little Ernie done?” asks Mrs. Jones.“He is constantly peeing in the pool,” says Mrs. Meyer angrily.“Don’t be so hard on him,” says Mrs. Jones, “all children of his age do that!”“Maybe they do,” says Mrs. Meyer, “but not from the diving board.”Childhood has its beauties, because it does not know the etiquette, the manners, and all kinds of crap. It is so simple and so innocent and so spontaneous.A man walked into a bar and was amazed to see a dog sitting at a table with three men playing poker. The man went over and asked, “Can that dog really read his cards?”“Sure he can,” said one of the men. “But he’s not much of a player. Whenever he draws a good hand he wags his tail!”That is absolutely innocent…the poor dog cannot contain his joy.Two cockroaches were munching delicacies on top of a garbage pile when one of them began telling of some new tenants in the nearby apartments.“I hear,” he said, “that their refrigerator is spotless, their floors are gleaming, and there is not a speck of dust in the whole place.”“Please, please,” said the other cockroach, “not while I’m eating!”Such bad news…!It will be a tremendous revolution the day we start learning the languages of birds, of bees, of cockroaches. They all have their ways of communicating. But then the heart feels a little sadness, because we have not been able to learn even to communicate with human beings, and we have been here for millions of years. What kind of stupidity is this, that we don’t know the whole humanity as belonging to us and we belonging to it? All that man has done is simply butchering, murdering, war. The same energy, the same effort would have made this world the greatest miracle in the whole universe.But we don’t understand each other. We may even be speaking the same language, but understanding is not necessarily expected; what is expected is misunderstanding. So people are hiding themselves, hiding their childhood, hiding their innocence, protecting themselves from everybody with defense measures; otherwise you will see children young and old all playing in this garden of the earth, rejoicing, laughing, giggling. Why this seriousness? Man has not gained anything out of this seriousness; he has simply lost everything – but he continues to be serious.I am absolutely against seriousness.I call it a psychological sickness.Only a playful, childlike, innocent behavior is the right behavior, is what I would like to call virtuous behavior, religious, spiritual…not only human but divine.The moment you are as innocent as a child you have transcended humanity, you have entered into the world of godliness.Osho,I love the words you use, “one's original face,” but I have no existential glimpse or understanding of what you mean by them. Would you care to explain further?Veena, the original face is only a poetic expression for your absolute innocence, which is not damaged by your parents, by your teachers, by your society, by your culture and by yourself.I can understand why you love those words…because you don’t have the original face. And the reason you don’t have the original face is…you are trying hard for it, but whenever I look at you there is a certain pretension, a certain hypocrisy. There is no bad intention in your being, but you want to look the way you should look, and that is destroying the whole thing.You should look the way you are.Drop all nonsense that has been imposed on you with all those commandments that religions have been issuing, without any respect to the uniqueness of individuals.Just be yourself.That’s the meaning of the original face.It is just a poetic expression to say to you: Don’t try in any way to look more beautiful, to look more meditative, to look more respectful. Those are deadly poisons…the very desire to look like somebody who you are not.My whole teaching is: Just be what you are and don’t care a bit about the world. Then you will feel a tremendous relaxation and a deep peace within your heart. That is your original face, relaxed, without tensions, without pretensions, without hypocrisies, without the so-called disciplines of how you should behave.But all those poisons have gone deep in your blood, in your bones, in your marrow. What I am trying to do is to take out those poisons and give you back your naturalness. And there is nothing more beautiful than the natural, there is nothing more mysterious than the original; no etiquette, no mannerism can improve upon it.But everybody is trying to improve upon himself. Then everything becomes false. Your smile is false, your hands raised together folded in reverence are just an exercise of the hands – your heart is not with them. And unfortunately I have such eyes that I can see exactly where the trouble is; when everybody is laughing there are serious and sober people who are pretending to hold their laughter, because it doesn’t look right.Veena, you have been a long, long time with me, but I have never felt that you are relaxed, at ease, at home. Just being at ease, relaxed, at home, all these poor trees know what is the original face, these birds know what is the original face. Only man has forgotten, because he has found masks upon masks; he is lost in the jungle of masks, and now it is very difficult to find which is the original.But a simple understanding…whenever you see yourself tense, remember that you are doing something against nature. Whenever you are doing something more special than others, remember that you are trying to be superior, behaving as a great meditator, behaving as a real English lady. English ladies don’t have original faces!Drop all this nonsense of being English and German and Indian. I see Indians here once in a while, and even in the tumultuous laughter of you all I can detect them; either they will laugh louder than anybody to show that they are not the Indians I condemn, or they will just look downwards to hide their face, because they have lost the intelligence to understand even a simple joke. And rather than enjoying the moment, they are judging continuously whether it is right to tell a joke in a religious discourse…. Who told you this is a religious discourse? I hate the very word! I just enjoy to be with you.This very enjoyment is our religiousness.We don’t have anything except ourselves. And condemned by the whole world, which is a big world, still we have our simplicity, our innocence; we have got rid of all old garbage. Just allow yourself to come out of the cage that you yourself have been creating…and others have been helping.The original face is a beautiful poetic expression, but it does not mean that you will have a different face. This same face will lose all its tensions, this same face will be relaxed, this same face will be nonjudgmental, this same face will not think of others as inferior. This same face under these new values will be your original face.There is an ancient proverb: Many a hero is a man who did not have the courage to be a coward. If you are a coward what is wrong in it? You are a coward – it is perfectly good. Cowards are also needed, otherwise from where will you get heroes? They are an absolute necessity to give the background to create heroes.Just be yourself, whatever it is. The problem is that never before has anybody told you just to be yourself. Everybody is poking his nose in, saying that you should be this way, you should be that way – even in ordinary matters.In my school…I was just a small boy, but I hated to be told how I have to be. Teachers started bribing me – “If you behave rightly, you can become a genius.”I said, “Hell with the genius – I simply want to be myself.”I used to sit with my legs on the table, and every teacher was offended. They would say, “What kind of behavior is this?”I said, “The table is not saying anything to me. It is something between me and the table, so why are you looking so angry? I am not putting my legs on your head! You should relax just as I am relaxing. And this way I feel better able to understand what nonsense you are teaching.”Just beside the room was a beautiful window, and outside were trees and birds and cuckoos. Mostly I was looking out of the window, and the teacher would come and say, “Why do you come to school at all?”I said, “Because in my house there is no window like this which opens up to the whole sky, and around my house there are no cuckoos, no birds. The house is in the city, surrounded by other houses, so crowded that birds don’t come there, cuckoos don’t feel that these are the people to be blessed by their songs.“Forget the idea that I come here to listen to you! I am paying my fee, you are simply a servant and you should remember that. If I fail I will not come to complain to you; if I fail I will not feel sad. But if for the whole year I have to pretend that I am listening to you, and I am listening to the cuckoos outside, that will be the beginning of a hypocritical life. And I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”On every matter the teachers, the professors wanted you to do it in a certain way. In my school in those days, and perhaps even today, using a cap was necessary. I have nothing against caps; since I have left the university I have started using caps, but I never wore one until I left the university. The first teacher who was worried about me, said, “You are disturbing the discipline of the school. Where is your cap?”I said, “Bring the school code of behavior. Is there any mention that every boy should use a cap? And if there is not, you are imposing something against the school code.”He took me to the principal of the school and I told the principal, “I am absolutely ready, just show me where it is written that a cap is compulsory. If it is compulsory, I may even leave the school, but first let me see where it is written.”There was no written code and I said, “Can you give me any other reasonable arguments for using the cap? Will it increase my intelligence? Will it increase my life? Will it give me better health, more understanding?” I said, “As far as I know, Bengal is the only province in India where caps are not used, and that is the most intelligent part of the country. Punjab is just the opposite. There for a cap, people use turbans – such big turbans, as if their intelligence is escaping so they are keeping it. And that is the most unintelligent part of the country.”The principal said, “There seems to be some sense in what you are saying, but it is a school discipline. If you stop using caps, then others will stop.”I said, “Then what is the fear? Just drop the whole old convention.”Nobody wants to allow you to be yourself on matters which are absolutely insignificant.I used to have long hair in my childhood. And I used to come in and out of my father’s shop, because the shop and the home were connected. The home was behind the shop and it was absolutely necessary to pass through the shop. People would ask, “Whose girl is this?” – because my hair was so long, they could not think that a boy should be having such long hair.My father felt very ashamed and embarrassed to say, “He is a boy.”But they said, “Then why all this hair?”One day – it was not his normal nature – he became so embarrassed and angry that he came and cut my hair with his own hands. Bringing the scissors with which he used to cut cloth in his shop, he cut my hair. I didn’t say anything to him – he was surprised. He said, “You don’t have anything to say?”I said, “I will say it in my own way.”“So what do you mean?”I said, “You will see.” And I went to the opium-addict barber who used to have a shop just in front of our house. He was the only man I had a respect for. There were a row of barber shops, but I loved that old man. He was a rare variety, and he loved me; for hours we used to talk to each other. What he was saying was all nonsense! One day he was saying to me, “If all the opium addicts can be organized into a political party, we can take over this country!”I said, “It is a good idea.”But he said, “Because we are all opium addicts, I myself forget my own idea.”I said, “You don’t be worried. I am here and I will remember. You just tell me what changes you want to have in the country, what kind of political ideology you want, and I will manage it.”He said, “That’s good.”So I went to him and I told him, “Just shave my whole head completely.” In India the head is shaved completely only when your father dies.For a moment even that opium addict came to his senses. He said, “What has happened? Has your father died?”I said, “Don’t bother about these things. You do what I am saying; it is none of your concern! You just cut my hair completely, shave it completely.”He said, “Done! That is the easiest job. So many times I get into trouble. People say to me, ‘Shave the beard,’ and I forget and I shave their heads. They say, ‘What have you done?’ And I say, ‘At the most I can say to you don’t pay for it – what is the problem?’”I used to sit in his shop, because there was always something so ridiculous happening. He would cut half the mustache of somebody and would say, “Wait, I have remembered some urgent work.” And the man would say, “But I am caught here in your chair and half the mustache is gone. I cannot go out of the shop!” He would say, “Simply wait there.”And then hours will pass and that man is sitting there…”What kind of idiot is this man?”At one time I had to help by cutting the half mustache of a man. I said, “Now you are free. Just never come back here again…because that man has not done much harm to you, he just forgets.”So the barber said, “That’s right. It is none of my concern. If he has died, he has died.”He shaved my head completely, and I went home. I passed through the shop. My father looked and all his customers looked. They said, “What happened? Whose boy is this? His father has died.”My father said, “He is my boy and I am alive! But I knew he was going to do something. He has answered me well.”Wherever I went people would ask, “What happened? He was perfectly healthy.”I said, “People die at any age. You are worried about him, you are not worried about my hairs.”That was the last thing my father ever did to me, because he knew that the answer could be more dangerous! On the contrary, he brought a certain oil that is used for growing hair. It is a very costly oil, comes from Bengal out of a certain flower, javakusum. It is very costly, rare, used only by the richest people – and not by men but by women – to keep the hair as long as possible. In Bengal I have come across women whose hair touched the earth – five feet long, six feet long. That oil simply functions powerfully on the hairs.I said, “Now you understand.”He said, “I have understood. You use this oil quickly; in a few months your hair will be back.”I said, “You created the whole mess. What was there to be embarrassed about? You could have said, ‘She is my girl.’ I don’t have any objection about that. But you should not have interfered with me the way you did. It was violent, barbarous. Rather than saying anything to me, you simply started cutting my hair.”Nobody allows anybody to be just himself. And you have learned all those ideas so deeply that it seems they are your ideas. Just relax. Forget all those conditionings, drop them like dry leaves falling from the trees. It is better to be a naked tree without any leaves than to have plastic leaves and plastic foliage and plastic flowers; that is ugly.The original face simply means that you are not being dominated by any kind of morality, religion, society, parents, teachers, priests, not being dominated by anyone. Just living your life according to your own inner sense – you have a sensibility – and you will have the original face.The young teacher wrote on the blackboard, “I ain’t had no fun all summer.” Then she asked the children, “What is wrong with that sentence and what do I do to correct it?”Little Ernie shouted from the back, “Get a boyfriend.”The sentence will be corrected by itself – just get a boyfriend!This is the simple original face; it doesn’t bother about consequences. But England is perhaps the most attached to false personalities….Elizabeth and Philip had been married for a considerable time, and it became particularly apparent to Philip that Elizabeth had lost all enthusiasm for their lovemaking.On a recent occasion, Philip was making love to his wife when he suddenly said, “Is something the matter? Are you hurt?”“No, I’m all right,” answered Elizabeth. “Why do you ask?”“Oh,” said Philip, “for a moment there, I thought you moved.”People have become absolutely dead. And Veena comes from that same lot of lunatics! Just enjoy and be at ease with yourself and with the world, and the original face starts shining by itself.When the doctor had finished his examination of the woman, he looked up and said brightly, “Mrs. Brown, I have good news for you.”“I’m glad of that, doctor,” said the woman, “But I am Miss Brown.”“Miss Brown,” said the doctor, without changing expression, “I have bad news for you.”There are many people whose expressions will not change. Now such a great change – from Mrs. Brown to Miss Brown – but the doctor is keeping his personality, his face, absolutely without change.Whenever I look at Veena I feel very sad for her…no expression, sits just like a marble statue. She is beautiful. She will make a good model if you want to make a marble statue. But it seems she is holding back from life; she is not allowing the playfulness and the joy that are our birthright. That is why the words original face strike her. It looks immensely intriguing – but she cannot understand what it means. It does not mean another face; it simply means no face imposed upon that which you have got from nature itself.One needs a little courage, a little daring, just to be himself whatever the circumstances. And on the whole, every circumstance and every consequence – even if you have to suffer – will enrich your individuality, will make your intelligence sharper, will give you a sense of direction which comes from your own inner being and is not given by some guide from outside.Osho,Every time I manage to clutch a straw you step on my fingers. My brain is totally scrambled. My whole world seems unreal. You got me into this mess – are you going to get me out, or is that up to me?The first thing is: I am going to get you into a deeper mess, because unless you touch the rock bottom of your mess, it is very difficult to get out of it.Do you know how to swim? Have you ever drowned in a river? – and what happens? You have to go first to the bottom and then at the bottom you are thrown up. That is why dead people know the secret but the living people don’t. You will not see any dead person drowning – he simply floats, and living people get drowned. They say they don’t know swimming, but dead people are swimming perfectly well!So as far as I am concerned I am not going to get you out of the mess. I will manage every way to take you to the rock bottom, then you will pop up on your own.And what do you mean, “Every time I manage to clutch a straw you step on my fingers”? Just don’t clutch at any straw. It is so easy…! And you know me perfectly well. I will not let you clutch at any straw, because those straws are not going to save you; I will step on your fingers. You cannot make me stop, but you can do one thing: stop clutching at straws.She is speaking in a very poetic way. To translate it into pragmatic language, she is saying that whenever she starts believing in some principle, I demolish it. Whenever she starts creating a system of beliefs and finds a consolation in that belief system, I destroy it.My way of creating goes through a long passage of destroying, because the real work is to destroy – and then you will come out of it. You don’t have to be created. You are there already, dumped with so much garbage that I have to take that garbage away. And you are clutching…!Never try to make a system of beliefs out of what I am saying. If you understand me well, I am not a system maker and I don’t want believers, I don’t want followers. I don’t want anybody to think that I am the savior.I don’t even shave my own beard! Nirvano goes on saying to me, “I can trim it a little.”I say, “No, absolutely no! These are my original hairs. I have never shaved my beard. They are the same original hairs as when they first had started growing in my youth, and I am going to keep them to the very last.”She feels worried that they will become thinner, that this beard will become too long. I said, “Don’t be worried. Even if it starts touching the ground, I am always in favor of the original.”One very essential thing which I have been telling you, but I have to repeat it, is: Feel me more than my words, feel my presence more than my presentation. I am not a philosopher. I am incurably a mystic. There is no medicine which can cure me.But if you go on…and this has happened with thousands of people; in these thirty years I must have come across millions of people, but they were all seeking some savior – and I walked on their fingers. They were all seeking somebody to take away their responsibility, without knowing that the moment your responsibility is gone, your freedom is also gone. They exist together; they are inseparable.If you want freedom, you have to accept every responsibility. If you want freedom, you don’t have to clutch with your hands onto any belief, philosophy, religion. You just be yourself. Why can’t you enjoy yourself consciously? There is no intrinsic necessity for having a belief.Thousands of people have come to me and gone. There was a time I was surrounded by Jainas. Unfortunately I was born in a Jaina family, so naturally my first audience was of Jainas. They were immensely happy because I was saying things which they had never thought about, I was interpreting their scriptures in a totally new way. They had great hope in me. They thought that…Their religion has remained very small; it is the smallest religion in India. And it is the ancientmost religion – it is more ancient than Hinduism. But what calamity has happened? Even today there are not more than thirty-five lakhs of Jainas in a country of nine hundred million people. What has happened? Jainism is at least seven thousand years old – that is at least. It can be more, older, because in Harrappa and in Mohanjodro two ancient cities have been excavated, and Jaina statues have been found in those cities.Now it is a scientific fact that those cities were destroyed somewhere between seven thousand and ten thousand years ago, and that is a very conservative estimate. But even if we take that estimate, in ten thousand years the population of the Jainas has remained negligible – thirty-five lakhs. That is not worth any consideration! That is why in the great religions of the world Jainism is never counted – never counted with Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. They are great religions, and they are all very new as far as Jainism is concerned.Because of my interpretations they had a tremendous hope in me, that perhaps I may spread their religion to the whole world, take the message to the whole world. But they were unaware – they were my first audience – they were not aware what kind of man I am: I cannot support anything which my heart is not ready to support.So a few things I have supported in Jainism – people were very happy. But the moment I started telling about things which I cannot support, they were shocked. I have walked on their fingers. Just a small thing – which is so rational – and the Jaina community…their supreme command decided to expel me. I wrote a letter to them saying, “Don’t be stupid. I expel you all from my life. You don’t have to expel me; you cannot. I am no more part of you.”And what was the reason? I addressed a Jaina conference and told them, “You are the oldest vegetarians of the world. You eat the purest food, but you have not produced a single Nobel prize winner. What is your contribution to art, to music, to science, to mathematics, to painting, to poetry? What is your contribution to the world? There are the Jews who get forty percent of all the Nobel prizes, and the rest of the world has to live only on sixty percent.”And I told them, “The reason is – I have deeply inquired into the matter – that in vegetarian food something is missing which is necessary for intelligence. That is why you have remained retarded.”Vegetarian food is not complete, and particularly for intelligence certain vitamins are missing. Those vitamins can be found in meat. Certainly I cannot support non-vegetarian food. Even though it gives you better intelligence, it destroys your very soul; it makes you cruel, violent, inhuman.So I suggested to them, “I have found something which should be immediately accepted if any intelligence is left in you, and that is eating eggs which are not fertilized, non-fertilized eggs. They are not living, there is no life. If you leave them they will simply rot and disappear. There is no life in them because the male sperm has not entered into the mother’s egg; the mother has grown the egg without the male sperm. It is not alive, so there is no harm in eating it. It is vegetarian.”Suddenly they were very angry. I am suggesting for them to eat eggs, and they are afraid even to eat tomatoes, because tomatoes look like meat – just the color, poor tomatoes…. How can they conceive of themselves eating non-fertilized eggs? Somebody stood up and said, “Maybe that is right that they are not living, but they are coming from animals.”I said, “So is milk; what is the difference? If you are avoiding anything that is coming from any living being, your children are from the very beginning against Jainism; they are drinking their mother’s milk. And you are drinking milk” – and Jainas drink milk and milk-made products more than anybody. They cannot enjoy meat and non-vegetarian foods, so to substitute they have invented thousands of ways of delicacies made of milk products.But the very word egg was enough for them to leave me completely; the Jainas disappeared. I was dangerous! I was teaching something that they have never done in ten thousand years. No scripture of theirs suggests anything about it. But they were absolutely unable to answer my questions – “If you are eating the purest food, your intelligence should have been the purest flame, the sharpest genius, the most creative, but it has not been so.” And immediately – they had come to me because they thought I was supporting their system, but I am not supporting anybody’s system – they disappeared.Then the second gang was of Gandhians. For a little while it was okay, but the moment I criticized Mahatma Gandhi…nobody had any answer for it, but the Gandhians disappeared. I had stepped on their fingers! And as the Gandhians disappeared, immediately socialists, communists gathered around me, not knowing that the same is going to be their fate.Of course, from each group a few courageous people have remained. A few Jainas have remained, a few Gandhians have remained, who had the intelligence to understand that I am not against anybody, but I cannot support anything which is fundamentally wrong, and is harmful to human life.The communists were very happy, because they were in search of a man…. The only calamity for the communists in India is that they don’t have a saintly figure. They don’t attract the masses, and the masses will never be attracted to communists, because they cannot think that someone who is speaking to them and also smoking a cigarette and putting it in the ashtray in between can be a leader. This is impossible for the Indian masses. And because communists don’t believe in God, are against all religions, Indians cannot have any communion with them.You will be surprised that in the Russian revolution there was one Indian as important as Lenin himself. His name was Edmund Roy; he was an international figure in the communist movement. Thinking that he was so much respected internationally by the communists, he came to India, back to his home, and here he came in conflict with Mahatma Gandhi immediately. He was right on many more points than Mahatma Gandhi, but that is not how the masses decide. He smoked cigarettes, he drank vodka, he has lived in Russia, he believed in violence: he is intolerable!So when the communists saw that the Gandhians were angry with me, they thought it was an opportunity. If I can be their representative, it will be an immense help for them to gain power in India, because they have heard that I don’t believe in any religions; they have heard there is no God, no heaven, no hell. They felt, “This seems to be perfectly agreeing with us.”In fact, my emphasis was far deeper than their own philosophy. So when I said that there are no religions, but there is something higher than religion and that is religiousness; there is no God as a person, but as a presence, and the whole universe is full of godliness…I walked on their fingers! Immediately all communists disappeared from my audience. But a few courageous souls have remained, and have become accustomed to my stepping on their fingers. And they have learned one secret:With me it is not ideas that matter.With me it is your transformation that matters.And your transformation is possible only if your mind slowly, slowly becomes calm and quiet.So now I have my own people. But once in a while a stranger accidentally gets caught. Now I have been inquiring about that sannyasin Piyoosh, whether he has reached Igatpuri and Goenka or not; otherwise he should be loaded in a truck and sent to Igatpuri. This is not his place. But he is hiding. He has not approached the office. He has not approached Yogi, who initiates sannyasins, to return his papers. So once in a while somebody who does not understand my way of working, gets into unnecessary trouble.I am not interested in how many people are meditating; it is not my responsibility. I am fulfilled and absolutely content. If death comes this moment I will not even tell death, “Wait a few minutes more; let me finish my speech.” What is the point? I am always ready; in the middle of the sentence I can stop. I have no desires, no longings, no stupid superiority complex of being a prophet or a messiah or a messenger of God. That is why I can speak to you now heart to heart.When I call you my people, it simply means you are no longer Hindus, no longer Christians, no longer Jews, that you have dropped all that rubbish away, that you have come to me as an individual on your own authority. And I will not give you new chains to console you.You are saying to me, “You got me into this mess.” You are wrong, you got into this mess on your own accord. I never go and knock on people’s doors – but it is so easy to throw away the responsibility, without knowing you are throwing away your freedom too. I cannot accept the responsibility because I cannot destroy your freedom. I love you too much.And now you are saying, “You got me into this mess – are you going to get me out, or is it up to me?” It has been always up to you whether to get into the mess or get out of it. It is none of my business. I have never bothered…. Millions of people have passed by my side, people who were ready to die for me, or were ready to kill me just if I said something that went against their prejudices – the same people.It has been a tremendously rich life of experiences, but now I am absolutely finished with taking anybody’s responsibility, destroying anybody’s freedom. You are here on your own accord. Whatever happens to you, you are responsible; it is happening out of your freedom. I respect your freedom so much that I cannot take the responsibility.Just meditate over the whole matter, and you will see this is not a place where one gets into a mess; this is a place where we dry-clean you! All the mess that you bring with you, we take it away…slowly, so it does not hurt you too much. But one has to be very alert and very intelligent if he wants to remain with me. I am not here for retarded idiots.The worried wife came to the doctor and said, “Doctor, I don’t know what is wrong with my husband. He has sudden changes. Monday he liked milk-pudding, Tuesday he liked milk-pudding, Wednesday he liked milk-pudding, Thursday he liked milk-pudding, and all of a sudden, today he does not like milk-pudding.”This is not the place for such idiots, who can’t understand simple things.Moishe Finkelstein met his old friend Sam Feigenbaum on the street in Moscow.“Did you hear,” said Moishe, “that old Yossel Mosovith has died?”“No,” said Sam, “I did not even hear that he had been arrested.”A man was having his fiftieth birthday and his wife wanted to give him something really special. They had been married for twenty-five years and had the perfect marriage.“What’s something you have never had on your birthday?” she asked.He looked coy and she said, “Come on, it is okay – anything you want.”“Well,” he said, “I have never had a whore.”“Okay,” she said, “I will get you the best.”So she booked him a very classy whore for the whole night. When he came home the next day she asked, “Did you enjoy yourself?”“Yes,” he said shyly.“Well, did she do anything I don’t do?”“Yes,” he said modestly.“Well, what was it?” she said.“She moaned,” said the husband.So the next time they were making love, the wife kept saying, “Shall I moan yet?”“Not yet,” he would say.Then finally he was about to climax and he said, “Okay start moaning, start moaning!”So the wife said, “Oh my God! I have had a terrible day, your mother came, the vacuum cleaner broke, my hair is a mess….”This is a place of laughter and love, of joy and celebration. According to me it is the only holy place in the world. Just be careful not to clutch any straw, because then I cannot resist the temptation of stepping on your fingers. The responsibility is yours.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The other day when you said that I was “coming along fine, slow but steady.” for me, it was a beautiful statement. But it touched an old wound that I was hardly aware of.The wound comes from school and being often told that I was slow, a bit dim, not very intelligent and definitely needed to try harder.And listening to you I had the feeling that maybe all this was true. Is it?Vimal, it is of great understanding on your part that you have not blamed me because I have touched your old wound. It hurts. But unless all the wounds are opened to the sun, to the wind, they will go on growing underneath; they can become cancerous.Many people, many more than the people who are suffering from physical cancer, are suffering from psychological cancer. And the only way to remove a psychological cancer is to expose it. If there is love and trust, then you will not start getting angry or hurt, because I am nothing but your physician. And just out of my love I have to hit you – sometimes very hard, because the crust that is covering your wound has become very thick.Your question reminded me of Veena. She had asked a question this morning. I had looked all around – she was not here. Although I knew why she was not here, I have also inquired. And the reason she has given is that she woke up with a stiff neck. That need not prevent you from coming here. You have a stiff neck anyway! Then she has not turned up to work the whole day, and her boyfriend has been saying that she is very upset.First you ask a question, without ever thinking that you are putting me into a situation: either I have to lie just to console you, just to inflate your ego…but that way I am not your friend; that way I am your greatest enemy. That is what all the priests, all the religions, all your leaders have been doing for thousands of years, and I don’t want to do it. But I can see why they were doing it: you were very happy with them. They were giving you more and more doses of opium to keep you fast asleep and consoled.Because I have to say the truth, it is bound to hurt you, sometimes very deeply. And I can understand; the pain that has been repressed suddenly uncoils within you. But if rather than bringing understanding it brings an upset, then it was better you had not asked the question. You cannot expect from me that I am going to nourish your ego, protect your wounds, console you in your misery, suffering, insincerity, helping you to be a beautiful hypocrite.She is again not here; I have looked around…. And it is not that she is not hearing what I am saying; her room is just close by. She has heard in the morning – the stiff neck came later on – and she is hearing right now.But you cannot understand my difficulty. If I don’t care about you, then I can simply say things which console you but don’t transform you. If I love you, then I have to be a surgeon and I have sometimes to operate on you.You laugh so beautifully when you hear of Zen masters hitting their disciples, and if Veena goes on like this she will have unnecessarily forced me to carry a staff too. I have never carried anything in my hand in my whole life, but a friend has sent a beautiful staff, which is waiting. Either Veena gets okay by tomorrow morning, or I will have to use for the first time a very gross and primitive method.I hit you as sophisticatedly as possible, as playfully as possible. But if you are here not to be transformed, but are just hanging around unconsciously, not even aware why you are here, not being aware of the pilgrimage, then your being here or not being here is almost the same. One thing you should remember: by your being upset you cannot change me. You can simply force me to use primitive methods that Zen masters used. Please don’t force me! And the only way is that whenever I say to you…even if it hurts, my purpose is not to hurt you. When I hurt you it is almost a necessity.Vimal has shown immense understanding. He is not complaining that I have touched his wound. That should be the attitude of everyone who has come to be part of this caravan, who has accepted a totally new way which has never existed before, and a totally new style of life, of utter freedom and love.But you have to be reminded continuously that even love is not just simply a bed of roses. And the more you love me, the more I am going to be hard with you. The more you understand me, the more I can operate on you. You should remember that all my sannyasins are just on the operating table twenty-four hours a day. If you have a stiff neck, good; it will be operated on!Whatever your teacher said to you is almost a universal problem. Teachers hurt their students, not out of love, not to help them, but to feel a certain power.There is a very beautiful historical incident in the life of one of the great emperors of India. He had captured his own father, imprisoned him, because the father was living too long. And he could not wait anymore; he himself was getting old. By the time his father dies he will not be able to live longer himself to dominate the whole kingdom. The father has to be removed.Politics knows nothing about love.The father was imprisoned by his own son in jail. And strangely enough, the next day the father simply sent a message, “There is no problem; I have ruled enough. You need not have taken so much trouble to arrest me. You could have simply said it to me. But now what has happened has happened. I would just like you to send thirty students, small boys, whom I can teach the holy Koran” – their religious book.When the message reached the court of his son, who had now become the emperor of the whole of India…The son, despite being a ruthless, violent, ugly man, still seems to have had tremendous insight into the psychology of man – and that is almost fifteen hundred years before Sigmund Freud.He said to the court, “Do you see this letter from my father? For what does he want these thirty children? He cannot live without dominating somebody, and the best way is to dominate small children because they are so helpless.”After fifteen hundred years Sigmund Freud came to the same conclusion – he had no idea of this incident – that the people who teach in the schools, who choose the profession of teaching, somehow are people who don’t have the courage to go into politics but still want to dominate. That is one thing to remember about teachers. In my vision not everybody should be allowed to be a teacher. It is one of the most fundamental things in life. Only people who have a meditative understanding and no desire to dominate should be allowed to be teachers. Then they will not hurt others, just to feel powerful themselves.I had graduated from the university, I had topped the whole university. I simply went directly to the education minister and I told him, “I need to be appointed as a professor in a certain university.”He said, “You are strange. You should have applied.”I said, “Applications cannot represent me. I have come myself.”But he said, “You need qualifications.”I said, “I have all the qualifications that you need, and I have much more.”He said, “What is much more?”I said, “Look into my eyes. I have no desire to dominate the way you have the desire to dominate. I am not a politician. And just because I don’t have any desire to dominate, I am qualified to be a teacher.”He said, “Strange argument. No application, no certificates, no moral certificates…”I placed my certificates before him and I said, “These are the certificates. But if you cannot see me, what will you be able to see in these certificates? And I am saying to you that I simply qualify on a ground which will be absolutely necessary in the future for every teacher.”He looked into my certificates and he said to me, “Speak quietly! There are clerks and typists and other departments by the side.”I said, “I don’t care about anybody. You just give me the appointment in the university I want; otherwise I am going to give a press conference and you will be unnecessarily embarrassed, because as far as educational qualifications are concerned they are amply fulfilled. What more do you want than a man who has topped the whole university? What more do you want than a man who has received as many marks as nobody else before? What do you want from a man who has this certificate from one of his examiners?” It was just a letter written to me saying, “For my whole life I have been waiting just to see something like the way you have answered the questions. In my whole life I have never given the first class award to anybody.”He was well known all over the country, particularly in this part, because I think he belonged to Pune or nearby, Professor Ranade. He was at that time the greatest professor of philosophy in India. In his letter he said, “I wanted to give you one hundred percent marks, but I hesitated because people may think that I am somehow favoring you. So please forgive me, I am giving you only ninety-nine percent. And the reason I am so impressed by your answers is that they are not from the textbooks. It seems you have never read your textbooks; it seems that you are the only person I have come across” – and he was an old man, a retired professor – “who has responded to the questions spontaneously.”I said to the education minister, “What more do you want?”He became so afraid when I told him about the press conference that he immediately wrote the order. He said, “It will reach.”I said, “I want it to be given to me to take with me when I go myself. What is the need to waste money in postage? You give it to me.”And he became so freaked out! He said, “You don’t understand the bureaucratic way. It has to go through the post.”I said, “I don’t want to support any bureaucracy. You give me the order, and you can send another copy of the order through your bureaucratic channel.”Just out of fear he gave it to me with trembling hands. I laughed saying, “It is strange. Are you taking my interview or am I taking your interview?”And he was right. I reached before the order came through the mail, and when I gave the order to the vice-chancellor of the university he said, “But I have not received anything.”I said, “This is the original. You will receive the true copy.”He said, “This is just absolutely absurd. The original has to come to me.”I said, “It has come.”He became afraid that there may be some trouble later on for him. He immediately told me, “I have to phone to the education minister.”I said, “You can phone.”And he phoned. He said, “This is a strange case, unprecedented. The order, the original order, has been brought by the person himself, and he says the true copy is coming through the bureaucracy – whenever it comes it will come. What should I do?”The education minister said, “Exactly what I have done! Simply do what he says; otherwise, from the very first day you will be creating trouble for yourself. So just do whatsoever he says. The true copy is coming by the bureaucracy.”It came after seven days.Teachers are psychologically attracted towards the profession for the simple desire of dominating, insulting, humiliating – not out of love, not out of respect, not out of concern for your growth.So it is good that you got your wound opened up. It has been created in your school, where they were telling you that you were “slow, a bit dim, not very intelligent and definitely needed to try harder.” Now you are saying, “And listening to you I had the feeling that maybe all this was true. Is it?”No. Something of it was true and something of it was not true. I will have to separate the truth from the untruth.You are not unintelligent, you are not dim; these statements are ugly from any teacher towards any student. These are the statements which make people dim and unintelligent, because repeated often in every class, again and again, they become a kind of hypnosis. They start believing in them. And once a person starts believing that he is unintelligent, dim, he starts acting also in an unintelligent way, because he has to prove the idea that he has been given.But as far as your being slow is concerned, they were absolutely right. You are slow, you are lazy. And your laziness is not bone lazy; otherwise I will forgive it. You are just lazy by habit. Bone lazy is someone who cannot help himself; from his very bones he is lazy.I am bone lazy, so I know perfectly well what bone lazy means. I have never done anything. How I have managed my life I sometimes wonder. People have been doing so much, and still they cannot manage their lives. It is just a miracle; I have simply not done anything.One of my friends came from Russia to see me. He shook hands and he told me, “You should never go to Russia.”I said, “Why?”He said, “Your hands! Anybody shaking hands with you will immediately say that you don’t belong to the proletariat, you are a capitalist, because you have never done anything – no sign on your hands that you have even carried a bucket of water.” And that’s true!You are in a far better position. I cannot help it, so I have not tried at all; I have simply relaxed in my laziness. People have understood that if somebody is bone lazy and you love him, what to do? – prepare food for him, prepare clothes for him, prepare his bed, prepare his bathroom, do everything.You are just habitually lazy. You can drop it, you are more fortunate than me. But that does not mean that you have to work harder. You have just to understand that laziness is your habit, and to be enslaved by any habit is against your own growth. I am not interested that you should work more or less – what does it matter? At least to me it matters nothing whether anybody works or not.This much is certain: that if for fifty-seven years I could manage without moving from my bed, moving from my chair…that is the only movement I do. I am the only man who enjoys freedom of movement – no obstacles, no problem.But it will go against your own growth if you don’t drop the habit. And you have such a beautiful soul that it will be a great misfortune not to attain to the ultimate illumination I have been talking about. Your laziness may become a hindrance; it is just against your own growth.So you can think: if you want to remain the same, I have no objection; if you want to grow, then just see that your laziness is not something natural to you. You have learned it just by your teachers telling you that you are unintelligent, you are dim. You accepted their ideas – and the natural effect of those ideas is laziness.You are neither unintelligent nor dim. Drop that laziness which is hanging around like darkness. By dropping it you will find your intelligence becoming sharper, better, your understanding more clear, more deep, your love gaining new flowers and new foliage.A few sutras for you to contemplate, just lying down in your bed underneath the blanket, in utter laziness.…A small town is one where there is no place to go that you should not.…The only thing which cannot be misquoted is silence.…No matter what goes wrong, there is always somebody who knew it would.…An optimist sees a doughnut – a pessimist sees a hole.…The best way to succeed in the world is to find a crowd that is going somewhere and get in front of them.…After man came woman, and she has been after him ever since.…Opposites attract – like sloe gin and fast women.You don’t get it? Neither do I! I will also think over it, because my understanding about gin or any other kind of alcoholic drugs is nil. I thought you may understand it!…There is a crack in everything God has made.…Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.…Whenever truth is injured, defend it. But if the truth goes against you, accept it. It is better to be defeated than to reject the truth.…A start is like a love affair…any fool can start it, but to end it requires considerable skill.So be alert! Before starting any love affair, be prepared how you will end it. That is called homework.…An Englishman thinks seated, a Frenchman standing, an American pacing, and an Irishman afterwards.…To keep an idea secret is to tell it to only one person at a time.…Old age is when it is harder to find temptation than to resist it.…Old men are not really old men, they are just twice boys.…If everything is coming your way, you are in the wrong lane.…A fool and his money are soon elected.Drop the old proverb which used to say: A fool and his money are soon parted, that does not happen anymore. A fool and his money are soon elected.…If the facts are against you, argue the law.…If the law is against you, argue the facts.…If the facts and the law are against you, shout like hell.…If worry makes you so nervous that your hand shakes, learn to play the guitar.The reason there are so few women after dinner speakers is because few can wait that long.A woman is able to forgive and forget, except she will never forget what she forgave. That is one of the mysteries of women.…If you have half a mind to watch TV, that’s enough.Just give it a try. I have nothing against laziness. It is not a sin, it is not a crime; it is only a hindrance to your own spiritual growth. But if you find it impossible and if you find that it is your very nature, then relax in it, it is perfectly good. But first give it a try, because my understanding is that bone lazy people are very rare in the world, they cannot survive.How have I survived? Later on when you start writing about me, make it a miracle!Osho,Nothing to hold on to,Nowhere to belong to,Nowhere to go,Osho, why is it painful to feel my aloneness?“Nothing to hold on to, nowhere to belong to, nowhere to go – why is it painful to feel my aloneness?”What am I here for? For the time being hang around me, hold on to me. Go with me wherever I am going. Belong to this caravan which is simply enjoying, not going anywhere.It is not the Jewish caravan that Moses was leading continuously for forty years. And just now they have discovered the reason was they had lost a quarter. They searched the whole Middle East – it took forty years, and still they could not get it!This caravan is not searching for anything.This caravan is just remaining herenow.And I am allowing you to hold on to me, belong to me, just as a device because you are feeling so alone. Just the idea that you belong to me, that you can hold on to me, that you go with me, and your painfulness and your feeling of aloneness will disappear. Once it has disappeared you will see that what I have given to you was only teddy bears just for the time being; temporary arrangements to keep you alive to the point where you can live in your aloneness, because aloneness is the most beautiful space there is.But you are in a deep misunderstanding. You are mixed up because of the language and the dictionaries and the so-called learned people who use the word ‘aloneness’ synonymously with ‘loneliness’. Aloneness is experienced only at the very height of consciousness, loneliness in the very dark ditches and valleys. Loneliness is a desire to be with someone, and aloneness is the joy of being oneself. They are not synonymous; they are absolutely opposite.If you are feeling painful, it is loneliness. So just for the time being you need a few teddy bears. All through history those teddy bears have been used. What is your God? – nothing but a big teddy bear. What are all your theological systems? – just teddy bears made out of logical, rational argumentation, to help you and to give you the sense that you are not lonely.But they have all proved dangerous, because if you go on carrying your teddy bear your whole life…It is okay up to a certain age. On railway stations, on airports you will see little boys, little girls carrying their teddy bears, which look absolutely Italian, so greasy, so dirty. But without them they cannot live, they are absolutely lonely. They sleep with them, they wake up with them, they go on carrying them everywhere.But a moment comes when they have grown up and they see that what they have been carrying is just stupidity. Then the teddy bear remains in the corner of the room for a few days, and then nobody knows where it has gone. The corporation truck has taken it away. So will go your God: the corporation truck will take it away with all the rubbish.You don’t know anything about what aloneness is. Aloneness is that beautiful space where you feel yourself so contented with yourself that you don’t need anybody else – no God, no master, no friend, no lover.That does not mean that you cannot relate. You can relate with a master, but for the first time the relatedness will be of a totally different quality. You can relate in love, but your relatedness will not become a relationship. You can have friends, but they will not be filling any gap inside you. You are so full, there is no gap. You can enjoy their company – and you will enjoy when they are gone even more, because they are a kind of disturbance. Once in a while just for the change of taste you can enjoy people. But mostly you will enjoy yourself.I am reminded of one of Walt Whitman’s most beautiful songs: “I celebrate myself.” You should look into that song and meditate upon it. Unless the moment comes when you start celebrating yourself for no reason at all, you have not known what religiousness is, you have not known for what this whole existence exists, you have not known anything of beauty, of truth, of divineness. Your life has been nothing but a long, dark night of the soul.Your meditation will help you to make the distinction between aloneness and loneliness. Your meditation will make you absolutely clear about the beauty and the light and the blissfulness of aloneness. Then what is the need to hold on to something? You are enough unto yourself. What is the need to belong to someone or to something? You are complete, entire: the circle has come to its completion. Nothing is missing, and what is the need to go anywhere?The most funny people in the world are the tourists, who are always going somewhere for no reason at all. Whenever I see tourists, I have such a hard time to keep myself silent. They are such a temptation to laugh: carrying two cameras, telescopes, thermos flasks, all kinds of junk and strange things; loaded with all that and running from one place to another. And they do all that running; they go on taking pictures!Back at home, relaxed, they will see the album and will say, “My god, what a beautiful Taj Mahal.” And they could have purchased that photograph in their own town without going anywhere else.All this tourism has given them amoebas, all kinds of diseases. What they think is beautiful, to me has always looked ugly. It has given them a tan, it has destroyed their original color, just burned their skin. But idiots are idiots. You can see them lying down – suffering, for a distortion of their faces, of their bodies – on all the beaches of the world.If you want to know how many authentic idiots there are, you just go on counting the number of people who are getting a tan on the sea beaches, and you will come almost very close to the right number. Whenever I see somebody with a tan I cannot practice what I preach. I simply cannot like that stupid act that they have done. And they waste so much money on it: there are tan oils and tan creams and tan powders, and all the five-star hotels are full of these people. A strange kind of mania – tan mania!There is nowhere to go.Just meditate silently here and avoid these kinds of madnesses. They go on spreading like wildfire, and just because others are doing it you get caught into it.Just meditation is enough for you.Go in, and you will find all the answers for all your questions, and more.Osho,When I first came to you, you told me to make work my meditation and to stop all formal meditations. Ever since, I have been going for it…and I love it!Lately I've been wondering if maybe I should slow down. You have been talking so much about meditation. Can work still be our meditation? I love working, but I get teased a lot about being a workaholic.Condensed to your very essentials the question means: I should slow down talking about meditation. You are doing perfectly well – and you love it.If people tease you and call you a workaholic, it is a compliment. These people must be lazy people like Vimal! All the people here are meditating, and if you are enjoying the meditation that I have given to you – that work is your meditation – and you are enjoying it and you love it, then why bother about others? Perhaps they are feeling jealous of you. Perhaps they want to destroy your joy.This is a strange world. Here anybody who succeeds in any sphere is going to be teased, dragged down, bullied by the people saying, “You are doing something wrong.” And all that they want is that you should be a part of the crowd of failures.As far as I can see you are doing perfectly well. Perhaps I may have done too much talking about meditation. I will try to slow down.A traveling salesman was stuck in a small town and went to the only available farmhouse for a place to sleep.“Can you put me up for the night?” he asked the farmer.“I guess I can,” he answered, “if you don’t mind sharing a room with my young son.”“My God,” said the salesman, “I’m in the wrong joke.”This is your situation; you are in a wrong crowd. But don’t look around at anybody; just concentrate, contemplate, meditate on your work. Everything has to be poured into work.Yes, be a workaholic.Be utterly drunk with the joy of creativity.I have not said it in vain, that work is your meditation. Apparently I am bone lazy, but just apparently; otherwise, who is harassing you all, day in, day out? By the time somehow you have got rested I am again back in the morning to torture you for the whole day. By the time you have slowed down a little – I am back!A young swami on his way to M.G. Road fell out of his rickshaw. And as luck would have it, he landed in heaven.After a few days’ rest, he asked for some work. Finally he was given a position in the “Religious Statistics Department.”Here they had a clock for every religious leader on the earth, and any sins committed by them would be recorded by a slight movement forward.The pope’s clock had moved only two minutes in sixty-seven years. Mother Teresa’s only one minute, and so on.The swami inquired to the angel in charge, “What about Osho’s clock?”“Oh,” said the angel, “we use his as a desk fan!”Just to avoid talking about meditation…There was a German, a Frenchman and an Englishman staying with their new brides at a famous honeymoon hotel. As they retired to bed they agreed that they would get together the next day and exchange experiences over some drinks.The next day the German was asked, “How did you get on last night?”“Ach, vunce to begin wid, then vunce one hour later, und every time the clock struck, vunce again, vich vass eight times in eight hours.”“And what did your wife say?”“Wunderbar, wunderbar!!”The Frenchman told them, “I am straight away on the work. Zen I am on the work again when I get back my breath. Zen I sleep and start again, and sleep and start again, and sleep and start again, twenty times. Then I am halted, finis.”“What did your wife say?”“Magnifique, encore, magnifique!!”The Englishman had been very quiet. “Come tell us, how many?”“Once,” he said.“Once! – what did your wife say at dawn?”“Get off, we need some sleep.”I am in a difficulty – how to avoid meditation? Only today I will avoid, not tomorrow, because I don’t want difficult tasks.Just for your sake…Devageet falls in love with an eighteen-year-old girl and they go off to Goa for a honeymoon. When they get back, a friend says to him, “Do tell me, how was it?”“It was beautiful,” says Devageet. “The sun, the sea…we made love almost every night.”“Wait a minute,” says his friend. “A man of your age – how did you manage that?”“Well,” says Devageet. “We almost made love on Monday, almost on Tuesday….”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 18 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What do you see in my eyes now, after you hit my head so hard? Oh , the blessing of your sword has left only one wound, that even the silence blossomed out of this meditation hasn't healed: Have I really been disrespectful in my unawareness? For I will rather cut my tongue before saying anything against you, and I will kill myself with joy rather than be unloving to you.Sarjano, I know your heart. I know your love. I know your deep gratitude and respect – but it is human, once in a while to slip from the path. And it happens from a necessary psychological principle: you start taking me for granted. This is one of the ancientmost diseases of the mind. Once you start taking me for granted, then you are bound to behave unconsciously.Never take me for granted.I am simply alive just for you.My work is finished and my boat has been waiting for long to take me to the other shore, but your love and the fear that without me, you may be lost…and you are coming so close, that if I can manage to wait a little longer on this shore, I can give all of my people what I have received from existence. But the moment you take me for granted, immediately you forget, become unconscious, create distance.I don’t want to hit anybody, but except hitting you I cannot wake you up when you have fallen asleep. Consciously, whatever you say is absolutely right, that you would rather cut your tongue than say a word against me, that you would rather die than offend me. These are not just poetic assertions. I understand you perfectly, but you still have the unconscious mind and that unconscious mind manages to sabotage whatever you are gaining in your consciousness.In mythological terms, it is a conflict between good and evil. In a more contemporary psychological way, it is the conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious is afraid – and its fear is real. If your whole being becomes conscious, it will be the death of the unconsciousness in you, and the death of mortality in you, and the opening of eternal life.Your unconscious mind does not want to commit suicide. It will give you every resistance; hence once in a while it will catch you unawares, and something will come out of you that you had never meant. But if I let it go without hitting you, then your unconscious will be gaining more and more power over your conscious. Hitting you is simply a loving way to put the unconscious back and to help your consciousness to be stronger, more powerful, more capable to understand what comes from your unconscious and what comes from your conscious.The unconscious is not your friend.The unconscious is all the past centuries, it is carrying the whole evolution of man. It is barbarous, it is animal. Only a small part of your being has become conscious, but that small being can manage to dispel the whole unconsciousness if you don’t become a victim of it again and again.Now Veena is sitting in her perfect beauty, relaxed, but she does not know: the whole night I have had to sharpen my sword for her! The closer you come to me, the more you love me, the more you should remember that at any time I can hit you.I have told you the most beautiful story in Zen, about a master thief. He was no ordinary thief, because in his whole life nobody had been able to catch him red-handed. Even the emperor was amazed at his craftsmanship, his art in stealing. The man was so perfect…but he was getting old. The situation had come to the point in Tokyo that whosoever’s house was visited by the master thief, bragged about it. It was a great honor, because it was not that he would go just to anybody, but only to the super-rich. It was a certificate that the master thief had stolen things from some family, that they bragged about it.But as he was getting old, his son said, “I don’t know anything of your art, your fame – and you have the strangest fame. Before you leave the world, please let me understand the secret of your greatness. Your stealing is not just for money; your stealing is simply to keep your mastery sharpened so you don’t forget the art.”It is almost like a musician. Once Yehudi Menuhin was asked, “If you don’t practice one day, what happens?”He said, “Only I understand that the thing is not as perfect as it would have been; nobody else will find any difference. If I don’t practice for two days, then the critics will become aware that something is missing. If I don’t practice for three days then everybody will be able to hear that something is wrong, the master is not at his height.”Every musician practices for hours, sometimes eight hours per day. Even the most famous musician practices for hours, because the art is so subtle and so delicate that it can slip out of your hands if you miss just a few days’ practice.So the boy said, “Before you leave the world, help me to know the secret so that I can practice in front of you, and you can correct where I am going wrong.”The father said, “Tonight you come with me.”They went to a very rich house, and the young man was trembling with fear and the old man was going as if he were going for a morning walk – so at ease, with such tremendous confidence. The old man made a hole in a wall to enter into the house…the young man was perspiring, and it was a cold night. But the old man was doing his job so silently that although he was making a hole in the wall, there was no noise. When the hole was ready, the old man slipped in, and signaled the boy to come in.His heart was throbbing, naturally, but he was wondering…his old father is going as if it is their own house! He had the master key that can open all the doors.He opened door upon door, and the boy became more and more afraid, he started cursing himself: Why have I asked him to teach me? This is not for me. If I can manage to survive tonight, finished – I don’t want to learn this art. It is beyond my capacity.The man was doing things, so at home, and he took the boy into the innermost part of the house, opened a big cupboard and there were very costly things inside, valuable diamonds, very costly, and rare clothes. Everything was dazzling. The boy could not believe his eyes, that people have so much money.The old man said, “Get in!” He got in and the old man went out and – it was such a great surprise – closed the door, locked it with the boy inside, and shouted “Thief! Thief!” and ran out!The boy said, “Is this my father, or my murderer? And what kind of teaching is this? I was wondering if I could survive – now there is no possibility.” The whole house was awake. The servants were awake. People were searching every nook and corner, and a maidservant came into the room where he was inside the cupboard. He knew nothing of what to do, but spontaneously he started scratching on the cupboard…as if there are rats inside.This was not a calculated act, it was absolutely spontaneous. Even he could not believe what he was doing. And the maidservant, just to look for the rats, because there were valuable clothes, opened the door. She had a candle in her hand, and the boy blew out the candle, and rushed out. But he was seen, so the whole family and the whole neighborhood followed him. He had never run so fast in his whole life – he could have become an Olympic champion the way he was going! – just like the wind.It was a question of life and death, and he was praying to God, “This is the first and last time, just save me!”Then suddenly he came across a well. He took up a big rock and threw it in the well – the whole crowd that was following him stopped. They thought he had jumped in the well: they had heard the sound, so they stopped there, and they said, “Now there is no worry. Either he will be dead, or in the morning we will pull him out and shoot him.”And the young man reached his house, and again a great surprise: the old man is fast asleep, snoring! He could not believe that this man was his father! He shook him, and the father said, “Don’t disturb me. You have come back, that’s enough. I know the conclusion; the rest of the story you can tell me in the morning. There is nothing else to learn, I have given you my whole art.“I am not acting out of mind. I am acting out of no-mind, in utter silence. It is my meditation. Just go to sleep.”The boy was amazed that he did not even want to know through what difficulties he had passed. He had been almost on the verge of being caught! He could not sleep the whole night: his heart was throbbing, and again and again as he would close his eyes, he would see the nightmare that those people had caught him, and he would wake up again. In the morning the father did not say anything, he was just sitting, with his tea. The boy said, “But at least ask me what happened!”He said, “You have come home; everything has gone right. You could not have come back if you had acted out of your mind, so you don’t need to learn anything more. All that you need to learn is how to act out of no-mind.”“Still,” the boy said, “please listen to my story.”He said, “Okay, if you want you can tell it. But I am not interested. All my interest was in whether you came back or not.”He told his whole story, and the old man asked, “Scratching like the rats were destroying the clothes – was it your thought?”He said, “I had never thought about scratching the cupboard like rats destroying the clothes…I don’t know how it came to me.”His father said, “That’s the way – you don’t come in. Let your no-mind take possession of the whole situation. How did you figure out that to throw the rock in the well would stop them?”He said, “I don’t know…just the rock was there, the well was there, and the people were just on my heels. Suddenly a flash…and I took the rock and threw it in the well. It was not my act.”The old man said, “This is what the ancient masters have said – action without action. I am not a thief, I have just chosen stealing as a way of enlightenment.”You cannot believe it; anything can become a way to enlightenment, even stealing. But it has to be not your action, it has to come from your no-mind.So now there are three things, Sarjano: the conscious mind, which you know and out of which whatever you have written to me has come. Behind and below is the unconscious mind, from where all kinds of sabotage will come, disruptions, to destroy the whole possibility of consciousness.Without your knowing, you have been disrespectful. I know that with your knowing, you will be the last person to be disrespectful, and it does not matter to me whether you are disrespectful to me or not. The point is, I don’t want your unconscious mind to sabotage the beauty that has arisen in your consciousness.Below is unconscious, above is no-mind, or super-conscious. I will hit you if I see that the unconscious is pulling you down, and I will hit you if I see that you are not moving fast enough from the conscious to the super-conscious. Those are the two times when I will hit you.It does not matter…I have not hit you because you were disrespectful. Remember it – because I have been condemned my whole life: from my very childhood I don’t know a day when I was not condemned for doing things not in the way people wanted. I have become so accustomed and at ease with condemnation, disrespect, notoriousness – everything – so that is not the question. Just Sarjano’s disrespect will not add anything; it will be just a dewdrop in an ocean, so that is not the problem. The problem is that it will disrupt your consciousness, your love, your peace that is growing, your meditativeness that is growing, and I cannot see that happening.And this is to be understood by all, because today it is Sarjano’s case; tomorrow it can be your case. These hits are out of sheer love. If I don’t care about you, why should I bother? The whole night I could not sleep…because I have not used the sword for many years, but just to prepare it for Veena – and she is sitting just here, laughing. If she had laughed before, I could have slept at ease.I don’t want to cut your heads, but if you insist I will have to do it – reluctantly, but there is no other way. If you only understand the language of the sword, then I will have to speak that language. I am not using it; I am using only words.So be careful. Whenever you start getting angry at me, remember: it is your unconscious that is disrupting your love, it has nothing to do with me. When you start thinking something against me, remember it is your unconscious that is feeding the idea to you.Otherwise, whatever you said is so beautiful, I would like to read it again so that everybody understands clearly. It is not only a question, it is a statement from the very deepest core of his heart.“Osho, What do you see in my eyes now, after you hit my head so hard?”I see your eyes. I see you – the same as you were before the hit, after the hit. But if you were not hit you would not have been so full of love, with tears of joy in your eyes.“What do you see in my eyes now, after you hit my head so hard? Oh beloved master, the blessing of your sword has left only one wound, that even the silence blossomed out of this meditation has not healed: have i really been disrespectful…?”No, you have not been disrespectful. But you don’t know: there are so many dark sides of you which you don’t identify with – they were disrespectful.“…In my unawareness? For I will rather cut my tongue before saying anything against you.”No, that won’t help. You can cut my tongue, your tongue; we both can sit in silence because we cannot speak – but I will go on doing what I am doing without the tongue, and you will go on once in a while being disrespectful, without the tongue. The tongue is not needed, just your face can show it, your eyes can show it. Just the smallest gesture can show it.Don’t think in terms of cutting your tongue. Think in terms of from where within you any ugly thing crept into your conscious…and destroy that unconscious. The tongue has nothing to do with it; it is only a means, which the conscious mind can use, the unconscious mind can use, the super-conscious mind can use. I am using it; it is a perfect mechanism to convey things which cannot be conveyed. And finally, you say, “And I will kill myself with joy, rather than be unloving to you.”That is easier, to die for someone.The real difficulty is to live for someone.Many have died in the name of love, because death is a single-blow thing; but living for someone because of your love is a long time process. I don’t want you to make this commune a Jim Jonestown – that is the Christian stupidity. I want this place to be the place of life and love and rejoicing.If you love me, rejoice. If you love me, sing. If you love me, dance. I don’t ask you for death. Death will not prove anything, it will simply prove your incapacity to live for my love. But that has been taught for as long as we can go backwards, that dying for love is a great martyrdom. It is sheer stupidity.I am not here to teach you all these stupid things that have happened in the past. People have died for Christ, people have died for Mohammed, people have died for Buddha. But that does not show their love, it simply shows their unconsciousness. The unconsciousness was destroying their love, now it has destroyed even themselves.Here you have to learn a totally new alphabet, the alphabet of rejoicing. If you love me, rejoice. In spite of everything, rejoice. The more blissful you are, the more you are laughing, the more you are dancing, the more I know you have given me, offered me your flowers of love.This is a temple of love and laughter.Never forget it for a single moment.As the boat was sinking, the skipper called out, “Does anyone know how to pray?”“I do,” replied Pope the Polack, who was on board the ship.“Okay, go ahead and pray,” said the captain. “The rest of us will put on life jackets; we’re one short.”An old English gentleman was on trial before the high court of Australia, for the crime of making sexual advances to an ostrich.“Before passing sentence,” announced the judge, “do you have anything to say?”“Your honor,” said the Englishman, “if I had known you were going to make such a fuss about it, I would not have married the bloody bird!”Here we are not masochists or sadists. This is not a sick psychological place – as all the churches are – belonging to any religion. This is a pagan, natural, simple, playful place. If you can laugh heartily, this is your prayer. If you can dance with abandon, if you can sway with the music, that is the only yoga I teach.I don’t believe in distorting your bodies.I believe in transforming your souls.Osho,Would you please explain your statement from the other morning of how music can be next to silence?Milarepa, I don’t know what I said the other morning – I don’t carry unnecessarily luggage from the past. But I will explain it to you this morning, in spite of the fact that I don’t know whether I made the statement or not.Music is certainly next to silence.There is a certain thing to be understood: Music does not consist, in the first place, of words, language. It consists of pure sounds, and it consists of pure sounds only to those who don’t know anything beyond sound. Those who know silence – for them, the whole gestalt changes.You see my five fingers, but somebody can see the five gaps between my fingers. Ordinarily you will not see the gaps, you will see five fingers. But the gaps are more real: fingers may come and go, gaps will remain.Between sounds of music there are gaps of silence. The authentic music consists not of sounds, but of the gaps. Sounds come and go; those gaps remain. And music can make you aware of those gaps more beautifully than anything else; hence I have to say that music comes next to silence. But it is possible even the musician may not be aware of it, unless his music is his meditation too. Then, soon, the shift from sounds to silence.The ancient Chinese story is that whenever a musician becomes perfect, he throws away his instruments; whenever a swordsman becomes perfect, he throws away his sword.It is a very strange saying and goes back almost five thousand years, because it has been quoted by Lao Tzu as an ancient saying. What does it mean? Chuang Tzu was asked, “This seems to be a very strange kind of proverb. When the musician becomes perfect we should have thought that he would have purchased perfect musical instruments, and the saying says he throws away his instruments.”Chuang Tzu told a very beautiful story to explain it. There are things which cannot be explained without beautiful stories, because stories give you enough space and freedom, enough gaps for you to fill with your own being. Prose is too tight and too mundane, so either poetry has to be used or a story has to be used. These stories are such that even a small child may be able to understand, or even an old man may not be able to understand; the question is whether he gets the undercurrent of the story.The story is:A man reached to the emperor of China and said, “I am the greatest master of the art of arrows, targets, archery, and I have come to ask you to declare in the whole empire that if anybody wants to compete with me, he should come forward; otherwise give time, and if nobody comes, then declare me the champion archer of your empire.”The king knew that man. He never missed a target. As far as human understanding is concerned, he was perfect. What more can you expect? One hundred percent success – success cannot be more than that. The king said, “I know about you. And I know that there is nobody who can compete with you.”When he was saying this, the servant of the king, who had raised him from his childhood…he was not just a servant but almost a father to him. The emperor’s father had died, and he had given the responsibility to his servant to take care of the child till he is of age, and see that no trouble arises and that he succeeds to the throne. So the emperor respected the servant as much as perhaps he would have respected his own father. The servant had done immense service to him; he had taken care of the whole empire till he was of age.The servant said, “Before you say anything to this man, I would like to interrupt. First listen to me. I know a man far in the hills who is really the champion. Compared to him, this man is just a child. He is a giant!”The king said, “How do you know he is a giant?”And the servant said, “He is so perfect in archery that he has thrown away his arrows, his bow – and you know the ancient proverb…. Send this man to that old man in the hills.”The archer could not believe it. What kind of perfection is this, when you throw away your arrows and your bow? But the emperor said, “You will have to go. I cannot deny anything to the man you have seen. Although he is my servant, deep down in my heart he is as great as my father. So you will have to go to that man, and if he recommends it, you will be declared the champion.”The man had to go, although feeling a little weird and awkward: What kind of a stupid thing…? The hills were great and very steep and it was a long journey, but he managed. Slowly, slowly he also became interested – what kind of perfection…? He reached finally to a small cave. He met an old man and asked him, “Are you the famous archer?”He said, “Archery? I remember, I have heard the word. It must be fifty years ago.”The archer said, “How old are you?”The old man said, “I am not capable of saying, because here there is no calendar, one does not know how time passes, but maybe one hundred and twenty, or one hundred and thirty.”The man said, “I am the greatest archer in the empire and by a stupid servant’s advice the emperor has sent me to you. Unless you give me a certificate, I cannot be accepted as the champion.”The old man said, “Champion? – so you have been learning archery to be a champion? Then you don’t love archery – it is motivated, it is goal-oriented. You can never be perfect because you are not directly related to archery. Archery is only a means; the end is championhood. But don’t be worried. You will have to pass just a little test, and I will give you the certificate – although as long as I am alive, remember that you are just a so-called champion. But because I am not a competitor, you can enjoy being the champion. Just come out with me.”The old man was so old…his back was bent, he had become hunch-backed. He took the young man, who was in the prime of his youth, to a cliff. The rock of the cliff, a small rock, hung high over a valley, thousands of feet below. And the old man went on that small rock – just a little missed step and nobody would be able to find you, not even your pieces could be gathered. He went to the very end of the cliff and stood with his feet on the edge of the cliff, just on his toes. He was standing there unwavering, as if he was standing on solid ground, and he said to the young man, “Come.”The young man took the first step and started trembling. “My god, what kind of test is this? and what has it to do with archery?” But he has to do it because the championship is in his hands. After the first step he fell down on the cliff, holding the cliff and saying, “Please forgive me, I cannot come that far. And I cannot stand with half my feet over the edge and just my toes on the rock. And I can see – I have never seen such a deep valley. It must be the very hell! Forgive me….”The old man said, “Then what kind of archer are you? The real archery is not to hit the target; the real archery is that you should be unwavering. Your unwavering is the real qualification of being an archer. Then your target cannot be missed.”The old man came back, helped the young man to stand up – he was perspiring, trembling, almost half dead – and the old man said, “Why are you carrying this bow and these arrows? A perfect archer throws them away.”The young man said, “Again the same thing! I don’t understand why a perfect archer should throw them away.”The old man said, “Look!” And he pointed towards the sky, where seven cranes were flying. The old man simply looked at those seven cranes, and they all fell on the ground. He said, “If you are absolutely stable, absolutely unmovable, you become such a magnet that your eyes are enough; no arrows are needed. How many cranes could you have brought to the earth?”The young man said, “Of course by one arrow, one. And by that time the others would have gone far away.”The old man said, “You are just a learner. You have not even found a master who can initiate you. So my suggestion is, go back, and unless and until you have forgotten what archery is…I will send my son to check you and if he can certify you, you can go to the emperor.”He said, “Strange, I have got into such a mess! With great effort I have learnt archery – but certainly I am not that kind of archer whose eyes become arrows, whose absolute immobility becomes a magnet.” But he touched the feet of the old man. He was certainly unique. He knew he was no comparison to him.He went back. The man had said, “Try to remain unmoving…” That’s a way of meditation: no movement of thoughts…utter stillness.After twelve years the old man’s son came. He said, “My father is dead, but he has left this message with me. I waited for twelve years before I came, because to be perfect in anything is not easy.” And then he suddenly said, “What is that thing that is hanging on your wall?” It was his bow.He said, “I somehow remember, it was something known to me. But these twelve years, just meditating, just remaining unmoving…You have to forgive me, I have forgotten what it is.”The young man said, “That’s enough! This is the certificate the old man has left for you. Now you can go to the emperor and be the champion.”But he said, “Now who wants to be the champion?” He tore up the certificate and threw it away.Chuang Tzu has told many beautiful stories unparalleled in the whole world, stories not without great spiritual significance.When a musician, Milarepa, starts shifting his attention from sounds to silence, his music becomes almost perfect; when he starts listening only to the silence and forgets all about sounds, his music is perfect. And to show the perfection he throws away his instruments; they are a kind of disturbance…the most beautiful disturbance in silence – but a disturbance is a disturbance.Music comes next to silence, but the difference is very big. And it is not that all music necessarily comes close to it. In the name of music, contemporary idiots are doing something which goes even farther away from silence – from Beatles to jazz to Talking Heads. It is not music; it is simply making noise! It is simply disturbing the silence.In the East, music has been always accepted as a spiritual phenomenon. If your music cannot create silence in the people who are listening, it is not music. If your music does not become an unmoving no-mind in the people of your audience, it is not music. It is just making noise.It happened in Lucknow, in the time of one of the very colorful kings of Lucknow, Nawab Wazid Ali Shah. He was really a very incomparable man. When the British armies were entering to capture Lucknow, he was listening to music. Somebody told him that the enemies had entered Lucknow, and he said, “Welcome them. They are guests, we are the host. Make places for them. We have so many places…make arrangements for them.”The servant said, “But they have come to conquer.”He said, “There is no problem. They can conquer, but first let them rest. What is the hurry? Conquering is not going to be a difficult problem because we are not going to fight. We are human beings, and it does not matter…if they enjoy ruling, they can rule.” And he told the musicians, “Go on!”This was the kind of man who was interested in a musician in Varanasi. He was thought to be the greatest musician of those days, but his conditions were so strange that nobody would even invite him to play his music. Vajid Ali Shah invited him.People tried to prevent him. Friends, courtiers, wives, everybody said, “What are you doing? That man is mad. He is a great musician, but he is certainly mad.”He said, “It does not matter. If music cannot cure madness, then he is not a musician; and if music cannot create a divine madness, then too he is not a musician. Let him come.”The musician came and said, “My condition is that while I am playing nobody should move. If anybody moves his head, or anything, his head has to be cut immediately. All around the listeners swordsmen with naked swords should be standing watching, and if anybody moves – finish!”Lucknow was one of the most juicy places in India in those days. It has still some remnants of that juice…. Knowing the conditions – because the conditions were also declared to the whole town – ten thousand people came to listen. Even the musician could not believe that ten thousand people are ready to risk their life to listen to the music. When the music ended in the middle of the night the officers had noted down almost two dozen people who had moved their head in appreciation, despite knowing the condition. Vajid Ali Shah said, “What do you say, should we behead them?”He said, “No! Everybody now should be allowed to go, and I will sing for those twenty-four – they are the real lovers. They moved their heads, they could not help it. They started swaying with the music, they became one with it. All the others were cowards, sitting like statues.”Those twenty-four people were retained, and everybody was allowed to go. People were afraid – perhaps they would be murdered. But in the morning they found them coming back home. They said, “What happened?”Those people said, “That musician knows how to find the right audience. The real music began when you had all left. He is certainly the greatest musician. We are feeling so pure and so fresh and so clean as we have never felt in our life. He has managed to initiate us into meditation.”Milarepa, music is certainly next to meditation. But not the modern music, which is ugly, which is sexual, which draws you lower rather than taking you upwards. It does not give you more consciousness, higher skies to fly in; it brings you down, back to deeper gutters.The real musicians will not accept this nonsense that goes on in the name of music. But young people who know nothing about music, who know nothing about meditation, who know nothing about silence, become fans, and they are mad about these idiots who think they are playing music. In any other wiser generation they would have been kept in psychiatric hospitals to be cured. They have gone berserk!A violinist was convinced he could use his art in music to tame wild animals. So, violin in hand, he traveled to the heart of the African jungle to prove it. He had no sooner begun to play than the jungle clearing was filled with animals of all kinds. Birds, lions, hippos, elephants all stood round, entranced by his beautiful music.Just then a crocodile crawled out of the nearby river and into the clearing and – snap! – gobbled up the violinist. The other animals were extremely angry. “You idiot! What on earth did you do that for?” they demanded. “We were enjoying that.”The crocodile put his hand on his ear and said, “What?”Music can be understood only by those who have a musical ear. And those who have a musical ear should think themselves fortunate because beyond music, just one step more, they enter the world of meditation, silence.Silence is the ultimate music.Osho,When I see you here with us, my heart melts, and your silence beckons me from out across the sea. When you speak, my thirsty being drinks deeply of your cool draught, then rests its drunken head at your feet. When I remember you, I fly like a bird in the open sky.But when you dance with us, Osho, it feels as if all things are set right with the universe, and the incredible sense of harmony vibrates skyward from this temple of life. Even my guitar closes its eyes and sheds a tear of contentment.Milarepa, this is the moment I have been living for: to share with you the miracle that has happened to me. I try in every possible way to make a way towards your heart. Slowly, slowly people are getting the clarity and the insight and the heartfulness.Temples are not made of bricks and stones.Temples are made of dancing hearts – I mean real temples.I know this is not only your situation. There are many who will share your question as their own. But living in this insane world…You can understand my difficulty.I wanted it to happen all over the world, but those insane people are against themselves; they are completely closed. They are open to any kind of stupidity, but they are not open to sanity. They are ready to do everything for destruction, but they are not ready to make this small life a life of pure joy and dance – and that was my whole effort.But the people for whom I wanted it to happen and for whom I worked my whole life are the people who would like to kill me. Now twenty-one countries are closed for me. It has never happened before. It is unprecedented that without any reason…I have never been in those countries, I have not even applied for a visa to enter in those countries. But they have taken precautions. Their parliaments have passed laws that not only can I not enter in their countries, even my jet-plane cannot land on their airports, just for fueling, because my presence can create immorality, anti-traditional revolution, unorthodox ideas.In short, every country’s parliament has said that I can corrupt the young people of their country; hence, as a precaution, the law was passed – unanimously. Have I corrupted you? Have I destroyed your consciousness? Have I destroyed your love? Have I destroyed your gratitude towards existence?But it seems idiots have always been in power. And those idiots are almost the same as the deaf crocodile: they can’t understand music, they can’t understand love, they can’t understand beauty, they can’t understand art, they can’t understand meditation – but they pretend that they are the most intelligent people in the world because they have the power.Power does not make you intelligent. In fact, it is absolutely wrong that I can corrupt people. It is a well known fact that power corrupts people – and I don’t have any power. They have all the power. The people in all these parliaments are already corrupted, and they are going beyond the limits of any conceivable intelligence.How can I corrupt just in fifteen minutes re-fueling my airplane on their so-called international airports? These are not international airports…! And if I can corrupt their country sitting in my airplane, I can corrupt from here perfectly well! And I will do everything I can to corrupt, because my corruption is against all that is ugly, all that is brutal, all that is violent, all that is oriented towards war.I will corrupt these people, and their minds.I would like them to be more loving, to be more friendly, to be more open, to be more available, to be more sharing of their joy and song and dance.It is a strange world. German sannyasins had applied just for a three-week visa for me. Germany has the greatest number of sannyasins in the world, the most flourishing discos, restaurants, meditation centers – and the government is simply being cowardly, impotent. And these are the descendants of Adolf Hitler! Even in his grave he will be feeling ashamed of these idiots.The same day that I was refused and the parliament passed an order that I cannot enter, they allowed a terrorist conference, an international conference in Berlin. These people are murderers. These people are doing all kinds of harassment – destroying property, hijacking airplanes, throwing bombs on innocent people. But their international conference is not a problem at all, because they fit with the politicians.I am a trouble – a single individual, with no weapons – because I don’t fit with their insane ideologies. And they are aware that if people try to understand me, they are going to leave their fold.But it is your responsibility now. You are here from all over the world. When you go back…they cannot prevent you in your own country. You have to spread the silence, the music, the beatitude of meditation, with all your heart in it, because now that seems to be the only way for me.Governments are ordering newspapers, news media, that even my name should not be mentioned. And I can see…Just the last days the international exhibition of books in Moscow ended. We received information from Lani that our meditation has been the greatest success; no stall was so overcrowded. We could not manage: we had the biggest stall, but an average of one hundred people were continuously there the whole day, thousands came and went – and other stalls were empty. But the newspapers have reported about all the stalls except ours: my name should not be mentioned.The government officials have come to visit all the stalls except our stall, but the opinion of the people was totally different. An old man used to come every day in the morning; because he had no money, he would sit there and read as much as he could manage until closing time. And he said to Lani – obviously asking her not to mention his name – that Russia needs Osho, not vodka!Because people don’t have private money they started stealing books, and I informed Lani to encourage them to steal! Three KGB agents were continuously present on the stall, watching carefully the people who are coming, and by the second day, even the KGB agents had become immensely polite and interested. They said, “This is a strange place. You people are allowing anybody to take anything.”I had told them, “Ignore it if you see somebody stealing because it hurts the person’s dignity. Just don’t see – let him take! Let the books reach to the people. Just tell them to read it and pass it on; that is the price!They confiscated all our tapes and videos, because first they must see what is in them. After two days they released them and thousands of people had tears in their eyes: “We have been living for seventy years in absolute darkness; we don’t know what is happening outside.”When Lani comes she is going to bring many beautiful stories. Even the president of the exhibition took her aside and asked her, looking at my beard and my pictures, “Is this man something like Leo Tolstoy in India? We have never heard about him.”The whole country has been kept under such concentration camp conditions that they don’t know what has happened in the world since 1917, and now it is 1987…seventy years. Russia has lived in darkness – utter darkness. Whatever the government wants them to know, they know.It is now your responsibility, because they will not allow me anyway. And what they call their tradition, their religion, their ideology, is so hilarious….Just a few months before I had been thrown out, deported from Greece, without being given any reason. They just told the Greek sannyasins, “The archbishop of the Greek orthodox church does not want him in the country, because he can destroy young people’s minds. We cannot help. He has to leave, although his visa is still valid for fifteen days, and we don’t have any legal right to cancel it unless he has committed some murder or some heinous crime. He has not even come out of the room….”And just a few days before, one archbishop of the same orthodox church of Greece had been caught on the airport of Paris, hiding heroin in his religious paraphernalia – a large amount of heroin. This is their religion…!The pope runs a bank in the Vatican. The Vatican is an independent sovereign state – although it is only eight square miles – and the Italian government has issued a warrant against the manager of the bank, because the bank is doing only one thing: it is turning all Italian Mafia money into white money. That is its only source of income. Otherwise from where…?The pope goes on getting the money and wasting it. Now he is going for a tour to America; estimated expenses will be twenty million dollars. When he went to Australia his expenses were more than Queen Elizabeth, who had visited just before him. All this money is heroin money.Now rather than allowing the Italian government to arrest the man…they cannot enter into another country; they have to wait for whenever the manager comes out. The manager was only a bishop, but the pope has raised him into an archbishop, because he has been doing such good work!These people have to be fought by you.You have to take my heart with you.You are not to be a missionary.You have to be a message.We don’t convert anybody. We simply want everybody to be himself, and we want to destroy all life-negative attitudes imposed on man, so all chains fall down – and the dance will come on its own.I preach life, I preach love. I preach music, I preach silence. To me these are the constituents of an authentic religiousness. All else is simply bullshit, holy bullshit!Just to listen to your laughter…!A magician performed brilliantly in the saloon of an ocean liner. On this ship there was a parrot who hated the magician. Every time the magician did a trick, the parrot would scream: “Phony, phony, take him away!”One day the ship sank and both the parrot and the magician ended up on a life raft together. The first day passed; they said nothing. Two days passed; still they said nothing.Finally the parrot could bear it no longer. He glared suspiciously at the magician and squawked: “Okay, wise guy, you and your tricks…what did you do with the ship?”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,It is now becoming too much. The gossips are going right and left. Even I have started suspecting whether I am old or just a woman. Please say some words of comfort.Devageet, it is true; now it is becoming too much. I have just seen you five minutes ago: neither are you old nor are you a woman. But gossips can affect…. If everybody is talking about it, even if it is a lie, it starts looking like a truth. So obviously you need some words of comfort.First: a gossip is a gossip. It is not even a yawn, because:…A yawn is at least an honest opinion. And if you start listening to all these gossips, there is a great danger.…We can easily forget ourselves when no one knows who we are – and you are included in those who do not know. In fact, whatever you think you are is nothing but a collective gossip called your personality. Because everyone agrees upon it, it becomes a truth.Adolf Hitler based his whole philosophy on this simple maxim, that a lie repeated often is truth, and a truth not repeated often is forgotten. And the trouble is, the lie is going to be repeated often because it is consoling; it hurts nobody. It is at the cost of others, it costs you nothing. And truth is not even mentioned; it is one of the most unmentionable things in the world for the simple reason that it will disturb too many people.It is not coincidence that many mystics became silent and remained silent – because there were only two alternatives: either to say the truth and be crucified, or to tell a lie, which is consoling, comfortable, respectable. Certainly a mystic does not bother about respectability – who cares to be respected by people who are absolutely unconscious and asleep? What they think is their problem.But the trouble is, if we are also asleep, then who knows? – they may be right. Because we don’t know what we are, who we are, we are nothing but the public opinion…and then gossip becomes a very significant factor. The only way to get rid of it is to know yourself on your own. Then you are neither old nor young, neither man nor woman. You are simply a pure consciousness which has no age because it is eternal. And it has no genital differences; a woman does not have a different consciousness from a man.At the height of consciousness all duality disappears.So the best thing that I can say to you is, Discover yourself; otherwise you have to depend on other people’s opinions who don’t know themselves.And you want a few words of comfort….In Germany there is a proverb: Many a good tune is played on an old violin. So don’t be worried; just being old is not a condemnation. Many a good tune is played on an old violin. And there are things which become more precious as they become old. Just like wine or holy scriptures, they become holier as they become older.You just wait. These gossipers are going to run to the logical conclusion. Soon they will say, “Devageet is ancient.” But it may be that not many people are gossiping about you, just the few – and mind has a tendency to exaggerate, to make everything big.…Just because you are paranoid, it does not mean that you are not being followed. I am not saying that.I am not saying that nobody is gossiping, but the number may not be so great. Because everybody is so concerned with himself, nobody has time for anybody else – except people like me, who have nothing to do in the world.From my very childhood my father used to remind me again and again, “Stop the way you are behaving, stop the way you are growing, because in the end you will become good for nothing.” And he was right: I have become good for nothing.I don’t have a single thing to do in the world. And because I am not going to live in this world forever, why should I care? Sitting in a waiting room in an airport, who cares what people think about you? You should keep your ears alert when your airplane is leaving. All these idiots will be left behind.And as far as the question of being a woman is concerned, Socrates has tremendously solacing words for you – and Socrates is a man of tremendous experience as far as women are concerned. He had the worst woman in the whole history of man. Her name was also as terrible as she was: Xanthippe.Socrates says, “Once made equal to man, woman becomes immediately superior.” Not to let her become superior, there is only one way: to keep her down, inferior. Equality is not possible at all; the moment the woman becomes equal, she is already superior. The reality is that even in her being inferior, she knows perfectly who is superior.In a small school a teacher asked the little kids, “Do you know of any animal who when he goes out of the house he goes like a lion, and when he comes back into the house he comes like a mouse?”Little Ernie raised his hand. He was the last person to do something like that. The teacher said, “Good, Ernie. Do you know the animal?”He said, “I know perfectly. He is my dad. When he goes out, then you see he looks like a lion, and when he comes in, then you see he looks like a mouse.”Every child knows it.I have come across a tremendous statement:…Man will be the last thing civilized by a woman.The woman goes on civilizing from childhood; she tries to civilize the children, then she tries to civilize the husband, and this goes on. But man will be the last thing; he is almost impossible. Civilization does not suit his taste.In case you are worried about what is going to become of you, you are going to become old and almost a woman. But I am saying, almost a woman…. So never worry about the future, it is certain. You are going to become old, and you are going to become almost like a woman: suspicious, jealous, irritable, annoyed for no reason at all.Even the most beautiful woman turns out to be terrible – terrific! It is a miracle of nature. Just keep away! From the distance the woman looks divine, and as you come closer and open your eyes, you say, “My god, here is the devil!”…Women are dressed but very few are clothed.The case with men is just the opposite: men are clothed, but very rarely dressed. Simple differences, but of great psychological importance.Devageet, there is nothing to be worried about, because love is as blind in old age as ever, but the neighbors are never blind – so beware of the neighbors. Old age cannot disturb your blind love.You have asked for some consoling advice…but:…A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.…Advice is the only thing everybody gives and nobody takes.In old age, Devageet, the past always looks better than it was. It is only pleasant because it is not there now; that is the beauty of old age. Youth looks golden; childhood looks almost diamond. Everything that is no longer there becomes a long history of beautiful experiences. When you were a child, you never enjoyed it. Every child wants to grow up as soon and as quickly as possible, because he can see that people who are grown up are powerful, are capable of doing anything they want to do, have all the money. Naturally every child wants to grow up faster. No child enjoys his childhood.If a child can enjoy his childhood, he will be able to enjoy his youth and he will be able to enjoy his old age, and he will be able finally to enjoy even his death. Everything begins from the beginning.But I have never come across a child who enjoys it. He is waiting for youth to come, when he will enjoy. And youth is a time of great turmoil: up and down…it is troublesome, no rest. Either chasing or being chased; either fighting or just preparing for fight…you cannot even sit silently.Mulla Nasruddin was asking me, just as Devageet is asking, “What to do? The moment I utter any single word, my wife just grabs me and the fight starts.”So I said, “Why don’t you sit silently? Why do you start even a single word?”He said, “I have tried that. She grabbed that too, she immediately said, ‘Why are you sitting silently? What is the meaning of it? Are you trying to ignore me? I am here and you are sitting silent.’”I said, “Then it is very difficult. You can only do two things: either you can be silent or you can speak. Then do one thing: agree with your wife – just to avoid confrontation, whatever she says, agree.”He said, “Osho, you are unmarried, you don’t know. The moment you agree with a woman she changes the subject. And if you go on agreeing with her, bankruptcy is not far away.”…When a man gets up to speak, people listen, then look. When a woman gets up, people look. Then, if they like what they see, they listen.It is impossible to create an equality between men and women. The whole women’s liberation movement is an utter absurdity. It is a futile exercise which is not going to lead anywhere for the simple reason that they are unique, they are not equal. Nobody is superior; nobody is inferior. They are just two different species accidentally living together: they speak different languages, they belong to different kinds of minds. I have never seen a man and a woman having a nice conversation – never!If you want to have a nice conversation with a woman, there are a few requirements. First, she must not be your wife. Secondly, she must be the wife of your neighbor. And thirdly, the conversation cannot be too long – just a few minutes is perfectly good. The longer you stay together, the more difficult it becomes to have a nice conversation.Women know only nice conflicts. In their own way they are warriors. They fight with different kinds of weapons; their strategy is different; their diplomacy is different. And man is always at a loss what to do, because he cannot understand the diplomacy.Homosexuals all over the world are called gay people – not without any reason, but because they understand each other, they are both happy, have nice conversations. In fact there is nothing else to do than have nice conversations. They enjoy each other’s company – same mind, same species, same language.It happened in the second world war….For five years Adolf Hitler went on winning for the very strange reason that he never listened to his generals. He had brought astrologers from Tibet, and they decided the whole strategy of his war fronts. The generals were beating their heads, “These idiots don’t know anything about military science, and stars are no more interested in who wins or who is defeated.”But they themselves were amazed because Hitler went on winning. In the beginning they were shaky, but soon they understood that perhaps they are wrong, he is right. Perhaps stars have something to do with it, because he is winning, and nothing is a greater proof of being true than winning. And you will be surprised that all the generals of different countries who were fighting against Adolf Hitler were at a loss – because whatever they expected, Hitler never did that, and what they never expected, he always did that. They were not aware that he was not functioning through military science.And all those generals knew, from this side to the other side, the same science. They knew what any general is going to do: he is going to attack the weakest point of the enemy. So naturally the enemy will gather all his forces at the weakest point…. But Hitler was not being directed by generals. And he would direct, “Attack where the enemy is the strongest. If you can defeat him there it is finished. Then everything else can be defeated very easily.” The argument was correct. He attacked the strongest points, but they had become weakest because of the military science. All the armies had been moved to the weaker points.Finally, Churchill got the idea what was happening. And then from India astrologers were taken to England and told, “Now it is a question of a war amongst the stars. You decide; it is whatever you say.” And the moment Indian astrologers started deciding, ordering the generals, that was the beginning of Adolf Hitler’s fall, because Tibetan astrology is only a by-product of Indian astrology. It knows much less than Indian astrology knows.Now it was a question between Indian astrology and Tibetan astrology, not a question between Germans and English and Americans and French. They were out of the game. The game was being played by two different kinds of astrologies. But Tibetan astrology is simply a by-product of Indian astrology, just as Tibetan religion is a by-product of Indian religion. Tibet has nothing original to it; everything is borrowed from India. So the Indian astrologers were in a higher position.Man always finds it difficult to understand women, and even the greatest poets have been writing poetry and saying that the woman is a mystery. It is not a mystery; it is a question of two different species accidentally falling together. They don’t understand each other’s diplomacy, each other’s tactics, each other’s way of understanding. The husband thinks he is continuously misunderstood; the wife thinks she is continuously misunderstood.It is a great chance for you, Devageet: you have been a man for so many years; now be a woman, so that you can know both the territories. Your experience will be far richer. And in fact, many people actually are changing their sex through plastic surgery.Just today I was informed by Anando that billions of dollars are spent in America on plastic surgery alone. Almost half a million people every year are going through plastic surgery. In the beginning the age group that used to go through plastic surgery was when a woman…and it was confined only to women. When a woman started feeling old, she used to go through plastic surgery to remain a little younger, a few days more attractive.But the recent development is that the majority of people in America who are going for plastic surgery are men, not women, because now they want to be young a little longer. Deep down they will become older, but their skin will show the tightness of a young man. And the most surprising thing in the report was that even a twenty-three year old boy has gone through plastic surgery to look younger.America is certainly the land of the lunatics. Now if a twenty-three year old boy thinks that he needs to look younger, what about Devageet?It is so ugly to go against nature.It is so beautiful to go in tune with nature and whatever gifts it brings, childhood or youth or old age. If your acceptance and your welcoming heart is ready, everything that nature brings has a beauty of its own.And according to my understanding – and the whole of the Eastern seers are behind me, in support – man becomes really beautiful and graceful at the highest point of his age, when all foolishnesses of youth are gone; when all ignorance of childhood has disappeared; when one has transcended the whole world of mundane experiences and has reached to a point where he can be a witness on the hills and the rest of the world is moving down in the dark dismal valleys, blindly groping.The idea of remaining continuously young is so ugly that the whole world should be made aware of it. By forcing yourself to be young, you simply become more tense. You will never become relaxed.And if plastic surgery is going to succeed – and it is going to become a bigger and bigger profession in the world – then you will find a strange thing happening. Everybody starts looking alike: everybody has the same size of nose, which is decided by computers; everybody has the same kind of face, the same cut. It will not be a beautiful world. It will lose all its variety; it will lose all its beautiful differences.People will become almost like machines – all alike, coming from the assembly line like Ford cars one by one. They say every minute one car comes out of the Ford factory, similar to another following it – in one hour, sixty cars…twenty-four hours it goes on. Shifts of workers go on changing, but the assembly line goes on producing the same cars.Do you want humanity also to be streamlined, assembled in a factory exactly like everybody else, that wherever you go you meet Sophia Loren? It will be very boring.…The way to fight a woman, Devageet, is with your head: grab it and run.…All would like to live long, but none would like to be old.Why? – because of the next stage. Nobody is really afraid of old age, but after old age is death and nothing else. So everybody would like to live as long as possible, but never to become old, because to become old means you have entered into the area of death. Deep down the fear of becoming old is a fear of death. And only those who don’t know how to live are afraid of death.Devageet, don’t be afraid of anything. You have been with me…one of the most beautiful persons with a great sense of humor. I have loved Devageet so much that just to be with him I have allowed him to drill all my teeth.I am rare in many ways – I have told you. One of our sannyasins from England has just come, because my arm was hurting very much, and he is an expert. And his finding was that something, not exactly in the arm but somewhere else, is causing the trouble. So he asked me about my teeth.I said, “About my teeth you meet Devageet.” And when Devageet told him that I have gone through eight root canals, he freaked out! He said, “I have never seen a man with more than three root canals. Eight root canals? You have drilled all the teeth!”I had to console him, “It is not his fault; it is my fault. I love his company; it is worth having one tooth drilled. Anyway one is going to lose all the teeth. These root canals are not his responsibility, it is my responsibility.”I like his dental chair and doing nothing in comfort. He has to do everything. And I must be the most difficult patient because I talk continuously while he is drilling. So something that can be done within fifteen minutes takes two hours! He has to stop again and again to listen to me, and then the work starts again.“He is not at fault, don’t be angry with him,” I had to tell him. “He is also my sannyasin.”The English sannyasin said, “But this is too much.”I said, “Don’t be worried; it is nothing, because there are still a few teeth left.”So whenever I feel in a good mood I will call Devageet. It is not for the pain in the teeth that I call him…when I am in a good mood! Then I say, “Now, let him drill.”…Youth is a malady of which one becomes cured a little every day. Old age is the cure.You have passed through the whole fire test of life, and you have come to the point where you can be utterly detached, aloof, indifferent.But the West has never understood the beauty of old age. I can understand, but I cannot agree. In the West the idea is:…The trouble with life is that there are so many beautiful women, and so little time.That’s why nobody wants to become old, just to stretch the time a little more.But I say unto you: the trouble would be even worse if there was so much time and so few women. As it is, it is the perfect world.Devageet, a very special advice for you:…A man is known by the company he avoids.So just you figure out where you are. If you avoid women, that will be decisive; if you avoid men, that will be decisive.The old saying is:A man is known by the company he keeps. The days of that proverb are gone. Now it is the company that he avoids. This is a little more subtle, and you will have to figure it out – whom you are avoiding and why.…Women have a lot of faults. Men have only two – everything they say, and everything they do.…A man who expects comfort in this life must be born deaf, dumb and blind. Then there is no discomfort at all.And the last gossip that I have heard – and perhaps Devageet has not heard – is that Devageet’s underpants are now regarded as a noodle-free zone!Osho,When you were being so beautiful in your reply to Milarepa this morning I longed for you to say those same words to me. I felt that I can never be one of your most beautiful people.Suddenly, I caught it at work: this judging mind. I saw the face of my unconsciousness in all its ugliness, and I also realized that the part of me that was watching was shining with its own unique beauty.Unconscious, I can never be beautiful; conscious, I am a beauty unto myself.My God, Devageet! Just now I have been saying that you are the most beautiful person and you ask me again the same thing. I will not say anything, but will tell you a beautiful joke.The teacher of the six-year-olds in first grade was annoyed to find water on the floor in front of her desk, but chose to ignore it. When the same thing happened the next day, she asked the children about it, but nobody said a word.On the third day it happened again. Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, she said, “I know whoever did this must be feeling very shy about their little accident. So I have an idea! We will all close our eyes while the child who did this comes and writes his name on this piece of paper on my desk. Then we will forget all about it.”Everyone closed their eyes. After a couple of minutes a chair squeaked, footsteps were heard coming and going, and the chair squeaked again.Delighted, the teacher told everyone to open their eyes. A second puddle of water could be seen on the floor and on the paper was scrawled: “The phantom pisser strikes again!”Devageet, not only you, but anybody who has fallen in love with me is beautiful, is intelligent, is rebellious, is a hope for the future. Ugly people cannot be here with me, because ugly people are always moralists. What they are missing in beauty they try to substitute by morality.Ugly women cannot come here. They will condemn everybody, “This is not what religion should be.” Your so-called saints cannot come here for the simple reason that our fundamental approach to life is of love, is of understanding, is of not dominating anyone, and not allowing anyone to dominate you – it is a teaching in absolute freedom and individuality.Respectable people cannot come here. Just to be known that they have been here, they will lose all their respect in the outside insane asylum.Cowards cannot enter this door. Only people who have guts to stand against the whole world can be here. And these are the most beautiful products of existence.I told that one young man, Piyoosh, “You took twelve years to decide to become a sannyasin, and you took only twelve hours to start judging me, whether I am right or wrong.” I have wasted my time on such idiots for so long that I am really tired of them, and I told him to leave the ashram. And I inquired whether he has left or not. He left, but two or three other Indians approached the office….There are a few Indian sannyasins here who have become sannyasins while I was not here. They don’t know me, and they don’t understand me. They entered the ashram and became sannyasins simply for free lodging, free boarding and they have done nothing. Now they are in a trouble. Now I am here and I must be saying a thousand and one things against their prejudices. And my people have come, and will be coming more and more, and they all show their love by working, by being creative, by doing something. So the Indians are feeling inferior, because they have learned in these years while I was not here just to rest and enjoy.Now it is work, enjoy and rest – but first comes work. Work in both the senses: working in the outside, being a creative contributor to the commune, and work on yourself, because unless you are working on yourself, you are not a sannyasin.Two or three Indians of that group reached the office saying, “This is not right what Osho did, that he told that man to go away.”Now those three people have to leave tomorrow morning. I don’t want any kind of rotten apples here. They don’t understand me. But Indians think they are born spiritual, they are all born enlightened, they know everything.So tomorrow morning, remember: pack up your things, not other people’s…and the gate you know perfectly…and anybody else who wants to go with them is welcome. Here will be only people who are in absolute tune with me. And to be in tune with me will confer all beauty and grace and blissfulness on you. You will not need anything more.It is good that you leave on your own accord, because I have been inquiring who are the people who are simply trying to waste their time and other people’s time, and you don’t know any ABC of my approach. It is better they should go to their home, study my books, meditate, and if they feel that now they are ready and ripe, they will be accepted back. But they cannot be tolerated here.It is so ugly that the people who are our guests are working, and the people who belong to this country are the hosts, and they are simply dodging, trying to escape from work. That Indian habit cannot be allowed in this place. That Indian habit has been the cause of two thousand years’ slavery. And this is not an Indian commune, it is an international commune. So unless you can raise yourself to the standard of international consciousness, international creativity, international intelligence, it is better simply to leave this place. Because of you the whole of India is condemned.Every day reports come to me that Indians are not working: somebody has a headache; somebody has a stomach ache. Indians suffer from headaches for a simple reason: their spiritual halo is too tight. And they are continuously judging everybody, that they are not moral, that they are not religious – and the definitions are their own. By religion they mean you should go every day to the monkey god, Hanuman’s temple….My people are not such idiots.If Charles Darwin had come to India, he would have been immensely happy. Seeing the monkey god he would have included it as a proof that man is born of monkeys: they are still worshipping their forefathers in India! Fortunately he never came; otherwise we would have been condemned forever. But he could have found the most coherent, rational argument. Everything that he has is guesswork, but this monkey god would have proved all his guesswork. Why should people worship a monkey unless monkeys are their forefathers? Somewhere, far away in the distant past, they departed from their fathers. And naturally, they are still remembering them respectfully; that is their religion.They can’t understand that these people here are religious. They are not Hindus; they are not Christians; they are not Mohammedans. They cannot believe that nobody seems to be praying.These people are not here to pray.These are not beggars before a hypothetical God.These are people who are trying to raise their consciousness to a point where they are themselves gods. Everybody’s ultimate birthright is to be a god. Less than that means you have failed in your life.Gautam Buddha is right that he will not allow any buddha to worship another buddha. You are all potentially the highest peak that has ever been touched by humanity, and perhaps you may have a higher possibility in future. Perhaps past buddhas may become pigmies if you rise to your full height.But that is not in their minds.And because they have not been initiated by me, they have not lived these years with me, they have to do some homework. They have to try to understand what is happening here. And if they feel judgmental, if they feel condemnatory, then I am not interested in converting them. They should go to their monkey gods, to their elephant gods – they have thousands of gods. In India in all there are thirty-three million gods. So they can go anywhere…and there are hundreds of Goenkas all around.Just leave me alone with my people.This is a Noah’s Ark.Everybody is not needed here, nor have we the space for five billion people.But these people have entered into the ashram without exactly knowing me, because I was not here. And they have not even tried to understand what they have got involved in. They were simply interested in having free lodging, free boarding.When I came to India, the first thing one of my old sannyasins said was, “We are tired now. Unnecessarily we are collecting money to feed people in the ashram. The ashram is absolutely unproductive. It needs fifty, sixty thousand rupees per month just to keep those people living comfortably, feeding them enough.”I said, “You need not be worried now. When I am here my people will be coming from all over the world. Then fifty, sixty thousand rupees don’t matter at all. Then think in millions of dollars – not less than that.”I am never interested in small things. Millions of dollars will be coming – they have started coming. Millions of people will be coming, and those who want to be here have to remember it: this is not a free house. In India that is the idea, that in an ashram people should be given food free, shelter free, and beads, so they can sit silently and repeat the name of Rama to save the whole world. We don’t want any kind of nonsense here.Our work is our prayer.Our meditation is our religion.Our declaration of freedom is our fundamental manifesto. We don’t belong to any nation and we don’t belong to any religion. We belong to the whole existence. That’s why I say I am not interested in small things.Just the other day I was informed that in Delhi the government is worried that we are going to take over Koregaon Park. In America they were worried we were going to take over Oregon, Wasco County. I am not interested in taking small things…Koregaon Park! – if I was interested to take over I would have taken over the whole world. I am not interested in taking over. But political idiots are a very special kind of idiots: India has so many problems…but their only problem is Koregaon Park.The day I came here, within two hours I was given a notice that I should leave immediately: I cannot stay here because my stay here is, “dangerous for the peace of the city.” Now I have been here almost one year. Now that police commissioner should come and apologize. What peace has been disturbed by me? But they don’t even have shame. He should at least get transferred from here, seeing that what he did was absolutely under pressure of the government.I have been here before – we have never disturbed the peace. We are not interested at all what goes on in Pune. We are interested in a spiritual experiment on ourselves. And just because I refused to move unless they show me the cause, and unless they prove that before….I have lived here six, seven years – have there been any reports against me that I have disturbed the peace? I don’t even go into this dirty town!In the seven years before, I had only gone into the town three times, because three sannyasins have been in the hospital and dying. And this time I have gone only once, because my arm was in trouble. Otherwise, who cares?We are enough unto ourselves.We are an island in this world.But the next day the corporation passed a resolution – because they were afraid that now we will make Buddha Hall again – that no building can be longer than one hundred feet. Now, in the whole of Koregaon Park there is no building which is one hundred feet long, except this Buddha Hall. Anybody of a little intelligence can understand who they are preventing by passing a law in the corporation. What will a residential place like Koregaon Park do with a one-hundred-foot-long hall? This ashram needs not only a one-hundred-foot-long hall, we are going to make two halls. This hall will be there, and we are going to make another hall of the same size as in the commune in America, where twenty thousand people can sit. And I will see who can prevent it.We don’t want to create any trouble for anybody, but we don’t want anybody to interfere with us! There must be informers of the police here now. They should take the information back!Devageet, the last joke for your consolation:A man woke up one morning and saw that his male member was covered in purple stripes. He rushed to see his doctor who told him that immediate amputation was vital.The distracted man rushed out of the door muttering that he wanted another opinion. The second doctor took one look at the candy-striped organ and told the man the same thing, It has to be amputated.”The poor man, not knowing what to do, went to seek the advice of a Chinese master of healing. The wrinkled old man said, “No need for surgery. In two weeks the problem will be solved.”The man said, “You mean I will be cured?”“No,” said the Chinese sage. “It will drop off by itself.”So don’t be worried about all these gossips; they will drop off by themselves. You just remain silent, watching, enjoying. If people feel you are getting disturbed, then more and more gossips will come to your door. Don’t be disturbed. On the contrary, enjoy and ask people, “Have you any gossip against me?”Collect all the gossips, and it will become a beautiful collection – far more beautiful than the gospel in The Bible.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You have not been coming for so long that now the gossip has changed about me: that I am no more old, I am really ancient. What should I do now?Devageet, all these days that I have not been coming, I have been watching. An ancient tree, just by the side of my house, has been dancing in the rain, and its old leaves are falling with such grace and such beauty. Not only is the tree dancing in the rain and the wind, the old leaves leaving the tree are also dancing; there is celebration.Except man, in the whole existence nobody suffers from old age; in fact, existence knows nothing about old age. It knows about ripening; it knows about maturing. It knows that there is a time to dance, to live as intensely and as totally as possible, and there is a time to rest.Those old leaves of the almond tree by the side of my house are not dying; they are simply going to rest, melting and merging into the same earth from which they have arisen. There is no sadness, no mourning, but an immense peace in falling to rest into eternity. Perhaps another day, another time they may be back again, in some other form, on some other tree. They will dance again; they will sing again; they will rejoice the moment.Existence knows only a circular change from birth to death, from death to birth, and it is an eternal process. Every birth implies death and every death implies birth. Every birth is preceded by a death and every death is succeeded by a birth. Hence existence is not afraid. There is no fear anywhere except in the mind of man.Man seems to be the only sick species in the whole cosmos. Where is this sickness? It should really have been otherwise…man should have enjoyed more, loved more, lived more each moment. Whether it is of childhood or of youth or of old age, whether it is of birth or of death, it does not matter at all. You are transcendental to all these small episodes.Thousands of births have happened to you, and thousands of deaths. And those who can see clearly can understand it even more deeply, as if it is happening every moment. Something in you dies every moment and something in you is born anew. Life and death are not so separate, not separated by seventy years.Life and death are just like two wings of a bird, simultaneously happening. Neither can life exist without death, nor can death exist without life. Obviously they are not opposites; obviously they are complementaries. They need each other for their existence; they are interdependent. They are part of one cosmic whole.But because man is so unaware, so asleep, he is incapable of seeing a simple and obvious fact. Just a little awareness, not much, and you can see you are changing every moment. And change means something is dying – something is being reborn. Then birth and death become one; then childhood and its innocence become one with old age and its innocence.There is a difference, yet there is no opposition. The child’s innocence is really poor, because it is almost synonymous with ignorance. The old man, ripe in age, who has passed through all the experiences of darkness and light, of love and hate, of joy and misery, who has been matured through life in different situations, has come to a point where he is no more a participant in any experience. Misery comes…he watches. Happiness comes and he watches. He has become a watcher on the hill. Everything passes down in the dark valleys, but he remains on the sunlit peak of the mountain, simply watching in utter silence.The innocence of old age is rich. It is rich from experience; it is rich from failures, from successes; it is rich from right actions, from wrong actions; it is rich from all the failures, from all the successes; it is rich multidimensionally. Its innocence cannot be synonymous with ignorance. Its innocence can only be synonymous with wisdom.Both are innocent, the child and the old man. But their innocences have a qualitative change, a qualitative difference. The child is innocent because he has not entered yet into the dark night of the soul; the old man is innocent – he has come out of the tunnel. One is entering into the tunnel; the other is getting out of the tunnel. One is going to suffer much; one has already suffered enough. One cannot avoid the hell that is ahead of him; the other has left the hell behind him.Devageet, your question is the question of almost every human being. Knowingly or unknowingly, there is a trembling in the heart that you are becoming old, that after old age the deluge – after old age, death. And for centuries you have been made so much afraid of death that the very idea has become deep-rooted in your unconscious; it has gone deep in your blood, in your bones, in your marrow. The very word frightens you – not that you know what death is, but just because of thousands of years of conditioning that death is the end of your life, you are afraid.I want you to be absolutely aware that death is not the end. In existence, nothing begins and nothing ends. Just look all around…the evening is not the end, nor is the morning the beginning. The morning is moving towards the evening and the evening is moving towards the morning. Everything is simply moving into different forms.There is no beginning and there is no end.Why should it be otherwise with man? – man is not an exception. In this idea of being exceptional, in being more special than the other animals and the trees and the birds, man has created his own hell, his paranoia. The idea that we are exceptional beings, we are human beings, has created a rift between you and existence. That rift causes all your fears and your misery, causes unnecessary anguish and angst in you.And all your so-called leaders, whether religious or political or social, have emphasized the rift; they have widened it. There has not been a single effort in the whole history of man to bridge the rift, to bring man back to the earth, to bring man back with the animals and with the birds and with the trees, and to declare an absolute unity with existence.That is the truth of our being. Once it is understood, you are neither worried about old age nor worried about death, because looking around you, you can be absolutely satisfied that nothing ever begins, it has been always there; nothing ever ends, it will remain always there.The idea of being old fills you with great anxiety. It means now your days of life, of love, of rejoicings are over, that now you will exist only in name. It will not be a rejoicing, but only a dragging towards the grave. Obviously you cannot enjoy the idea that you are just a burden in existence, just standing in a queue which is moving every moment towards the graveyard.It is one of the greatest failures of all cultures and all civilizations in the world that they have not been able to provide a meaningful life, a creative existence for their old; that they have not been able to provide a subtle beauty and grace, not only to old age, but to death itself.And the problem becomes more complicated because the more you are afraid of death, the more you will be afraid of life too. Each moment lived, death comes closer…. A man who is afraid of death cannot be in love with life, because it is life finally that takes you to the doors of death. How can you love life? It was for this reason that all the religions started renouncing life: renounce life because that is the only way to renounce death. If you don’t live life, if you are already finished with the job of living, loving, dancing, singing, then naturally you need not be afraid of death; you have died already.We have called these dead people saints; we have worshipped them. We have worshipped them because we knew we would also like to be like them, although we don’t have that much courage. At least we can worship and show our intentions. If we had courage or one day if we gather courage, we would also like to live like you: utterly dead. The saint cannot die because he has already died. He has renounced all the pleasures, all the joys; all that life offers he has rejected. He has returned the ticket to existence saying, “I am no more part of the show.” He has closed his eyes.It happened once that a so-called saint was visiting me. I took him into the garden – there were so many beautiful dahlias, and I showed him those beautiful flowers in the morning sun. He looked very strangely at me, a little annoyed, irritated, and he could not resist the temptation to condemn me, saying, “I thought you were a religious person…and you are still enjoying the beauty of the flowers?”On one point he is right, that if you are enjoying the beauty of the flowers, you cannot avoid enjoying the beauty of human beings; you cannot avoid enjoying the beauty of women; you cannot avoid enjoying the beauty of music and dance. If you are interested in the beauty of the flowers, you have shown that you are still interested in life, that you cannot yet renounce love. If you are aware of beauty, how can you avoid love?Beauty provokes love; love imparts beauty.I said, “On this point you are right, but on the second point you are wrong. Who ever told you that I am a religious person? I am not yet dead! – to be religious the basic requirement is to be dead. If you are alive you can only be a hypocrite, you cannot be really religious.”When you will see a bird on the wing, it is impossible not to rejoice in its freedom. And when you will see the sunset with all the colors spread on the horizon – even if you close your eyes, your very effort of closing the eyes will show your interest. You have been overwhelmed by the beauty of it.Life is another name of love.And love is nothing but being sensitive to beauty.I said to that so-called saint, “I can renounce religion but I cannot renounce life, because life has been given to me by existence itself, and religion is just man-made, manufactured by the priests and the politicians; manufactured to deprive man of his joy, to deprive man of his dignity, to deprive man of his humanity itself.“I am not a religious person in your sense. I have a totally different definition of being religious. To me the religious person is one who is totally alive, intensely alive, aflame with love, aware of tremendous beauty all around; has the courage to rejoice each moment of life and death together. Only a man who is so capable of rejoicing in life and death – his song continues. It does not matter whether life is happening or death is happening, his song is not disturbed, his dance does not waver?”Only such an adventurous soul, only such a pilgrim of existence is religious. But in the name of religion man has been given poor substitutes, false, phony, meaningless, just toys to play with. Worshipping statues, chanting man-made mantras, paying tributes to those who have been cowards and escapists and who were not able to live life because they were so afraid of death, and calling them saints, religion has distracted man from true and authentic religiousness.Devageet, you need not be worried about old age. And it is even more beautiful that people have starting thinking about you as ancient. That means you have attained to the real transcendence, you have lived everything. Now it is your maturity. You have not renounced anything, but you have simply passed through every experience. You have grown so experienced that now you need not repeat those experiences again and again. This is transcendence.You should rejoice, and I would like the whole world to understand the rejoicing that is our birthright in accepting with deep gratitude the old age and the final consummation of old age into death.If you are not graceful about it, if you cannot laugh at it, if you cannot disappear into the eternal leaving a laughter behind, you have not lived rightly. You have been dominated and directed by wrong people. They may have been your prophets, your messiahs, your saviors, your tirthankaras; they may have been your incarnations of gods, but they have all been criminals in the sense that they have deprived you of life and they have filled your hearts with fear.My effort here is to fill your heart with laughter. Your every fiber of being should love to dance in every situation, whether it is day or night, whether you are down or up. Irrespective of the situation, an undercurrent of cheerfulness should continue. That is authentic religiousness to me.A few sutras for you, Devageet……An ancient man is one who wears his glasses in bed so he can get a better look at the girls he dreams about.…An ancient man is one who only flirts with young girls at parties so his wife will take him home.…The beauty of being ancient is that since you are too old to set a bad example, you can start giving good advice.Only a really old man, well-versed in the wisdom of life, can say: …Puppy love is lots of fun but few men realize it is the beginning of a dog’s life.…Women like the simple things in life – for example, the old men. Once the women start liking you, it means you are finished. They are no longer afraid of you; you are perfectly acceptable.Women have their own reasons, although:…Women’s reason is like eternity: it passeth all understanding.Devageet, if you have really become old, then you are in a wrong place. The right place for you will only be a Catholic monastery, because:…A Catholic monastery is a home for unmarried fathers.Devageet, if you are really old:…Start loving your enemies; it makes them so angry.…An old married man’s best friend is his wife’s husband.Get it?…No. I have to give you some explanation.A man was sitting with his best friend and told him, “My wife has escaped with my best friend.”The friend said, “What are you talking about? I’m your best friend.”The man said, “No, no more.”…For ancient ones there is a new thing in the world to do; its name is punk yoga. Punk yoga is where you stand on someone else’s head.…Inside every older person there is a younger person wondering what happened.And remember, Devageet:…If you are not going all the way, why go at all? And don’t be worried at all about your old age, your ancientness. At least as far as enlightenment is concerned, it does not care how you get there: young, old, ancient; man, woman, all are accepted without any exception, because the ultimate experience is welcoming everybody from every direction. One need not be concerned about these small matters; moreover, they are not facts. You are simply getting paranoid about gossips.Naturally, here there are so many beautiful people, gossips are bound to happen. And what else will meditators do? – you cannot meditate for twenty-four hours. Just to relax, just for a change…the best relaxation for a meditator is gossip. It hurts nobody and it gives you free entertainment.The truck driver pulled into the truck stop, went inside, and ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. Sitting next to him was a member of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, who looked at him and said, “Hey man, I don’t like you sitting next to me. Move over!”The truck driver did not say a word, so the Hell’s Angel reached over and put his cigarette out in the driver’s coffee. But still the truck driver was silent and continued eating his cake. When he had finished he got up, paid his bill and left.When he had gone, the Hell’s Angel said to the waiter, “Man, that guy was a pushover. Did you see what a coward he was?”“Yes,” said the waiter, looking out of the window, “a real coward. And a terrible driver too. He just drove over some poor guy’s motorcycle.”The English couple had not made love for years. The wife was very suspicious: What is the matter? Is he having an affair with somebody? The lady was surprised to see the maid very happy that day, wearing a beautiful new dress and preparing her bedroom as if she was expecting someone to come in the night.So that evening she sent the maid to her mother’s for the night and then climbed into the maid’s bed herself and switched off the light. Soon a shadowy figure climbed in through the window, slipped into bed and made passionate love to the lady.When he had finished she felt satisfied like never before, but still wanting revenge she snapped on the bedside light. “I will bet you are surprised to see me,” she said triumphantly.“I sure am,” said the chauffeur.It is perfectly okay for meditators – they are involved in such a serious research – to relax once in a while, gossip, joke, laugh. It is not contrary to their meditations; it is immensely helpful. It takes away your seriousness, it gives you back your innocence, simplicity, relaxedness. It helps you to go back into the deeper realms of meditations.Osho,How did you know when you said the question was from an Indian?It is very simple. The question does not arise out of the blue; the question arises in the heart of the questioner.The question says so much about the questioner that if you don’t start immediately figuring out the answer…which is done all over the world; people start searching in their memory for the answer.I don’t have any ready-made answers. When I listen to your question, I have to go deeper into the question to find you first, because unless I know the questioner, I cannot respond. I am not a holy book; I am a living being. I am not a computer that you ask the question and the answer comes irrespective of who is asking the question.I can answer you, not your question. Your question is secondary. So when I hear your question, my first search is for the person who has asked it. Without knowing the person who has asked it my answer is going to be irrelevant. It will answer the question, but it will not answer the questioner, who is the real problem.I have to go to the very roots. And it is not very difficult to know whether the question has come from a German or from a Jew or from an Indian or from an American; whether the question has come from a Jaina or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian. It is very simple because the question contains the questioner. It has come with all the colors and all the conditionings of the questioner contained in it. It is absolutely indicative about the personality.You are wondering, “How did you know when you said the question was from an Indian?” That kind of question cannot be asked by anyone else.I will give you a few examples. For example, if somebody asks, “What is ‘nigodh’?” that question can come only from someone who belongs to Jainism, because even the word nigodh will not be known to anybody else. It is part of the Jaina philosophy and it is not part of any other philosophy in the world. In fact nothing parallel to it exists anywhere. It is almost impossible to translate the word nigodh into any other language because no parallel words exist. The idea has never existed anywhere else; hence, there cannot be any word for it. I will have to explain to you what nigodh is.For Jainism it has been a problem, but for no other religion, because Jainism does not believe in God the creator. Then the problem arises: from where do souls go on coming? The population goes on increasing…in Mahavira’s time the population of India was only two million; today it is nine hundred million. If there is nobody manufacturing souls, from where do these souls go on coming? God is out of the question.Other religions can answer, “God goes on creating…” Jainism cannot answer it that way, because there is no God in its philosophical framework and there is no creation; hence, it has to create another hypothesis like God. That hypothesis is nigodh. Nigodh means there is an infinite number of souls dormant in existence. Out of that immense, infinite number of sleeping souls a few go on waking up. That is from where people continuously go on coming, and they will go on coming. And the source of their coming is inexhaustible. The name of that source is nigodh.If somebody asks a question about nigodh, I can easily know the question can come only from a follower of Mahavira. It cannot come from anybody else – the followers of Moses may not even have heard the word.Nigodh does not explain anything; it is as stupid as the idea of God. This is something to be understood, because you will come across such things again and again. Jainas refuse the hypothesis of God because it does not answer the question. The question is: Who created the existence? – because without creating, how can the existence come into being?All the religions have agreed on the hypothesis of a God as the creator except Jainism, because they say that if we accept God as the creator, then the question again comes up: Who created God? God cannot be the answer, because the question still remains relevant: Who created God? And if you say that God is not created by anyone – he is self-sufficient, he is eternal, not created by anyone else – then Jainism laughs and says that if God can be without any creator, why cannot the whole existence be without any creator? What is the problem? Why unnecessarily create a hypothesis? And on that point they are right.This is the scientific approach. Never accept any unnecessary hypothesis unless it explains something. Why go on burdening yourself with hypotheses?So Jainism rejected the idea of God because it does not answer the question. Then they were in the same trouble. People started asking, “From where do the new souls go on coming?” The doors of God were closed; they had to find a new hypothesis, but it is as stupid as the hypothesis of God. That’s the beauty – that nobody sees his own stupidity, but everybody is capable of seeing the stupidity of anybody else. Jainism says, “Souls go on coming from a dormant, infinite source, where billions and billions of souls are asleep. As they go on waking up they start moving, finding wombs.”But no Jaina thinker asks, “Who created this nigodh? From where came this infinite source of sleeping souls?” It raises as many questions as Jainism raises about God, but it never raises questions about nigodh…from where did it come?Secondly, if these souls are asleep, were they awake before or have they always been asleep from eternity? If they were awake before, then it is very dangerous, because those who are awake can fall asleep and get into nigodh, for infinity. Nobody knows whether they will be awake again or not.If you say that they have always been asleep from the very beginning, then what made them asleep? People need sleep when they have worked hard in the day; they are tired, and they go to sleep. Eternal sleep…Even to sleep twenty-four hours is very difficult – after six, eight hours you start thinking about tea or coffee or some breakfast. These people have not taken even breakfast for infinity, and you still call them alive?Even more important, the question arises: Why have a few of them suddenly become awake? What happens? Some mosquitoes disturb their sleep? Because millions of others are fast asleep, and suddenly one becomes awake – you have to provide some reason why particularly this person and not somebody else. You cannot say that he was having a nightmare. He has never been awake, he knows nothing, he cannot dream. For dreaming you need some experiences of waking. About what will these people be dreaming?People dream about things because those are the things they have missed when they were awake. People dream of beautiful women because when they are awake they have only their wife. It is the wife which is the cause of many saints: they renounce the world, because without renouncing the world they could not renounce the wife! The poor fellows had to renounce everything, just to escape from the wife.Perhaps the proverb is true, that every great man has a wife behind him. Because she goes on nagging and harassing him and finding no other way he goes on succeeding, becoming richer, climbing ladders. The wife goes on hitting: “Go on!”…she never allows any rest for the poor fellow.What can they dream about? They have never been hungry, they have never eaten anything; they cannot dream about ice cream. And certainly they cannot have nightmares which can awaken them.Aesop has a beautiful parable:A cat is sitting on a tree, giggling and smiling. And a dog looks up and asks, “What is the matter, you idiot?”And the cat says, “I was just having a beautiful afternoon nap and I dreamed that it is raining, very fast, strong rain, and the most amazing part is, it is not water that is raining, it is mice.”The dog was very angry. He said, “You idiot. You will never grow out of your retardedness. In my holy scriptures there are instances when it has rained, but it has rained always cats, never rats!”Obviously, a cat cannot think the way a dog can think, and they cannot agree. But if somebody is seeing rats and mice raining you can know that the person who is seeing the dream is a cat. There is not much logic involved in it.An Indian went to Singapore to buy a video. He went into a shop and asked, “What is the price of this video near the window?”The seller answered, “Sorry sir, we don’t sell to Indians.”The Indian went back to his hotel and dressed in his best clothes. Back at the shop, again he asked, “What is the price of this video near the window?”To his dismay, the seller replied, “Sorry sir, we don’t sell to Indians.”The Indian went back to his hotel and dressed in Western-style clothes – shorts, T-shirt, sunglasses. Returning again to the shop, the Indian was most upset to receive the same answer to his inquiry. In exasperation he asked, “How do you know that I’m an Indian?”“Oh,” said the seller, “that’s easy. The machine near the window is not a video, it is a washing machine.”Paddy was convinced he was a cannibal. His wife finally persuaded him to visit a psychiatrist.When Paddy returned home after his first visit, his wife asked, “So tell me, what is a fancy psychiatrist like?”“Delicious,” beamed Paddy.If the man thinks himself to be a cannibal, then you can expect the answer that he has given.You can expect the question, you can expect the answer. And from the question or from the answer, from both the sides, you can find out whose is the mind, of what kind of conditioning.The Indian always asks questions about his repressed sexuality – not directly that he is suffering from repressed sexuality, but in a very indirect way. He does not even think that in his question he is showing himself. He asks questions about other people who are not completely dressed; other people who are hugging each other in public; other people who are holding the hands of their girlfriends. He never thinks that all these questions show only one thing, that he is sexually repressed. These are not questions about other people; these are questions about his own unconscious.Now, no American will ask that question. That is absolutely out of the question. People ask about things which they are missing.Just a few days ago a therapist inquired of me, “I am at a loss, because so many Japanese sannyasins are coming to the groups, and it is absolutely impossible to work with them. And the impossibility is that psychoanalysis and other sister systems of therapies have been evolved in the West. They are not applicable to the Far Eastern people. These people have a different conditioning, centuries old.”The therapist became afraid because Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis says that every child, if the child is a boy, wants to make love to his mother. And because the father goes on making love to his mother and he is not allowed, he hates the father. He is jealous of the father; he thinks and dreams of killing him. If the baby is a girl she wants to make love to her father, and obviously the mother is the enemy, because the mother goes on making love to the father and the girl is never allowed – not even allowed to think about it.Sigmund Freud was very much condemned for his ideas, but there is some truth in them. And after a struggle of one century, slowly, slowly Western society has accepted the idea. Now there is no resistance against it. If you say to someone that you hate your father, that you wanted to make love to your mother, he will accept it.But if you say that to a Japanese, either he will kill himself or he will kill you – those are the only two alternatives. He will immediately challenge you to a fight because it is absolutely inconceivable to a Japanese that he has even dreamt of making love to his mother or he was jealous of his father; that he was antagonistic and hated his father, that he wanted to kill his father. Because the Japanese conditioning is that the very idea, even the idea of being disrespectful to your father is enough to feel so ashamed that you don’t have any worth even to live a single moment more. Hara-kiri, suicide is the only way.In Japan millions of people down the ages have committed suicide over such small matters that you cannot conceive. Rarely, once in a while, somebody commits suicide, but you can see that he has reasons: his business went bankrupt, his wife eloped, he was the richest man and now he has to live like a beggar on the street. It is so against his ego that he would rather kill himself.But hara-kiri, suicide in Japan is inconceivable to anybody else in the whole world. You misbehaved, you were disrespectful towards your father; when it was expected of you to bow down to your father you did not. That’s enough. Now if you have any dignity, you should commit hara-kiri – nothing less than that!So the therapists are in a difficulty because those poor fellows are talking whatever they have learned from Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler. And they think they are talking very sensible things, but to the Japanese…He immediately stands up saying, “Take your words back! What do you think of me?…I wanted to make love to my mother? I will kill myself, even if the idea happens to me. Even if I dream it in the night, in the morning I will finish myself. What nonsense are you talking?” Now the therapist does not know what to do.In the beginning, when Japanese sannyasins started to come, I was at a loss, because they have a different symbology, different gestures, different from anybody else in the world. Everywhere nodding your head up and down means yes. In Japan it means no. Nodding your head side to side everywhere in the world means no. In Japan it means yes.So when I used to ask, I was at a loss. The person has come to be initiated into sannyas, and when I asked him, “Have you really thought about it? Do you really want to take sannyas?” he would say no. He was saying yes – I was thinking he was saying no. He looked amazed – I looked amazed. Finally, I had to make one Japanese sannyasin sit near me. I said, “You translate all these strange gestures because I cannot figure them out.”Conditions all over the world are different.Your question comes from your conditionings.If somebody has a clarity and transparency of eyes, he can see from where the question has arisen. It is not difficult to know that the question is from an Indian.The Indian court was in session and the attractive blond took the stand. As the prosecuting attorney approached the girl he coughed nervously, and while fixing his tie asked, “Where were you on the night before last?”“I was with a gentleman friend,” she answered, looking down shyly.“And where were you last night?” continued the attorney.“I was with another gentleman friend,” she answered coyly.Then, his voice very gentle and low, he asked, “Where are you going tonight?”The defense attorney jumped to his feet and shouted, “Objection! I asked her first.”It is not difficult to know that you are in an Indian court where everybody is sexually starved.Questions coming out of sexual starvation will indicate the religious conditioning against life. And India has suffered most; it has the deepest conditioning against life, that’s why it also has the biggest ego of being spiritual. And it is sheer nonsense, because having such a deeply repressed sexuality and then the claim for being spiritual is just a contradiction.You can be spiritual only when all sex is transformed, not repressed – understood, transmuted. When there is no sex lurking in your mind somewhere, when the whole energy involved in sex has become luminous, only then can you be spiritual, because sex at the lowest point when it becomes aflame is the same energy as enlightenment at the ultimate point. At the alpha point it is sex; at the omega point it is samadhi, it is super-consciousness.So whatever you ask, you show without knowing your unconscious. I have to look into your unconscious and only then I can answer you relevantly. Then my answer is no more academic, then my answer becomes intimate: the answer out of love and compassion, not out of knowledge and ready-made wisdom.A pair of good friends, Frenchmen…Now even if the mention of Frenchmen is not made, looking at the whole episode you can conclude it is about Frenchmen.A pair of good friends were strolling down the street in Paris one day when they spied two women approaching.“Sacre bleu, Pierre,” cried one. “There comes my wife and mistress walking towards us arm in arm!”“Mon Dieu, Henri,” cried the second, “I was about to say the same thing!”But that can happen only in Paris, and that can happen only about the Frenchman. You cannot expect this happening in Pune.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Am I a philosopher?Milarepa, philosophy is not the real thing, and to be a philosopher is just to go astray.Philosophy only thinks but never experiences, and there are things which cannot be thought about: either you experience them or you don’t. How can you think about truth, of which you have no experience? How can a blind man think about light and colors and rainbows and flowers and butterflies? Whatever he is going to think is going to be wrong. To know the colors, to know the light, to know the stars one needs eyes; not thinking. And to have eyes is a totally different phenomenon than thinking. In fact, only blind people think. Those who have eyes see, experience.Philosophy is a non-existential approach to existence; hence it never comes to any conclusion. It goes round and round but remains stuck in the same groove. One of the oldest professions of man is to be a philosopher, and it has always been praised very highly. But the reason for the praise was that the philosopher is thinking about ultimate values, while the whole world is concerned with the mundane. It is a world of blind people. And if one blind man starts thinking about light, other blind people are going to worship him. But there is no way to think about light.There is no way to think about truth.There is no way to think about love.There is no way to think about beauty.In fact, the moment you pinpoint some ultimate value for thinking, you immediately feel uneasy. For example, if somebody asks you, pointing to a beautiful sunset, “What do you think about it?” or to a beautiful rainbow, “What do you think about it?” obviously you are going to say, “It is beautiful,” because you have never thought about whether you know beauty or not.You have simply accepted others’ opinions, and that accumulation of others’ opinions is all that you have – nothing of your own, everything borrowed. If it is insisted upon, “What do you mean when you say a sunset is beautiful? What is beauty?” you will immediately feel caught in a difficulty. There is no way to define what beauty is. There is no way to define what good is. There is no way to define what love is.You can love but you cannot define it.You can be overwhelmed by love, you can be transformed by love, but still you will never be able to think about it. Thinking is a very low category, in fact the very bottom; you cannot go lower than that.Being a philosopher is not something great, Milarepa. I hate the very word because it helps people to hide their ignorance. It never gives them a breakthrough into light, into life, into love, into existence. It blocks their path. It becomes a China Wall.Thoughts can create such a barrier that even if you are standing before a beautiful flower, you will not be able to see it. Your eyes are covered with layers of thought. To experience the beauty of the flower you have to be in a state of meditation, not in a state of mentation. You have to be silent, utterly silent – not even a flicker of thought – and the beauty explodes, reaches to you from all directions. You are drowned in the beauty of a sunrise, of a starry night, of beautiful trees.Last night it rained again very hard. It was so silent – everybody must have been fast asleep. It was past midnight, but in the darkness of the night, in the serenity of the night, the dance of the rain was immensely beautiful. But you have to be receptive to it.Philosophy is an aggression, and through an aggressive attitude you may become a scientist, but you will never go beyond matter. You can dissect matter, you can think about its constituents, you can put it together, you can even produce it, but matter is something outside you.Beauty is something within you.To see the beauty of a rose you need a beautiful heart.Light is not just outside. To see the light you need receptive eyes. You may never have wondered that if the whole world suddenly goes blind would the sun still shine with its light? Ordinary logic will say yes, it does not matter; whether you are blind or whether you have eyes, the sun will rise. But those who have penetrated deeply into all these problems have come across very different conclusions. If everybody on the earth goes blind, there will be no light at all. The sun is only half of the phenomenon. Unless you have receiving eyes, there cannot be any light, nor can there be any darkness.The moment you leave your room, lock the room, you are performing a miracle of which you are not aware. All the photographs in the room, all the clothes in the room, all the paintings, everything disappears. No color can exist without an eye to see it. The color is a response of an eye, so the moment you have locked your room, your room becomes colorless – everything. The green is no longer green; the red is no longer red. But if you just look through the keyhole all the colors simply jump back in their place. Once the eye is there the missing link is no longer missing.One cannot think about anything which is valuable.This is the basic difference between the whole heritage of philosophy and my approach. With great humbleness I want to say that all great philosophers are great blind men – certainly great, because what they cannot see they manage to think about, what they cannot touch they manage to figure things about.In the fables of Aesop you must have heard the most famous fable…Five blind men go to see an elephant. All five are philosophers, Milarepa, and naturally they start touching the elephant. Somebody touches the legs of the elephant and he says, “My god, the elephant is just like the pillars in a temple.”The other one who is touching the big ears of the elephant…Certainly the story must have been born in India because the African elephant does not have big ears. That’s how you can find from where a story is coming. The Indian elephant has really big ears. The blind man who was touching the ears said, “You idiot! Stop all that nonsense about pillars in a temple. The elephant is like a big fan.” Before electricity came into being, rich people used to have very big fans, and two servants standing by their sides were continuously moving the fans over them. Those fans are almost like the big ears of the elephant.And so on and so forth; all the five blind philosophers argued and argued. One man was watching. Just a simple and ordinary man, not a philosopher but a man with eyes. He could not believe how these people are going to come to a conclusion. They are fighting, quarreling, arguing. He said to them, “You are all in a tremendously great difficulty. Your arguments are not going to help. What you need are eyes, not arguments. Once you see the elephant, there is no question of thinking about it.”The word philosophy comes from two words: philo and sophia. Philo means love, and sophia means wisdom or knowledge – love of knowledge. In the East we have nothing parallel to philosophy. In the East we have a totally different approach. It is not the approach of the philosopher; it is the approach of the mystic.We don’t have any system parallel to philosophy in the East. What we have is totally different. But continuously there has been a misunderstanding between the scholars from the West, from the East. They have all started calling it Eastern philosophy. There is no such thing in existence.In the East we have a word darshan, which means seeing not thinking; it means simply seeing. Darshan cannot be translated as philosophy. I have coined a word for it. I don’t care about languages and I don’t care about grammar, and I don’t care about dictionaries and encyclopedias. My concern is existential not linguistic. I have coined my own word and that is philosia: love of seeing, not love of knowledge.Milarepa, if you have decided to be something, be a lover of seeing the truth. Be a lover of experiencing the truth. Become part of the vast experience I am calling “philosia.”Trust more in your eyes than in your mind.Trust more in your heart than your thoughts. Trust more in your being, because it is the being which is going to experience the very center of the cosmos.Avoid philosophy; it is a sickness of the soul. The moment you see the distinction between philosophy and philosia, you will be amazed that that small difference between two words takes you on different routes. Philosophy takes you deeper into the mind; it refines your mind. It gives you more systematic arguments. It can help you to make a perfect system of thought but it will be only hot air; it will not correspond to the reality.Philosia will take you on a different path, the path of the mystic, whose whole search is to find a new way of looking at things. His search is for eyes. His search is for an open heart – to be receptive. His ultimate search is to come in tune with his being, with the existential heartbeat. When your heart is beating in synchronicity with the universal heart, you know without knowledge, you are wise without wisdom, because you experience without any explanation.If you want to understand me, then you have to understand the distinction between these two words. Philosophy leads deeper into mind and that means deeper into mess. Philosia leads you beyond mind into a state of no-mind. Philosia is basically meditation. It is an opening of a third eye within you, as if…The third eye is only a new way of receiving the gifts of existence. I am using only a parable. Don’t take it literally.Philosophy is bound to be aggressive. One of the great philosophers of the modern age, Bertrand Russell, has written about “the conquest of nature.” That indicates the hidden aggressiveness of philosophy.Philosia is not a conquest of nature, but on the contrary is a willingness to be conquered by nature. It is a deep trustfulness, openness, receptivity. The philosopher is bound to become serious. The deeper he moves into the paths of philosophy, the more serious he will become, because the farther away he is going from life, love, the farther away he is going from beauty, from celebration, from festivity, from laughter.Just the opposite happens to the mystic. He comes closer and closer to a childlike innocence. He is full of smiles, bursting out into laughter looking at the miracle of existence all around. We are so blind that we never see the wonder anywhere. You sow a seed and the rains come, the seed disappears and dies in the soil, and two green leaves start sprouting – and you don’t see any wonder? You don’t see the magic? Out of that small seed will grow a big huge tree with thousands of flowers and thousands of fruits. Out of one seed the tree will give millions of seeds every year.It is said by a scientist that just a single seed can make the whole earth green in time. So much miracle in a small seed! But we live in an attitude of “taking for granted.” That is our blindness. Don’t take anything for granted, and then you will be encountering on every step, every moment, miracles upon miracles.The mystic becomes so overwhelmed by the majesty and the miraculousness of existence that he knows, but he does not reduce his knowing into knowledge. He never becomes a philosopher. He always remains a seer.Milarepa, you are a musician. That is far better and far higher than being a philosopher. Perhaps you have not thought about it….Music consists of sound and silences. Philosophy is only so much prose, just words and words and words. The word is a secondary phenomenon. Sound is a primary phenomenon. You can listen to the music of a waterfall, you can listen to the music of wind passing through the pine trees…nothing is said, but much is understood. The wind passing through the pine trees has no words, but it has a sound.In the fall when all the paths become full of falling leaves…have you walked in a forest? Just by your walking you create sound, because the paths are full of old leaves. Just a little breeze comes and those old leaves start dancing and moving. Existence is full of sounds, but it never speaks a single word. The birds are singing but they are only making sounds. They are not saying anything, but their songs are immensely beautiful. They touch the very core of your heart.Music is a higher system than philosophy, because music is something in between philosophy and philosia; in other words it is something between words and silence, perhaps just a midway overnight stay. If you fall back, you can become a philosopher. If you go ahead, you can become a mystic. Falling back means losing sounds and catching hold of words. Going forward means losing even sounds and just entering into silence because music consists of both the sound and silence. It is a rhythm, a dance, hand in hand between sound and silence.A musician can easily become a meditator, he is very close. There is nothing closer to meditation than music – wordless, meaningless, but tremendously significant. It says nothing but shows much, expresses nothing but brings to you a great splendor. From musician move towards the mystic. The day your music consists only of silence, you have arrived home.This will not make you sad. Music is not serious; it is playfulness, it is song, it is dance. It has an immense beauty. It can move peoples’ hearts. Entering into music, don’t remain stuck there. That’s where modern music has got stuck. It has become too much sound and it has forgotten the silences in between. You have to change the gestalt.If you know about gestalt psychology…it is a very specialized approach. The word ‘gestalt’ is worth understanding. In any book on gestalt psychology you will find a picture inside, just a sketch, a line sketch of a woman. If you look at it and go on staring, a moment comes…the woman becomes old. If you go on staring, again a moment comes…the woman becomes young, very beautiful.In those lines both are hidden; just your gestalt changes, your emphasis changes. You are looking at the lines in one way; it looks like an old woman. But because your mind cannot stay long with any experience – it is continuously moving – soon it changes its gestalt, and the same lines which were making an old woman suddenly create a beautiful young woman.The strangest part is that you cannot see both together. You cannot see because obviously the same lines have to be used. Either you can see the old woman or you can see the young woman, but you cannot see them simultaneously, together, because there are not two.The word gestalt means change of emphasis.There is a great Sufi book – I would like to call it the greatest book in the world because nothing is written in it; it is absolutely empty. It is almost twelve hundred years old, and the first man who purchased it was Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi.His disciples were very intrigued, very curious, because he never read that book in front of anybody. When all are gone he would close the door and pull out the book, which he used to keep under his pillow, and then he would read it. Naturally it was creating much curiosity, “What kind of mysterious book is it?” People tried in every possible way. Sometimes a few disciples were found on the roof, removing tiles and looking underneath to see what Jalaluddin Rumi is reading, but they could not figure it out.The day Jalaluddin Rumi died, they were more concerned with the book than Jalaluddin Rumi…and they loved the man. They loved him as Sufis have never loved any other master. Mevlana means beloved master. That word is used only for Jalaluddin Rumi and for nobody else. In twelve hundred years in the world of the Sufis there has never been a more charming, more beautiful, more loving, more human being than Jalaluddin Rumi.But even the disciples forgot that their master had died. They rushed and pulled out the book from underneath the pillow and they looked, and they were amazed – the book was absolutely empty! There was nothing to read. But those who were very close and intimate devotees, they understood the meaning.Words have to be dropped.Only then can you have silence.The whole teaching of the book is be silent. First let the words go, then the sounds, and there remains an emptiness, nothingness, just a pure space. That purity is what meditation is all about. For twelve hundred years the book has not been published because no publisher was ready to publish it. Obviously the publisher asked…there is nothing to publish in it. Finally one Sufi master published it himself. Now it is available – but it is just empty pages. It is called The Book of Books.Move from sound to silence.This way you will not become serious and dead like your saints. I have heard, Milarepa: A man once said to Doctor Johnson, “You are a philosopher, Doctor Johnson. I have tried too, in my time, to be a philosopher, but I don’t know how to be one. You see, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”You cannot be a philosopher and retain your cheerfulness. It is better to drop all philosophizing and open all the buds of your cheerfulness. Sing just like the birds. Play on your guitars, but remember the gestalt should be on the silences. Dance to abandon, and you may be coming closer and closer to the reality because the reality is so festive. It is a festival of lights, day in, day out.Just watch existence and you will be surprised. What do these poor trees have? – no bank account, no houses to live in, no clothes to hide their nakedness. But just watch their cheerfulness; just watch their flowers, their fragrance. They don’t have anything as possessions, but they have themselves. You may have many possessions, but you don’t have yourself.You are a house full of things, but the master is missing. Awaken the master. Be more alert, aware, receptive, and you will come to know immense mysteries surrounding you. When one feels surrounded by mysteries, a deep gratefulness arises in the heart. That gratefulness is the only authentic prayer. All other prayers are false, manufactured by man. Only gratefulness that arises spontaneously is not manufactured by you. It is a happening just like love.And once it starts happening, it starts growing wider, bigger. Soon it starts reaching to the faraway stars. Your whole life becomes nothing but a prayer. Your actions become prayer, your rest becomes prayer, your work becomes prayer, your sleep becomes prayer, you become a prayer. It is not something to do in a church or in a temple. It is something to be, wherever you are.Milarepa, no one has ever heard of any philosopher coming to a conclusion. No one has ever heard about any philosopher becoming enlightened, becoming self-realized. It is as unheard of as anyone ever complaining of a parachute not opening. Philosophers are the most misguided people on the earth, and to follow them is to follow blind people.Find someone who sees, who is a seer, who experiences…whose heart dances with the wind, the rain, the sun, whose innermost being has achieved a synchronicity with all that surrounds you, from the lowest grass leaf to the biggest star in the world. He is in tune with everything. He is no longer an outsider; he is an insider. The philosopher is an outsider. He stands away and thinks about things. The mystic takes a jump into existence, becomes an insider, has no need to think. He tastes, he smells, he sees, he loves, he lives.Truth has to be lived, not known.Life has to be squeezed to the last drop of juice. It is not something to be contemplated upon – drink it.The last words of Jesus to his disciples are significant. The last supper, the last time when Jesus ate and drank with his disciples before being caught and taken to prison…He was aware that he is going to be caught; the rumor was all around. He was aware that it is possible he may be crucified. So after supper he spoke a few words to the disciples: “Perhaps I may not be able to see you again. Just remember one thing: You have not been with me to listen to what I say; you have been with me to eat me, to drink me, to live me. I may be gone, but you can continue to drink me.”Once you have known the secret of drinking and eating and absorbing, then the whole existence is available.The master is only a small window into the universe. Once you have come to the master, the window disappears and you are facing the whole existence. The frame of the window should not become important. That’s what has happened to millions of people: the frame of the window is being worshipped; nobody is looking through the window to the beyond.The window is only an invitation to see to the beyond, but people are worshipping the windows: somebody worshipping Buddha, somebody worshipping Jesus, somebody worshipping Ramakrishna. These are all windows, but they are not for worshipping; they are to be transcended. They give you the vision, the philosia. Then leave them behind and go on moving into existence as deeply as possible. And that is possible only in silence.Let your music slowly become more and more close to meditation. Philosophy is a kind of disease – very dangerous, almost incurable. I would like you not to be a philosopher but just a dancer, a singer, a flute player, because they are very close to my world of meditation.My emphasis is to increase your cheerfulness, your laughter, because this world is not for the miserable. This world is not for the people who have become too accustomed to anxiety, anguish. This world belongs to those who live moment to moment in utter ecstasy. Cheerfulness, nonseriousness, a sense of humor to me are very fundamental qualities of a religious being.Solomon Rabinowitz went to his doctor to have a checkup. The doctor said, “For a man of eighty-seven you are doing well. Why a checkup?”Solly explained that he was going to marry a girl of twenty. He would not be dissuaded, so the doctor’s final advice was, “Then if you hope for a fruitful marriage, take a lodger as well.”When they met again after eight months the old man said, “Congratulate me, Doctor, my wife is pregnant.”The doctor paused for a moment, and then said, “Ah yes, so you took my advice and had a lodger as well?”“Of course,” grinned Solly through his toothless gums. “She is pregnant too.”Just remain cheerful.Existence loves nothing more than cheerfulness.Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan are traveling in a plane together when Reagan says, “If I throw a one dollar bill out of the plane, I will make someone happy.”“Okay,” says Gorbachev, “but if I throw out a one hundred ruble note I will make one hundred people happy.”“In that case,” says Reagan, “I will throw out a million dollars and make a million people happy.”“Go ahead,” says Gorbachev, “and then I will throw you out and make the whole world happy.”It was in the divorce court and the judge asked the husband, “So you have not spoken to your wife for three years – why?”The husband replied, “I did not want to interrupt her.”The priest was visiting the young widow who had just moved to his parish. After talking with her for a while he raised a questioning eyebrow and said, “Now let me get this straight. You say you have a child of two and another three years old, and yet you say that your husband has been dead for seven years.”“Yes,” said the woman, “but I’m not.”A philosopher becomes enclosed within himself. He loses contact with the birds. Do you hear them? – for no purpose, just out of sheer joy, just for being in existence…. Nobody has asked them to sing. The song is coming from an inner source of cheerfulness. Nobody has asked the trees to give flowers so colorful and so fragrant. But the tree, just out of gratitude towards existence, brings all those beautiful flowers – a silent prayer and a beautiful offering.A man remains miserable if he becomes closed within his own mind and goes on and on just making sand castles – words, theories, hypotheses. He loses contact with existence. And to lose contact with existence is to be almost dead before death comes.It is almost the average case that people die at the age of thirty and are buried at the age of seventy. For forty years what have they been doing here? – just dragging themselves, and dragging towards the graveyard. These people go to the churches, go to the temples, go to the mosques, go to the synagogues, and because of these corpses, all synagogues, all churches, all temples have become utterly sad, serious.In Israel just now there are riots among Jews themselves. They had to fight with the Mohammedans, who are surrounding them like a vast ocean, and Israel is just a small island surrounded by millions of Mohammedans; that fight continues. But a new fight has started which is more dangerous; it is coming from inside. Now Jews are divided into three sections in Israel.The people who have been living there for centuries think they are the real Jews. They follow everything as traditionally as it has been followed since Moses, four thousand years ago. The second group has come from European countries. They are a little more progressive; they cannot follow dead routines. They have lived in a different atmosphere, in different cultures.The worst problem is with the Jews who have come from America. And you will be surprised to know that on the Sabbath, on Friday evening, the orthodox Jews stop working – everything. The American Jews have never thought that driving their car home from the office is work. The American Jews are being stoned; their cars are being damaged. They are beaten because they are driving cars. No work is allowed.Now Israel is really in a terrible mess. Orthodox Jews are telling the European and the American Jews to go back, “You are destroying our religion, our culture, our tradition.” And naturally, the American Jew is a totally different species; just in name is he a Jew.I have told you one story before….Three American rabbis were bragging about their synagogue’s progressiveness. The first rabbi said, “Nobody can beat me. In my synagogue people are allowed to smoke.”The second rabbi laughed and said, “That’s nothing. In my synagogue we are really progressive. People are allowed to drink, bring their girlfriends, dance, are even allowed to make love.”The third rabbi said, “Drop all this crap. We are the most avant garde, most progressive people in the world. In my synagogue there is a board hanging on the door saying that on Jewish holidays the synagogue will remain closed.”This is real progress! Naturally the orthodox Jews in Israel who have always lived there and have not known anything about the world, are still with their conditionings from the past. They are serious people. They cannot conceive that in a synagogue you should laugh. In a synagogue even a smile is not allowed. You have to be serious; it is serious business.But the whole existence is nonserious.To me the only authentic temple is existence.Learn from it. You don’t have to become a philosopher, you don’t have to become a saint, you don’t have to become a wise man. Milarepa, it is perfectly good to remain otherwise. The so-called wise have tortured humanity so much that now my preference is for the otherwise.Be more human. Don’t betray the earth. Be more in love with the earth and with all the treasures that that the earth provides you with. It is our home. We are not renouncers, we are rejoicers. We want to participate in the dance of existence.My people are not anti-life.My people are life affirmative.Except life there is no God.And life is not something to be thought about, it is something to be danced, to be loved, to be celebrated.A Frenchman staying at an English country house for the weekend was attracted to a beautiful society girl, and without much difficulty seduced her. Several months later they met by chance at a very select society ball. He stepped forward with outstretched hand, but she walked straight past him without acknowledgment. As soon as he could, the Frenchman cornered her and said, “Surely you remember me?”“Of course I do, young man, but you are not to assume that in England a one-night frolic means that we have been introduced.”Life is so hilarious that to be serious is to be sick unnecessarily. A psychological health, a spiritual sanity, a possibility to remember that here you are not to be dead, that you have to live life in its totality, with intensity, to burn your torch of life from both ends together. That is the only authentic philosia.But don’t be a philosopher; that is the original sin of man. I stand against all philosophies because all philosophies are poisonous. They poison your possibilities of humor, of playfulness, of cheerfulness. They destroy your songs. They make you crippled and stop you from dancing. All these philosophers with long faces have dominated humanity too long. It is time that their domination be completely eradicated.A new era of the mystics is knocking on your door. Listen carefully and open your doors.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 22 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I have overcome the gossips, please just give me some sutras to meditate upon.Devageet, it is next to impossible to overcome gossips, particularly in such a juicy, holy place! Gossips are so intrinsic to a cheerful life that they need not be overcome. They should be enjoyed. They also contain a certain fragment of truth. That should be discovered. No gossip is just a lie. It is a strange phenomenon that all gospels are simply lies; and no gossip is just a lie, there is some element, some fragment of truth in it.The serious people are addicted to gospels. And if nonserious people start overcoming gossips, what will be left for you? Gospels you have overcome already; now all that remains for you is gossiping. Life has always been taken seriously, and that has produced a miserable mankind. Life should be taken as fun! Only then can we create a paradise on the earth.Life is neither profane nor sacred; those are words used by the serious people. Either they condemn it, or they make it divine; either this extreme or that extreme – but the truth is always in the middle, in the exact middle you are standing on the truth. Life is neither profane nor divine. It is simply a tremendous opportunity to rejoice. The moment you call it profane, you start feeling guilty. You become crippled on your own, you cannot dance – dance becomes profane and condemned – you cannot sing, you cannot celebrate.One Zen master, Takuan, was on his deathbed. He asked for some paper and his calligraphic brush. It has been a long-standing tradition in the world of Zen that masters when departing from life give their last statement, written. Takuan wrote on the paper a Japanese word which means dream. He laughed, closed his eyes, the brush dropped from his hand.But before writing this last statement he had instructed his disciples, “Bury me just in the mud behind the temple, because I am part of the earth and the earth wants to reclaim me, to rejuvenate, to create me anew. I am tired and it wants to take me to rest. And don’t mourn when I die, but celebrate. Don’t make a monument on my grave, because I am going home. It is not a grave to me, it is only entering into eternal rest. So rejoice, sing, dance, celebrate and carry on your daily work as if nothing has happened.”People like Takuan understand that life, although it is a dream, does not need to be condemned. It is a beautiful dream. You can sing it, you can dance it, you can make it more beautiful, you can decorate it.To call it a dream is not a condemnation. He has instructed that they should celebrate and they should continue their daily work as if nothing has happened. The people who know never feel guilty about life and never put life on a high pedestal beyond their reach, so that they can only kneel down, lose their dignity, their pride and their self-respect and pray to a hypothetical divine life – to someone who does not exist, far away in the stars.All the religions have done both these things. On the one hand they have condemned your ordinary life, and they have created a tremendous sickness of guilt all over the world. For centuries man has been drowning in guilt. All his pleasures are poisoned. The condemnation goes so long and so deep that you cannot enjoy your food, you cannot enjoy your love, you cannot enjoy your clothes, you cannot enjoy at all. Something inside you goes on condemning: you are doing something wrong.A small boy in the school was saying, “It took me twelve years to understand that ‘don’t’ is not my name! Whatever I was doing – ‘Don’t do it!’ Everything that I was doing was wrong, and everything that I had no interest in was right.”The impossible is made right and the possible and the real is made a sin. Between these two – the sin and the virtue – every man is crushed, sandwiched between two rocks. You don’t see the naturalness, acceptability of whatever you are, without any ideals.Devageet, nothing is wrong in gossiping; just gossip in an enlightened way. Beautify your gossips; let your gossips also be part of your understanding, of your love, of your compassion. Even your gossips will show who you are. They are your signatures.Gossiping becomes evil when it is out of jealousy, meanness, violence, when it is just to pull somebody down, when it comes out of a revengeful mind – but it is not the fault of gossiping. Gossiping can come out of a meditative mind. Gossiping can come out of love, out of peace. Gossiping is an art in itself. Everybody is not capable of gossiping. There are born gossipers!Devageet, you cannot overcome it; it is intrinsic to your nature. You are a born gossiper. You gossip against yourself.You are asking me for some sutras to meditate upon. Before I give you some sutras, it has to be understood that you can contemplate on them, but you cannot meditate on them. That is the difference between contemplation and meditation. That is the difference between mind and no-mind. That is the difference between philosophy and philosia.Contemplation needs an object. Without an object to contemplate on, you cannot contemplate – contemplate on what? Some content, some object is needed for your mind to focus upon it; hence, contemplation never goes beyond mind.Philosophy is contemplation.Science is concentration.Religion is meditation.But meditation means you don’t have anything, any object to think about. You are just in a state of absolute aloneness. You don’t have anything on which you can focus yourself – not a sutra, not a mantra, not any great value of life, just pure space all around you. Then you are in meditation.Meditation is never about something.Meditation is a state.You can be in it; it is not something that you have to do – not even thinking, not even contemplating.There are beautiful ways of contemplation, and I will give you sutras to contemplate. But it has to be made absolutely clear that there is nothing in the world that you can meditate upon.Meditation is simply going beyond mind, beyond the functioning of the mind, beyond all the fetters of the mind, and just entering into this silence, unmoving, unwavering – just a pure awareness, a silent flame, a great joy…but nothing to see. A great clarity of seeing, a vast openness…the whole sky is yours, but nothing objects to you, nothing prevents you. For the first time the nothingness has opened its doors to you. You simply are, utterly centered, without even a single thought flying across your mind. Then you are in meditation.There are many moments here when you are in meditation in spite of yourself. I am not an orator, I speak only to create silence for you. I speak only so that between two words you can feel the gap…that between two words you can fall into the silence. The speaker, the orator, the philosopher, the teacher, they emphasize the words; I emphasize the silences between the words. They emphasize the lines; I emphasize between the gap between two lines. It is a change of gestalt from word to wordlessness.If you make an effort, you miss the whole point, because making an effort your mind comes in. Perhaps nobody has ever spoken the way I am speaking to you. They had a message to give to you; I have an experience to share. They had a certain philosophy to convince you, to convert you; I don’t have any philosophy, any nonsense. I have simply a device: I am not saying anything to you, I am just giving you chances of being in silence without any effort on your part. Once you have learned these moments and their beauty, and their benediction and their blessing, it will not be difficult to find the same spaces anywhere. Just the first experience is the most difficult.An ancient Chinese proverb says, The first step is the only problem, because the whole journey is complete in the first step. You don’t have to take another step.For thousands of years there have been masters telling people to be silent, to go beyond mind. People have listened to them and they have tried also – but they go on failing again and again, because effort will not lead you to it. The master’s function is not to give you a certain technique. The master’s function is to give you a glimpse, just a little taste: the sweetness of silence on your tongue. Then you will be able to find it on your own.Meditation cannot be taught, it can only be caught.I am meditation.If you are available you can catch it.It is just as contagious as any disease – it is not a disease, it is a cure of all diseases; it is the ultimate health. But nobody has thought that health can also be contagious. The whole of medical science goes on thinking about infections, about diseases. Nobody bothers to make health infectious, to create healthy people who move anywhere and make other people healthy, just by their presence.My own experience is – I am not a physician, the body is not my world – that spirituality, religiousness, is certainly contagious. I give you moments to feel the presence, to feel the nothingness surrounding you. This is meditation; it does not need any object.But for your contemplation I can give you a few sutras….…An atomic war will not determine who is right, but who is left.…A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right.…Take care to get what you like, or you will be forced to like what you get.…Say it with flowers, say it with sweets. Say it with kisses, say it with eats. Say it with jewelry, say it with drink. But always be careful not to say it with ink.…Philosophy is the discovery that you might be worse off than you are.…If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…maybe you have not heard the gossip!…Keep quiet and people will think you to be a great philosopher.…A reformed politician is one who did not get enough votes.…A neurotic is a person who worries about things that did not happen in the past, instead of worrying about something that won’t happen in the future, like normal people.…The difference between capitalism and communism: in capitalism, man exploits man; in communism it is vice-versa.…Women are the kind of problem most men like to wrestle with.…To have the last word with a woman – apologize.Osho,When you are talking everything feels fine, but when you stop, it feels like the carpet has been pulled from under my feet.Please comment.That’s the very purpose of my stopping: to pull the carpet from under your feet, to give you a chance to become aware what you are without me. So once in a while, I pretend to be sick. I have to; otherwise you start forgetting your reality. You start becoming more and more my music, my poetry, my painting, and I don’t want that. You have to be your own music and you have to be your own poetry.You have to be just yourself.What happens when I stop speaking? You are saying, “Everything feels fine when you are talking, but when you stop it feels like the carpet has been pulled from under my feet.” Suddenly you become aware of all the garbage that you had forgotten you are carrying within you. All that crap – centuries old – starts rising within your mind; it is really stinking. You forget all the fragrance I was talking about; you don’t see any flowers anywhere. You don’t see the beautiful sunrises, the beautiful sunsets; you don’t hear anymore the songs of the birds. You are so full of your own garbage, you become completely closed to the world.I open you, your windows, your doors, your eyes, your ears. I give you a chance to be unafraid, fearless, and open your doors.The unknown is not your enemy.The unknown is your friend.The stranger is your guest.Allow the strange, allow the unfamiliar.With me you gather courage, you open up; you start listening to the silences, you start seeing the beauties of existence. But left alone you immediately rush to close your doors and windows, and start hiding in your dark hole which you think is your security and safety.It is not safety, it is not security, it is your grave – although the grave has a certain kind of security. For example, you cannot die again. You can rest at ease, no death is ever going to disturb you – but do you want that kind of security? The dead are so safe, they will not even fall sick, not even the common cold – no problems, no anxieties, no responsibilities.While you are alive, don’t create a grave for yourself. As I see it, everybody is a gravedigger; he digs his own grave continuously, in search of security, safety, protecting himself from the unknown, the unfamiliar, the strange – who knows what it is. It is better to live with your known sadness, misery, darkness – but at least you know them, you have been with them long enough, you are acquainted.So the moment you are not listening to me, you start listening to yourself. That is the problem. You have to come to a point when you don’t have anything to say. Then without me you will have even greater experiences, even greater ecstasies, even greater moments of splendor.I am simply showing you the path.It leads to faraway stars.But when I am not with you, you have to understand that what starts surfacing in you is your reality – and you have to get beyond it.Two Martians crash land their flying saucer in a piano shop. Dusting themselves off they approach a grand piano. Says one, “Take me to your dentist.”The other commands, “Wipe that grin off your face.”Now the Martians have their own understanding of things. They don’t belong to your world. They are coming from a different world, different language, different ways of seeing things.The little boy comes back from his first day at school.His mother greets him and says, “Well, Tommy, did you learn much on your first day?”“Not enough I guess,” said Tommy sadly, “I have to go back again tomorrow.”Children have their own understanding. When you are alone, you speak your language; you speak from the space where you are, and you become frightened – what happened to great ecstasies? Only agonies are arising in you, miserable, tidal waves. What happened to all that was so beautiful? What happened to that music? You hear only noises – maddening.It was the first day of the factory football match and the Polacks were playing the Italians. Nobody managed to score, and at five o’clock the factory siren blew, so the Italians left the field and went home. Half an hour later, the Polacks scored a goal.Now, nothing can be done about it! You have to face your reality. Only by facing it and remembering those glimpses that you had with me, in communion, in a deep harmony with me, you have now a certainty that your reality is not the whole reality, that there is much more, that the real richness is missing. You are living at the minimum – a poor life, spiritually. I drag you to the very sunlit peaks. But when I leave you, you immediately start rolling down, back into the valley in search of your security, because on the hilltop you feel so alone. In the valley is the whole crowd, all your friends, all your enemies….After two years in a salt mine in Siberia, Ivan was unburdening himself to his sweetheart.“Oh, darling, how I have suffered without you these past two years!” he babbled. “Nothing to do all day except dig salt…salt…salt. In all that time what do you think was on my mind?”“Tell me, dearest,” she breathed as she snuggled closer.“Pepper!” he answered.Salt and salt and salt – naturally, only one thing was in his mind, pepper.You have to face your mind.You cannot just avoid it and escape from it. Wherever you go, you will find it; it is within you. It is you.So this is my way of working. I will be with you and I will take you to unknown spaces. But once in a while I will disappear, just to give you a sense of where you are and where you ought to be, and to know the distance.And it is not difficult to bridge the gap, but you have to be aware. Once you know the gap, the bridge is not difficult. But people are not even aware of the gap; they think this is all that life is meant to be. It is not all.Life is infinite.Life is beyond your wildest dreams.It is an eternal romance, a great love affair which begins but never ends.A suave executive seemed disappointed after lunching with a gorgeous blonde.When his friend asked what went wrong, he replied, “She said yes.”“Yes sounds good to me!”“Not,” the other said, “when the question is, ‘Are you married?’”When you are alone, watch what kind of questions are arising in you, and what kind of answers you are capable of giving to those questions – because every question that arises in you has an answer somewhere within you. Without an answer no question arises. So just watch. Dig deeper into every question and you will find your answer. It will be ordinary, mundane and you will feel hurt, wounded. But I want you to know where you are, because the journey begins from where you are.I can give you glimpses of the faraway experiences, but you have to move from the space where you are. You have to go on a pilgrimage. Being with me you can either use this opportunity for your growth, or you can misuse it. If you are simply being entertained, you are misusing the opportunity. Unless you are becoming enlightened – even if slowly and gradually but steadily – then you are not using the opportunity to its fullest.I am not here to entertain you. Other than your enlightenment, nothing will make me celebrate you. I would like to celebrate for all of you, but you have to blossom to your uttermost potentiality.One evening in a bar in New York, a woman with a nasal, raspy voice was singing, “My Old Virginia Home.”An old man in the corner bowed his head and wept quietly. A lady leaned over to him and whispered, “Excuse me, but are you a Virginian?”“No, lady,” said the man, “I am a musician.”Jake Lavinsky decided to return to Russia, the land of his birth, after living in America for thirty-five years. “I want to help make a success of the workers’ paradise,” he gave as his excuse.But he was back in the States three months later. “In Russia it is just impossible to do anything right,” he complained. “If you arrive for work five minutes early, you are betraying your fellow workers. If you are five minutes late, you are betraying socialism. And if you arrive on time – God forbid – the commissar calls you into his office and shouts, “So where did you get the watch?”Here, it is a totally different situation: everything is right. Five minutes earlier, five minutes late, or at the right time – nothing is wrong if you are just alert.If you are going deeper in your alertness, if you are aware, and your awareness is becoming more and more crystallized, everything will go on becoming more and more right. A moment comes when you cannot conceive how to commit a mistake; you cannot conceive how to be cruel, how to be unkind, how to be violent, how to be inhuman.The day you cannot conceive all that is animal in you…then from your very mud the lotus has grown, has gone beyond the waters, has reached and opened its petals to the sun. The day of dance has arrived – the moment of celebration.We are all born in the mud, but there is no need to remain there. This place is not to condemn you for being born in the mud, but to provoke you, to challenge you, to invite you, to welcome you. Although you were born in the mud – all lotuses are born in the mud – you have the potential of becoming a lotus, the most beautiful flower in existence.With me, drink your future as deeply as possible. I am your future. When you are alone, watch quietly and silently your present. From your present, from your muddy mess, will arise a flower. Where you are today, I was exactly there yesterday, so I know what a great future you have. Where I am today, you are going to be there tomorrow – or at the most the day after tomorrow.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 23 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I have fallen so much in love with this gesture of yours of shaking your head at people's foolish questions that I am trying hard to write one to provoke you to do so again. But the problem is that this does not suit a serious German disciple like me.Anyway, did you know that you are not only the most beautiful and gorgeous master, but also the most irresistibly charming being my eyes have ever seen?It seemed difficult for you to ask a foolish question but you have managed. One need not make much effort to ask foolish questions; in fact, all questions are foolish! A mind that questions does not know how to live, does not know how to love; otherwise life itself brings all the answers, love fulfills all the questions.The people who have been talking about God, about heaven and hell, about faraway things, are the people who cannot live herenow. Their questions show that their present is empty. They want to have contentment and fulfillment, but in the present they are almost incapable – and the present is the only time that exists. There is no other time.These are ways of postponing. Talking about God, nobody will think it is a foolish question; but it is, it is a way of avoiding life. It is a way to take yourself away from the present moment. All questions take you away from yourself. There is not a single question that brings you home. To be at home you will find no questions, no answers, but an eternal peace. In that peace you don’t become knowledgeable, but in that peace your ignorance is transmuted into innocence. In that peace your questions go through a metamorphosis. They become your wonders. Your questions become your mysteries.I say all questions are foolish because their basic root is…perhaps you are not aware of it, the basic root of all questions is that we want to demystify life. What are all questions for? You want to become knowledgeable, and the more knowledgeable you become, the less mysterious life becomes. You start thinking as if you know. And even your greatest knowledgeable learned people know nothing. What do you know about even yourself? – which is the closest thing to begin with. What do you know about your own consciousness?You are it, but absolutely unaware of it. And if you cannot know such a close phenomenon, how do you think you can know the farthest star? But the farthest star serves a particular purpose. Your eyes become focused on faraway things and you can avoid the present moment. And to avoid the present moment is to avoid life itself.Great philosophies have arisen, great theologies based on faraway questions, without your being aware that every question is a strategy of the mind to take away from this small moment…from this silence, from this heartbeat. The next moment is not certain, and all questions are postponement. Looked at exactly, all questions are escapist. And there have been people who are giving you answers and making you feel great because you have so much rubbish, you know so much. And you start thinking that just knowing so much, being so much informed, is a revolution.Remember, information is never a transformation. On the contrary, all information that you collect becomes a barrier for your transformation. And all our universities and colleges and educational systems are simply doing the most harmful thing to you: they are giving you a false notion of knowing.Knowing comes through living, not through books, not through teachers, not through saviors. It comes through your own intensity, aliveness – and you cannot be alive tomorrow, you have to be alive this moment. You don’t need questions and you don’t need any answer, because no answer is going to satisfy your quest. You are thirsty…you need water, living water, to quench your thirst. You don’t need the answer that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. The formula H2O is not going to quench your thirst. This is my existential approach.Man has lived too long under the shadow of intellectual efforts to demystify existence. Fortunately, he has not been able. The existence is as mysterious as ever, but unfortunately he has become burdened with great knowledge and a false feeling that he knows. This is the greatest danger – to be addicted with a false notion of knowing.Socrates, in his last days of life made one of the most significant statements ever made. He said, “When I was a child I used to think I know everything. When I became a young man I became aware that the more I know, the more there is to know. My knowledge is not dispelling ignorance, but only making me aware of my ignorance, how little I know, and the immense and infinite that is waiting to be known.“And now at a ripe age I can gather courage to say that which I could not say when I was young, that I know nothing. And this experience that I know nothing has unburdened me completely of all the knowledge that I have accumulated; it has fallen away. I am standing utterly naked, just as I was born. The same innocence has come with tremendous beauty, with great rejoicing.”There are only two men in the whole history of man – Socrates is one – who said, “I know nothing.”The second man is Bodhidharma, who said it in a more dramatic way. He had a unique personality of his own. He was born in India, but was sent by his master to China to inform the people about Gautam Buddha. He went there, and nine years he lived there; and before leaving China he had thousands of disciples. But he chose four disciples and told them, “Before I leave, I want somebody to be my successor. Amongst you four is the one who will succeed me. I will ask you a simple thing, and whoever answers rightly will be the successor.”Naturally, it was a great moment of suspicion. Time suspended… thousands of disciples waiting… those four disciples standing… and Bodhidharma asked, “In a very simple statement, telegraphic, don’t use a single word that is not necessary, state what was my purpose in coming to China from India.”The first one said, “You had come here to spread the transcendental wisdom of Gautam Buddha.”Bodhidharma looked with compassion and said, “You are right, but not enough. You have my skin.”And he moved towards the next, who said, “You have come here to give an experience of silence, of truth, of beauty, of blissfulness.”Bodhidharma again looked with deep compassion and said, “A little better – you have my bones.”And he turned to the third disciple who said, “Your coming has been the greatest phenomenon in the history of China. Your purpose was to impart meditation.”Bodhidharma said, “You are not wrong, but not right either.”He turned towards the fourth. And the fourth started crying with tears flowing down, not out of any misery but out of tremendous joy. And he collapsed at the feet of Bodhidharma without saying a single word. Bodhidharma took him up, hugged him, and said to him, “You have said it. I don’t know; you don’t know either. You are going to be my successor. Spread this luminous ignorance as far and as wide as possible.”Luminous ignorance – yes, that is the ultimate state of silence. That is the only living water which can quench your thirst. Questions won’t do it. I allow you to ask questions – it is just an indirect way of taking away all your foolishness. I don’t answer your questions, I simply destroy them. If I can succeed in taking away all your questions my purpose is fulfilled and your destiny too. It is not that my answers are needed, it is that your questions have to be utterly, mercilessly destroyed. You are to be left without questions, and that is the answer.Haridevi, you are saying, “Anyway, did you know that you are not only the most beautiful and gorgeous master…?” I don’t even know that I am a master.Just yesterday I saw your question, and for the first time in my whole life I looked seriously into the mirror. Because if Haridevi thinks that I am the most beautiful and gorgeous master, there is bound to be something wrong. I tried hard but I could not find anyone there in the mirror. I have been absent for almost thirty-five years.Once I used to be…but for thirty-five years I have been just empty, a hollow bamboo. In the right hands that hollow bamboo can become a flute. I have allowed my hollow bamboo to bring to you any music, any song, any ecstasy that existence wants to share with you. But on your part, perhaps listening to a beautiful flute player, you start looking at the flute, thinking perhaps the music is of the flute. The music is not of the flute. I am singing songs of existence. My gestures are not my gestures.I am no longer a person, but only a presence. But perhaps that presence is giving you the idea of beauty. In fact you yourself have said, “I have fallen so much in love with you.” Love imparts beauty to anything. It is not my fault. If you have fallen in love with me, to you I will look as gorgeous as your love is deep. But that shows the heart of a disciple. That shows the eyes of a devotee; that shows the feeling of a lover. It has nothing to do with me; it is all your experience. It is your own inner beauty projected on me. It is your own feeling projected on the screen which is empty.You are also saying, “Not only you are the most beautiful and gorgeous master, but also the most irresistibly charming being my eyes have ever seen.” Your eyes have remained closed to the whole existence. You have not fallen in love with trees and birds and animals. You have not fallen in love with the ocean and the mountains; otherwise you would have seen the same beauty millionfold. Let this be the beginning of a long pilgrimage. Don’t stop at me.The master has to be only a beginning, just a push on the way. But remember that these are your eyes full of love which are projecting. These eyes can make this whole existence beautiful. And the moment you can start seeing into rocks and into flowers and into stars, you will be amazed, overwhelmed what a great existence you have been missing. If the master can give you just a glimpse, that’s enough; then you can go on your way.Gautam Buddha is reported to have said, “If you meet me on the way again, cut my head immediately. “No authentic master would like you to become addicted to him. He would like you to move on. If you have seen the beauty in me, you are capable of seeing beauty. Just here, you have opened your eyes in trust, in love. To the whole existence you remain closed in distrust, in doubt, in uncertainty; otherwise, this is the most perfect existence possible. And anyway, there is no other existence.If the master can become your window and you can see through the window to the open sky, to the vast spaces, you will remain grateful to the master, but not addicted to him. The fear of addiction is not unfounded: there are millions of people who are addicted to Gautam Buddha, millions of others who are addicted to Jesus Christ, millions of others addicted to Mohammed. They have forgotten that a master is only a window frame, and if you start becoming addicted to the frame of the window, you will never look through it. Then the window becomes your worship, the object of your worship. Windows are not to be worshipped; windows are to be opened so that you can see beyond.You are on the right track – just don’t go astray.Once there were three men traveling in an airplane. Unfortunately, one fell out; but fortunately there was a haystack below him. Unfortunately there was a pitchfork in the haystack; fortunately he missed the pitchfork. Unfortunately he missed the haystack too!So there will come moments when you are fortunate, when you are unfortunate. Life is not a straight line; it is very zigzag. The path goes in a zigzag way. It is a mountainous path and to go astray is very simple, because your mind is all for going astray. You have to be very alert that your mind cannot take you away from the reality, that your mind does not succeed in taking you astray.Your mind is your most unfortunate thing.“My wife is always asking for money, money, money,” complained Hymie Goldberg to a friend. “Last week she wanted two hundred dollars. The day before yesterday she asked me for one hundred and fifty. And this morning she wanted one hundred dollars.”“That’s crazy,” said his friend. “What does she do with all that money?”“I don’t know,” said Hymie, “I never give her any.”Your mind will demand continuously: Do this, go this way. Don’t listen to it. The moment a person stops listening to his own mind, he starts listening to the universal mind. He has come in the open. Your mind is an enclosure, very tiny, and mind cannot help you on the way. It is your greatest enemy. All your questions come from the mind, and all the answers that have been given down the ages go into the mind.I repeat again, I am not answering your questions. I love you enough…I am not your enemy and I cannot give you answers. I simply want to take away your questions. Slowly, slowly you forget asking questions, you start just being here, enjoying. Nothing is to be asked. Nothing has to be inquired, but one has just to be. To be or not to be is the only significant decision. Be here and you will find that you are the answer.Mind is full of questions and full of borrowed answers. You are the authentic answer, but then there is no question – it is a very strange phenomenon. When you have questions, you don’t have the answer. And when you come across the answer you don’t have the questions.Gertrude Stein was dying. She was a great poetess, perhaps the greatest woman poet who has existed on this planet. Her friends had gathered, and just before she died, she opened her eyes and asked, “What is the answer?” The friends were stunned. Has she gone mad? – nobody asks what is the answer. First you have to ask the question; otherwise how can it be answered? But they were in deep love and gratefulness to the woman who has ignited the flame in many of those who were present.One friend asked her, “This is absurd. You are asking, ‘What is the answer?’ but we don’t know what the question is.”Gertrude Stein opened her eyes again and said, “Okay, then tell me, what is the question?” And she died.There is no question and then suddenly you are the answer. Not that it comes from anywhere else…your answer is covered with your questions. Take away all the questions, and in that state when all questions have fallen down like dry leaves falling from the tree, and you are standing like naked branches against the evening sky, you will know. But it will be more a knowing than knowledge.Knowledge is the corpse of knowing.Knowing is alive; knowledge is dead.In that moment when there is no question around you, there is an innocent opening to all the mystery of existence. Here, my effort is to make you somehow ignorant.Socrates has divided man into two categories. The first category is of those who can be called “knowledgeable ignorant,” and the second is of those who can be called “ignorant knowers.” Certainly ignorance is being used by Socrates in the second category, and by me, as synonymous with innocence. Just don’t be concerned with questions. Let them by and by disappear…and a moment certainly comes when you don’t have any question.At that moment is the explosion. You become luminous. Suddenly you don’t know, and you know for the first time as an experience, the ultimate that quenches all your thirst. The quest is over. You have come full circle back to your innocent childhood. It is going to happen to you, because there is no other way for man to know the ecstasies which are his birthright.You are not born here to be miserable.You are not born here to fulfill the requirements of the so-called contemporary existentialists – meaninglessness, boredom, misery, anguish, anxiety, angst, agony. The whole existentialist philosophy of the contemporaries is so sick. And even those philosophers don’t believe in it; otherwise they should have committed suicide. What is the point of living a meaningless life? What is the point of living an accidental life? What is the point of living in anguish which leads nowhere? What is the point…if death is going to be the end, then why go on unnecessarily torturing yourself?I have asked this to many professors of philosophy in the universities who have become influenced with existentialism. I said, “Then you have to give a proof.”They said, “What proof?”I said, “You have to commit suicide, because there seems to be no reason…. You should return the ticket and get down from the train.”But these existentialists go on living to the very ripe age of eighty, ninety – and this is not new.In Greece, Zeno lived ninety years, and his whole life he was preaching exactly in different terms what existentialism is preaching now. It is said that thousands of his disciples committed suicide. He was a very convincing man, but he himself lived for ninety years. When he was dying one follower asked, “This seems to be very unbelievable. Thousands of people have committed suicide, convinced by your philosophy. Why did you go on living?”He said, “I had just to convince people.” He was saying that he is a martyr. He has sacrificed himself for ninety years – continuously he has lived in misery, just to teach people and to help them to commit suicide.I am not here to help you to commit suicide. I am here to help you to know the great splendor of life, the benediction of existence. Each moment is so full of joy and blessings that if you start living moment-to-moment, your life will be a constant dance.I am really an authentic existentialist. I don’t think that Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Marshall and their whole company is truly existentialist. They have not known even a single moment with their totality; otherwise, all boredom disappears, all meaninglessness disappears.Life is so juicy, so full of flowers with so much fragrance.Just don’t miss the moment.Osho,What is the difference between no-mind and my-mind?Milarepa, the difference between no-mind and my-mind is the difference between your mind and my mind.Just drop the “my” and there is no difference between no-mind and mind. “My” mind creates the boundary. Take the boundary away, and mind becomes no-mind, infinite, unbounded. You are an imprisoned splendor. Just take the prison away…And the prison is not much; it is of I, my, mine. Just be without these words surrounding you, and no-mind will give you the whole existence as an inheritance. Mind has poisoned you, but it has been able to poison you because you have become identified with it. You start calling it my-mind. Drop the my and you are separate from the mind – that was the bridge. Separate who you are from the mind – just a pure presence, an utter silence, unmoving stillness…and in this space happens all that deep down you are all looking for, knowingly or unknowingly.Three mice walked into a bar, sat down and began some serious drinking. All three became thoroughly drunk and in due course, each began to boast about how brave he was.“I’m going to tell that dumb Ronald Reagan in the White House about some of his policies,” said the first mouse.“That’s nothing,” sneered the second mouse. “I’m going over to the Kremlin and tell them just what I think about them.”They both turned to the third mouse who was sitting there dreaming.“Well, what are you going to do?” they demanded.“Me, I’m going to screw the cat.”This is your mind. Just drop the identity with the mind and you will be surprised beyond your wildest expectations what a tremendous treasure you have, inexhaustible. And when I am saying this, I am not saying it within quotation marks. When I am saying this, I am saying this on my own authority.I am not authoritative, remember – one can get confused. The authoritative person is a person who wants to dominate. I am not an authoritative person, I have no desire to dominate; but what I am saying is with absolute authority. I am not quoting any scriptures; I am saying only what I have encountered within myself. The day I dropped the identity with the mind I became the no-mind. No-mind is the highest state of your consciousness.Paddy and Sean were sitting in the bar when Paddy said, “You know, Sean, I have read so much lately about how smoking can ruin your health that I have finally decided to do something about it.”“So, you are going to give up smoking?” asked Sean.“Heavens no,” cried Paddy, “I am going to give up reading.”So just be very alert. I am saying to drop the idea of my, mine – the identity. But you can misunderstand me, because misunderstanding does not need much intelligence. You can go on being identified with the mind. Your mind is capable of giving you the sense that you have arrived, that this is no-mind. It is so easy to deceive yourself that you have to be alerted again and again not to deceive yourself.Just the other day I have received again a letter from a German sannyasin. Now he is asking for my blessings because he has become enlightened. Germans are very strong people, and once they get an idea, it is very difficult to change them. And this is not the first case!It has happened before with another German sannyasin, Gunakar. He became at least six times enlightened and finally he dropped it. Whenever he would go to Germany he would become enlightened and from there – and he was rich, he had a beautiful castle in the mountains – he would write letters to all the presidents, to all the prime ministers of the world, to all the members of the UN, “I have become enlightened. If you need any advice I am available.”His letter would come to me also, “Osho, I thank you, you were right that enlightenment is our nature. I have become enlightened. I just need a recognition from you because nobody else believes in me.”So I had to call him again and again. And when he would come and sit in front of me, and I would say, “Gunakar, are you really enlightened?” he would say, “No.” He would say, “It is strange. When I come to you I become unenlightened, and when I go back to Germany I become enlightened again!”This happened six times. Gautam Buddha became enlightened only once. In fact, people have never become enlightened even twice – once is more than enough. But mind is very cunning, it can give you all kinds of ideas.Beware of your own mind.If you can remain alert and not allow the mind to disturb your silence, your peace, slowly, slowly the mind stops bothering you. And the day the mind feels completely frustrated that you are no more listening to it, it evaporates. Its whole life is the life of a parasite. If you get identified with it, you are giving life to it, you are giving nourishment to it.Just get unidentified. Let the mind be there, but remember, you are not it. Just this simple remembrance: I am not the mind. Not that you have to repeat it – because repetition will be done by the mind, that is the problem. Just a wordless awareness, I am not the mind…and no-mind will start opening its doors to you. And that is the beginning of the transformation.Osho,What is the most important word in our language?Tennis, meditation, chi-chi, mangoes, suntan, women, philosophy, exotic beaches, cricket, instant coffee, jazz music and skinheads.Milarepa, I know you are crazy, but if I answer your question truthfully it will also drive the police commissioner of Pune crazy, because none of these words you are mentioning have any importance.In the past, before that German guy Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead, God used to be the most important word in our language. But when a German says something, you have to listen to it; otherwise there is trouble. Germans are like your wives: you have to listen to them, otherwise there is trouble. Nobody has ever heard such a thing, that God is dead, but by and by people started believing it. If it comes from a German guy it cannot be wrong – at least you cannot dare to say it is wrong, otherwise you are bound for great trouble.In his statement there was something more. When Nietzsche said, “God is dead,” he also said, “Now man is absolutely free.” God has certainly disappeared. It has become a phony word without any content, but the other thing has not appeared, the other part of the statement that man has become free. Freedom has not arrived.On the contrary, a kind of licentiousness which looks like freedom has possessed the whole humanity. Perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche was not alive to what he was doing, not aware. Perhaps he was talking in his dreams and finally he had to enter into a madhouse. He himself could not live without God. God was the hope, ancient hope. God was the opium, the consolation of all those who are in despair.When Friedrich Nietzsche declared, “God is dead,” he himself became utterly helpless – no consolation, no hope, no meaning. He had to go through a long process of insanity.Nietzsche seems to me to be the most important figure that has dominated the world in this century. Without any argument his statement has infiltrated into every mind. But he was not aware of the implications. I have no problem if God is dead. There is no need to mourn his death. The problem is that if God is dead, then you lose the most important word in your language and you will need a substitute. God was one end, one extreme, and when one extreme disappears from your mental vision, the necessary and inevitable is that you will fall to the other extreme.And that’s what has happened, Milarepa. Instead of God, fuck has become the most important word in our language. Even if Friedrich Nietzsche comes back, he will be surprised and he will try to resurrect somehow the dead God, because this is stupid. But you will need a whole report on it, a whole research.One of the most interesting words in the English language today is the word fuck. It is a magical word. Just by its sound it can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love. In language it falls into many grammatical categories. It can be used as a verb, both transitive, “John fucked Mary,” and intransitive, “Mary was fucked by John”, and as a noun, “Mary is a fine fuck.” It can be used as an adjective, “Mary is fucking beautiful.”As you can see, there are not many words with the versatility of fuck. Besides the sexual meaning, there are also the following uses:Ignorance: Fucked if I know.Trouble: I guess I am fucked now!Fraud: I got fucked at the used car lot.Aggression: Fuck you!Displeasure: What the fuck is going on here?Difficulty: I can’t understand this fucking job.Incompetence: He is a fuck-off.Suspicion: What the fuck are you doing?Enjoyment: I had a fucking good time.Request: Get the fuck out of here.Hostility: I’m going to knock your fucking head off.Greeting: How the fuck are you?Apathy: Who gives a fuck?Innovation: Get a bigger fucking hammer.Surprise: Fuck! You scared the shit out of me!Anxiety: Today is really fucked.And it is very healthy if every morning you do it as a transcendental meditation – just when you get up, first thing, repeat the mantra “fuck you” five times; it clears your throat too!

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 24 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In Hamlet's famous soliloquy his ultimate question is: To be or not to be? Osho, my ultimate question is: To be and not to be?Milarepa, Shakespeare is a great poet, but not a mystic. He has an intuition into the reality of things, but that is only a glimpse, very vague as if seen in a dream, not clear. His question in Hamlet shows that unclarity. “To be or not to be?” can never be asked by a man who knows, because there is no question of choice. You cannot choose between “to be” or “not to be.”In existential terms, not to be is the only way to be. Unless you disappear you are not really there. It looks a little difficult to understand, because basically it is irrational. But reason is not the way of existence; existence is as irrational as you can conceive.Here those who think they are, are not. And those who think and realize they are not – they are.The idea that “I am” is just an idea, a projection of the mind. But the realization that “I am not” comes only as a flowering of meditation. When you realize, “I am not,” only the I disappears and there remains behind a pure existence, undefined, unbounded, unfettered, just a pure space.“I” is a great prison.It is your slavery and bondage to the mind.The moment you enter beyond the mind, you are – but you don’t have any notion of being an ego, of being an “I.” In other words: the more you think you are, the less you are; the more you experience that you are not…the more you are.The moment the soap bubble of your ego pops, you have become the whole existence. Yes, something has disappeared…before you were just a dewdrop, now you are the whole ocean! You are not a loser. You were encaged in a very small, limited space, and that imprisonment is our misery, our pain, our anguish. From every side we are enclosed, from every side we are encountered by a thick wall – we cannot move.Have you ever experienced in a nightmare, in a dream…you know perfectly well that your eyes are open, but you want to move your hands and you cannot; you want to get up, but you cannot. A tremendous fear grips you as if you are paralyzed for the moment. That experience will explain to you our whole life as a dewdrop. Our intrinsic nature is to be oceanic and to force an ocean into a dewdrop is certainly to create anxiety, anguish, misery, agony.Shakespeare’s question, To be or not to be? is only intellectual – and it is bound to be intellectual, because he was not a man of realization. He was very talented, perhaps there have been only a few poets of his caliber. But to be a poet is one thing – and to know existence from inside, not from outside, is another.The poet looks at the beauty of the flower, at the beauty of the sunset, at the beauty of the starry night, but he is always on the outside, an observer, a spectator; he is never an insider. That is the difference between a poet and a mystic. When the poet sees the rose, the rose is there outside the poet, and the poet is there outside the rose.When the mystic sees the rose, he is the rose.All differences, all distinctions, all distances have disappeared.In such moments the seers of the Upanishads have declared: Aham brahmasmi – I am God. It is not a declaration of ego; it is simply a declaration of the mystical experience of being one with the ultimate reality. But it is true on smaller scales too.The mystic can say:I am the rose, I am the stars, I am the ocean.The poet cannot say that. He can say that the rose is beautiful, he can make an observation and a judgment about the rose, but he cannot melt and merge into the reality of the rose. He cannot get lost into it, he cannot become one, he cannot drop the duality. Howsoever great his insight as a poet may be, it will remain based in duality. Certainly the poet sees more beauty than you see. He has clearer eyes, he has a more loving heart and he has a different approach than the scientist.The scientist looks at the roseflower from intellect, from mind. The poet looks from the heart, from intuition. He is certainly deeper than the scientist. The scientist in fact cannot see the beauty of the rose; all that he can do is dissect the rose to find out where the beauty is. And the moment the rose is dissected, all beauty disappears…hence for the scientist there is no beauty, because the beauty cannot survive the dissection; hence for the scientist there is no life, because the moment you dissect a living being what you find are dead parts, you never find life.The mystic is just the very opposite of the scientist. The scientist tries to know things by dissecting them, and the mystic tries to know things by dropping the distance, the gap between himself and reality. His approach is of the being. These are the three approaches. The approach of the mind – that is what the scientist is doing. The approach of the heart – that is what the poet, the painter, the artist is doing. And the approach of the being – that is the world of the mystic.Shakespeare is great in his poetic compositions, his intuition is deep. But he is not a mystic; otherwise he could not have made the statement: To be or not to be?There is no choice; they are not two.The only way to be is not to be.Disappear if you want real existence, authentic existence; merge into reality, dissolve your ice-cube in the ocean and become one with it. Of course you will get lost as a separate entity, but you will become the whole. It is not a loss; it is a tremendous gain.Milarepa, you are asking, “My ultimate question is: To be and not to be?” That is not a question. That is the only way you can find yourself. But first comes “not to be,” and second comes “to be.” That is the only change I would like to make in your question. You say, “To be and not to be?” – “not to be” has to be first, then “to be” follows. You have just to give space. Throw out all the furniture that is filling your space. And the greatest block is the ego – throw it out!Let the temple of your being be utterly empty.That is the state of “not to be.”And you will be surprised…here you are trying “not to be,” and from the back door comes a new realization of being, of “to be.” But your effort should not be based in this order – first to be and then not to be. That is against the natural process of enlightenment. You have to attain nothingness first, nobodiness first.This is the price you have to pay for attaining to the experience of authentic being. This is the sacrifice you have to make. This is what Jesus means when he says, “Unless you are born again, you will not enter into the kingdom of God.” What does he mean when he says, “Unless you are born again”? He means, first you have to die, and after death is resurrection.As the ego dies it allows space for your authentic being to blossom. On the grave of your ego blossoms the lotus of your being. But remember, you have to change your statement because in this statement your ego lingers. “To be” is your first desire. But if that is your first desire, then it will be very difficult, almost impossible, to allow “not to be.” You will cling to your ego.You are saying, “To be and not to be.” One thing is certainly right, that both have to exist together…but which is to be the first? You cannot start from the wrong end. You have to start by being nobody, by simply being spacious. In that spaciousness the guest arrives.But it is natural…the way you have put your question is natural to the mind. It happened…A man came to Gautam Buddha with almost the same question that you have raised here. Gautam Buddha said to him, “First you have to drop your ego and then you need not worry; everything happens on its own accord, spontaneously.”The man said, “If that is the way to realize myself, then I will make every effort to drop the ego.”Buddha said, “You have not understood me. You are still trying to realize yourself. You are even ready to drop the ego, but the desire deep down is to find a truer ego, a more eternal ego; that’s what you are calling the self. Forget about the self. There is nothing to be achieved! You have simply to drop your ego and wait.”There is no question of any effort to be made; no achievement is going to be there. What happens, happens on its own accord. You cannot claim that it is your realization. That’s why Gautam Buddha is the first person in the history of man who has not used the word self-realization. He came to know…so many people, under the disguise of the word ‘self’, are simply protecting their ego. They are calling it self-realization, but they really mean ego-realization. They have a disguised desire to make their ego permanent and eternal.Seeing this cunningness of the human mind, Buddha simply dropped the words self, self-realization. He stopped talking about what will happen when your ego is dropped. He said, “That is not my business and that is not your business either. You simply drop the ego and wait and see what happens, but don’t conceive it from the very beginning. Don’t make it a goal, an ambition. The moment you make it an ambition, the ego has come back from the hidden, secret door of your being.”Buddha was very much misunderstood. It was obvious, particularly in this land where for thousands of years before him the religious people have been talking about self-realization. But Gautam Buddha had a far deeper and clearer insight than anyone who has preceded him. He saw behind this self-realization nothing but a deep ego.He changed the whole language of spirituality. In the language he used to speak – Pali is its name – the self is called atta. Buddha dropped the word completely and he started using a negative word, anatta. Atta means self; anatta means no-self. It was against the whole tradition, not only of this country but of all the countries. Nobody had ever heard about no-self, no-mind, no-realization.Then people started asking him, “What is the point of all this effort, meditation, disciplines, fastings, austerities…? What is the point if finally we are going to be nobody? – it is a strange effort! Such a long journey, so arduous, just to find in the end that you are not.”They were logical. But whenever you encounter a man like Gautam Buddha, his love is far stronger than your logic can ever be. His presence is far stronger than your reason, your mind, your personality, your ambitions, your desires. His very presence is so powerful, so magnetic that people start – against themselves, in spite of themselves – on a journey which ends in no-self.Just the other day I came to know about a child who was born in France. The mother had been working in an atomic research center. While she was pregnant she continued to work, so the radiation of atomic energy was surrounding her continually while she was pregnant. Just three or four days ago she gave birth to a child. The doctors were very interested to see what had happened to the child, because he had been exposed to radiation for nine months continually – he may be blind, he may be crippled…is there going to be something strange?The whole medical staff, all the surgeons and doctors were watching breathlessly as the child came out of the womb and the doctor put the child on the table. He was perfectly healthy – not blind, not crippled. All their fears were negated. But something they never expected happened. On the table all the instruments of the surgeon and the doctor started moving towards the child. The child had become magnetic! The child will have to live a very strange life. Wherever he will go things will start moving towards him.Now they are trying hard to de-electrify the child. They cannot even bring their instruments close to him; those instruments slip from their hands, because the child is such a magnetic force. The child is very healthy, very radiant – they have never seen such a child – but to touch the child is to get a shock. The nurses who are taking care of the child have to wear shockproof dresses because they are playing with a danger.A man like Gautam Buddha has a certain magnetic attraction, very subtle. Things don’t move toward him but souls move, consciousnesses move, life forces move. It is his presence that gives you the proof that not-being is not death, not-being is the ultimate in life.But remember, Milarepa, not-being is the first thing; that is your meditation, that is your death. Out of this meditation, out of this death, out of this nothingness will arise your original face, your original being. So you will have to change just a little bit. Put not-being first. That has to be the priority. You need not be concerned about being, it comes. It comes absolutely without any exception.I am saying it on my own experience too. I had to disappear into nothingness – and out of that nothingness a totally new, an utterly fresh, an eternal presence has arisen. It is not my doing. I cannot take any credit for it. At the most I allowed it to happen, because I was not there to disturb. Your not-being is necessary first so that you don’t disturb when your being starts arising…just a little change.Old Hymie Goldberg returned to the doctor to express his delight over the invisible hearing aid that his doctor had fitted for him.“I bet your family likes it, too,” said the doctor.“Ah no,” said old Hymie, “they don’t know about it yet and I am having a great time. In the past two days, I have changed my will twice!”Everybody thinks he cannot hear…and he can hear, so he is having a great time changing his will.You also have to change your will. What you have put as secondary has to be primary, and what you have put as primary is not your concern. It will come, just as when spring comes, flowers come on their own accord.Osho,Recently Rudolph Hess, one to the last Nazi big shots, died. He committed suicide in jail in Berlin, where he was imprisoned for forty-six years. He was the right hand man of Adolf Hitler.“I don't repent anything,” he said before the court in Nuremberg, “and if I could start from the very beginning, I would do the same thing again.”Osho, can you say something about forgiveness, even for people who seem to be unworthy of it.It is one of the most fundamental things to understand. People ordinarily think that forgiveness is for those who are worthy of it, who deserve it. But if somebody deserves, is worthy of forgiveness, it is not much of a forgiveness. You are not doing anything on your part; he deserves it. You are not really being love and compassion. Your forgiveness will be authentic only when even those who don’t deserve it receive it.It is not a question of whether a person is worthy or not. The question is whether your heart is ready or not.I am reminded of one of the most significant woman mystics, Rabiya al-Adabiya, a Sufi woman who was known for her very eccentric behavior. But in all her eccentric behavior there was a great insight. Once, another Sufi mystic Hassan was staying with Rabiya. Because he was going to stay with Rabiya, he had not brought his own holy Koran, which he used to read every morning as part of his discipline. He thought he could borrow Rabiya’s holy Koran, so he had not brought his own copy with him.In the morning he asked Rabiya, and she gave him her copy. He could not believe his eyes. When he opened the Koran he saw something which no Mohammedan could believe: in many places Rabiya had corrected it. It is the greatest sin as far as Mohammedans are concerned; the Koran is the word of God according to them. How can you change it? How can you even think that you can make something better? Not only has she changed it, she has simply cut out a few words, a few lines – removed them.Hassan said to her, “Rabiya, somebody has destroyed your Koran!”Rabiya said, “Don’t be stupid, nobody can touch my Koran. What you are looking at is my doing.”Hassan said, “But how could you do such a thing?”She said, “I had to do it, there was no way out. For example, look here: the Koran says, ‘When you see the devil, hate him.’ Since I have become awakened I cannot find any hate within me. Even if the devil stands in front of me I can only shower him with my love, because I don’t have anything else left. It does not matter whether God stands in front of me, or the devil; both will receive the same love. All that I have is love; hate has disappeared. The moment hate disappeared from me I had to make changes in my book of the holy Koran. If you have not changed it, that simply means you have not arrived to the space where only love remains.”I will say to you, the people who don’t deserve, the people who are unworthy, don’t make any difference to the man who has come to the space of forgiveness. He will forgive, irrespective of who receives it. He cannot be so miserly that only the worthy should receive it. And from where is he going to find unforgiveness? This is a totally different perspective. It does not concern itself with the other. Who are you to make the judgment whether the other is worthy or unworthy? The very judgment is ugly and mean.I know Rudolph Hess is certainly one of the greatest criminals. And his crime becomes even a millionfold bigger, because in the Nuremberg trial with the remaining companions of Adolf Hitler – who killed almost eight million people in the second world war – he said in front of the court, “I don’t repent anything!” Not only that, he also said, “And if I could start from the very beginning, I would do the same thing again.” It is very natural to think this man is not worthy of forgiveness; that will be the common understanding. Everybody will agree with you.But I cannot agree with you. It does not matter what Rudolf Hess has done, what he is saying. What matters is that you are capable of forgiving even him. That will raise your consciousness to the ultimate heights. If you cannot forgive Rudolf Hess you will remain just an ordinary human being, with all kinds of judgments of worthiness, of unworthiness. But basically you cannot forgive him because your forgiveness is not big enough.I can forgive the whole world for the simple reason that my forgiveness is absolute; it is nonjudgmental. I will tell you a small Tibetan story which will make the point absolutely clear to you.A great old master, worshipped by millions of people, refused to initiate anyone into disciplehood. His whole life, consistently, he was asked by kings, he was asked by very rich people, he was asked by great ascetics, saints, to be initiated as his disciples, and he went on refusing. He would always say, “Unless I find a man who deserves it, unless I find a man who is worthy of it…I am not going to initiate any Tom, Dick, Harry.”He had a small young boy who used to cook food for him, wash his clothes, fetch vegetables from the market. The boy himself had become slowly, slowly old and for his whole life he had been listening to the old man, who had lived almost one hundred years, and without exception the denial: nobody is worthy! “I will die,” he said, “without initiating anyone, but I will not initiate anyone who is non-deserving.”People became tired, frustrated. They loved the man, the man had immense qualities, but they could not understand his very stubborn attitude – no kindness, no compassion.But one morning the old man woke up his companion, who himself had become old, and said to him, “Run immediately down the hills to the marketplace and tell everybody that whoever wants to be initiated must come soon, because this evening as the sun sets I am going to die.”His companion said, “But what about worthiness?…I don’t know who is worthy and who is not worthy. Who have I to bring?”The old man said, “Don’t worry at all. It was only a device, because I myself was not worthy to initiate anyone, but it was against my dignity to say so. So I chose the other way round. I was saying, ‘Unless I find somebody worthy enough, deserving enough, I am not going to initiate.’ The truth is, I was not worthy to be a master. Now I am, but the time is very short. Only this morning as the sun was rising, my own consciousness has also risen to the ultimate peak. Now I am ready. Now it does not matter who is worthy and who is unworthy. What matters now is that I am worthy. Just go and fetch anybody! Just go and make the whole village aware that this is the last day of my life, and anybody who wants to be initiated should come immediately. Bring as many people as you can.”The companion of the old man was at a loss, but there was no time to argue. He ran down the hill, reached the marketplace and shouted all over the village, “Anybody who wants to become a disciple, the old man is ready now.”People could not believe it. But out of curiosity a few thought, “There is no harm at least to see what is going on.” The man had refused his whole life, and on the last day of his life suddenly such a great change. Somebody’s wife had died and he was feeling very lonely, so he thought, “It is good. If he is going to initiate everybody, no question of worthiness…” Somebody was released from jail just the night before; he thought, “Nobody is going to give me employment; this is a good chance to become a saint.”All kinds of strange people went to the cave of the old man, and his companion was feeling so embarrassed at the kind of people he had brought: one is a criminal, one’s wife is dead, that’s why he thinks, “It is better…now, what else to do?” Somebody has gone bankrupt and was thinking to commit suicide; now he thinks that this is better than suicide.A few had come just out of curiosity. They had no other work; they were playing jazz and they thought, “We can play jazz tomorrow, but today there is no harm, let us see what this initiation is. Anyway, that man is going to die by the evening so we will be free to remain disciples or not. We can play jazz tomorrow – there is no harm.”The companion of the old man was feeling very embarrassed, “How will I present this strange lot when that old man has refused kings, saints, sages, who have come with deep earnestness to be initiated? And now he is going to initiate this gang!” He was even feeling ashamed, but he entered and asked, “Should I call the people? – eleven have come.”The old man said, “Call them quickly, because it is already afternoon. You took so much time and you could fetch just eleven people?”His companion said, “What can I do? It is a working day; it is not a holiday. I could only get these. All are absolutely useless; even I could not initiate them. Not only that they are not worthy – they are absolutely unworthy. But you insisted to bring somebody; nobody else was available.”The old man said, “There is no problem. Just bring them in.” And he initiated them all. Even they were shocked. And they said to the old man, “This is strange behavior. All your life you have insisted that one has to deserve to be a disciple. What happened to your principle?”The old man laughed. He said, “That was not a principle, that was only to hide my own unworthiness. I was not yet in the position to be a master. And I cannot cheat anyone, I cannot deceive anyone; hence I have taken shelter behind a judgmental attitude, that unless you are worthy, you will not get initiation.”Obviously nobody is worthy.Everybody has his own flaws, weaknesses; everybody has done things that he never wanted to do. Everybody has gone astray. Nobody can say that he is absolutely pure; everybody is polluted. So when the old man insisted, “Unless you are worthy don’t come back to me,” nobody argued with him; he was right. First they have to be worthy!On the last day, he said to those eleven disciples, “I bless you and initiate you. It doesn’t matter whether you are worthy or not, but for the first time I am worthy. And if I am really worthy, just my presence is going to purify you. My worthiness of being a master is going to make you a worthy disciple. Now I don’t have to depend on your worthiness. My worthiness is enough.“I am just like a rain cloud; I will shower all over the place – on the mountains, on the streets, on the houses, in the farms, in the gardens. I will shower everywhere, because I am too burdened with my rainwater. It does not matter whether the garden deserves…I don’t even make any distinction between the garden and the rocks. I will simply shower out of my abundance.”If your meditations bring you to the state of a rain cloud, you will forgive without any judgment out of your abundance, out of your love, out of your compassion.In fact I would like to make the statement that the man who is unworthy deserves more than the man who is worthy. The man who does not deserve, deserves more, because he is so poor; don’t be hard upon him. Life has been hard upon him. He has gone astray; he has suffered because of his wrong doings. Now don’t you be hard on him. He needs more love than those who are deserving; he needs more forgiveness than those who are worthy. This should be the only approach of a religious heart.Your question was raised before Gautam Buddha, because he was going to initiate a murderer into sannyas – and the murderer was no ordinary murderer. Rudolf Hess is nothing compared to him. His name was Angulimal. Angulimal means a man who wears a garland of human fingers.He had taken a vow that he would kill one thousand people; from each single person he would take one finger so that he could remember how many he had killed and he will make a garland of all those fingers. In his garland of fingers he had nine hundred and ninety-nine fingers – only one was missing. And that one was missing because his road was closed; nobody was coming that way. But Gautam Buddha entered that closed road. The king had put guards on the road to prevent people, particularly strangers who didn’t know that a dangerous man lived behind the hills. The guards told Gautam Buddha, “That is not the road to be used. You will have to take a little longer route, but it is better to go a little longer than to go into the mouth of death itself. This is the place where Angulimal lives. Even the king has not the guts to go on this road. That man is simply mad.“His mother used to go to him. She was the only person who used to go, once in a while, to see him, but even she stopped. The last time she went there he told her, ‘Now only one finger is missing, and just because you happen to be my mother…I want to warn you that if you come another time you will not go back. I need one finger desperately. Up to now I have not killed you because other people were available, but now nobody passes on this road except you. So I want to make you aware that next time if you come it will be your responsibility, not mine.’ Since that time his mother has not come.”The guards said to Buddha, “Don’t unnecessarily take the risk.”And do you know what Buddha said to them? Buddha said, “If I don’t go then who will go? Only two things are possible: either I will change him, and I cannot miss this challenge; or I will provide him with one finger so that his desire is fulfilled. Anyway I am going to die one day. Giving my head to Angulimal will be at least of some use; otherwise one day I will die and you will put me on the funeral pyre. I think that it is better to fulfill somebody’s desire and give him peace of mind. Either he will kill me or I will kill him, but this encounter is going to happen; you just lead the way.”The people who used to follow Gautam Buddha, his close companions who were always in competition to be closer to him, started slowing down. Soon there were miles between Gautam Buddha and his disciples. They all wanted to see what happened, but they didn’t want to be too close.Angulimal was sitting on his rock watching. He could not believe his eyes. A very beautiful man of such immense charisma was coming towards him. Who could this man be? He had never heard of Gautam Buddha, but even this hard heart of Angulimal started feeling a certain softness towards the man. He was looking so beautiful, coming towards him. It was early morning…a cool breeze, and the sun was rising…and the birds were singing and the flowers had opened; and Buddha was coming closer and closer.Finally Angulimal, with his naked sword in his hand, shouted, “Stop!” Gautam Buddha was just a few feet away, and Angulimal said, “Don’t take another step because then the responsibility will not be mine. Perhaps you don’t know who I am!”Buddha said, “Do you know who you are?”Angulimal said, “This is not the point. Neither is it the place nor the time to discuss such things. Your life is in danger!”Buddha said, “I think otherwise – your life is in danger.”That man said, “I used to think I was mad – you are simply mad. And you go on moving closer. Then don’t say that I killed an innocent man. You look so innocent and so beautiful that I want you to go back. I will find somebody else. I can wait; there is no hurry. If I can manage nine hundred and ninety-nine…it is only a question of one more, but don’t force me to kill you.”Buddha said, “You are absolutely blind. You can’t see a simple thing: I am not moving towards you, you are moving towards me.”Angulimal said, “This is sheer craziness! Anybody can see that you are moving and I am standing on my rock. I have not moved a single inch.”Buddha said, “Nonsense! The truth is, since the day I became enlightened I have not moved a single inch. I am centered, utterly centered, no movement. And your mind is continuously moving round and round in circles…and you have the guts to tell to me to stop. You stop! I have stopped long ago.”Angulimal said, “It seems you are impossible, you are incurable. You are bound to be killed. I will feel sorry, but what can I do? I have never seen such a mad man.”Buddha came very close, and Angulimal’s hands were trembling. The man was so beautiful, so innocent, so childlike. He had already fallen in love. He had killed so many people…He had never felt this weakness; he had never known what love is. For the first time he was full of love. So there was a contradiction: the hand was holding the sword to kill the person, and his heart was saying, “Put the sword back in the sheath.”Buddha said, “I am ready, but why is your hand shaking? – you are such a great warrior, even kings are afraid of you, and I am just a poor beggar. Except the begging bowl, I don’t have anything. You can kill me, and I will feel immensely satisfied that at least my death fulfills somebody’s desire; my life has been useful, my death has also been useful. But before you cut my head I have a small desire, and I think you will grant me a small desire before killing me.”Before death even the hardest enemy is willing to fulfill any desire.Angulimal said, “What do you want?”Buddha said, “I want you just to cut from the tree a branch which is full of flowers. I will never see these flowers again; I want to see those flowers closely, feel their fragrance and their beauty in this morning sun, their glory.”So Angulimal cut with his sword a whole branch full of flowers. And before he could give it to Buddha, Buddha said, “This was only half the desire; the other half is, please put the branch back on the tree.”Angulimal said, “I was thinking from the very beginning that you are crazy. Now this is the craziest desire. How can I put this branch back?”Buddha said, “If you cannot create, you have no right to destroy. If you cannot give life, you don’t have the right to give death to any living thing.”A moment of silence and a moment of transformation…the sword fell down from his hands. Angulimal fell down at the feet of Gautam Buddha, and he said, “I don’t know who you are, but whoever you are, take me to the same space in which you are; initiate me.”By that time the followers of Gautam Buddha had come closer and closer. Seeing that now Gautam Buddha was standing in front of Angulimal, there was no problem, no fear, although he needed only one finger. They were all around and when he fell at Buddha’s feet they immediately came close. Somebody raised the question, “Don’t initiate this man, he is a murderer. And he is not an ordinary murderer; he has murdered nine hundred and ninety-nine people, all innocent, all strangers. They have not done any wrong to him. He had not even seen them before!”Buddha said again, “If I don’t initiate him, who will initiate him? And I love the man, I love his courage. And I can see tremendous possibility in him: a single man fighting against the whole world. I want this kind of people, who can stand against the whole world. Up to now he was standing against the world with a sword; now he will stand against the world with a consciousness which is far sharper than any sword. I told you that murder was going to happen, but it was not certain who was going to be murdered – either I was going to be murdered, or Angulimal. Now you can see Angulimal is murdered. And who I am to judge?”He initiated Angulimal.The question is not whether anybody is worthy or not. The question is whether you have the consciousness, the abundance of love – then forgiveness will come out of it spontaneously. It is not a calculation, it is not arithmetic.Life is love, and living a life of love is the only religious life, the only life of prayer, peace, the only life of gratitude, grandeur, splendor.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 25 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,As I look around me, at the people that have answered your call, my spirit flies with joy with the knowledge that these, my brothers and sisters, are some of the most extraordinary people on the planet. Seeing them with this awareness makes me drop from my head to my heart. For in the heat of dealing with my own stuff I forget to see them as they are, and not how I perceive them.Please comment.It is one of the basics of human understanding that if you want to see the others as they are you have to be utterly empty, without any prejudices, without any preconceived ideas, without any judgmental attitudes.Nobody ordinarily sees people as they are. They see them as they can. They see them through a thick barrier of their own mind, of their own conditionings. Unless you are capable of seeing…In pure seeing, philosia, you don’t have anything to project from your side, you don’t have any color to give to the object of your observation. Then only are you capable of seeing things, people, as they are in themselves.One of the great German philosophers, Immanuel Kant, even dropped the idea that you can see things as they are in themselves, because he had no way of knowing meditatively. He was a great mind – but the greater the mind, the greater the difficulty of seeing clearly. Your mind grabs every information that reaches to you, screens it, sorts out whatever is adjustable with your existing knowledge, allows it, and whatever is going to disturb your mind – anything new, unfamiliar, a stranger – it rejects.Science has discovered a surprising fact. Our mind used to be thought of in the past as a receiver of information from the world, and our eyes, our ears, our noses, all our senses as doors from where the existence can enter into us. This has been an ancient understanding prevailing for thousands of years. But just within these five years, science has become aware of a totally different situation. Your senses are not simple windows; your mind allows only two percent of information and discards ninety-eight percent of information. It is continuously on guard for what enters you. It should be in tune with your concepts, superstitions, ideologies, and if it is not, the mind is not going to get disturbed, to get in a chaos, by allowing a new idea which will not be fitting with you.This makes things very different. It means your mind is not a vehicle of knowing, but a vehicle for preventing ninety-eight percent of the knowledge that was available to you. And the two percent that is allowed in is worth nothing, because it adjusts to you; it means it is the same stuff of which you already have enough.Only a meditator can know people, can know things, can experience beauty as it is in itself, because he does not interfere, he does not censor, he is not on guard, he has nothing to lose. He has already dropped all that could have been the cause of fear. It is utterly empty.Once in a while you are empty. In this moment you can see things with a clarity, with transparency. But when your mind starts, covered with your own thoughts, they protect you: they protect the dead against the living, they protect the static against the dynamic, they protect what has been given to you as knowledge against existential experience.You are right when you say, “As I look around me, at the people that have answered your call, my spirit flies with joy with the knowledge that these, my brothers and sisters, are some of the most extraordinary people on the planet.”If you are silent and your eyes are without any dust and your heart is just a pure mirror, this will be the experience of everyone. These people are certainly extraordinary! I am against the whole past, I am against all conditionings, I am against all ideologies, all organized religions. So only very few people, who have the courage to drop the whole past in its entirety, can have the opportunity to be with me.To be with me is risky. It is dangerous – dangerous to your mind. To be with me finally means you will have to lose your mind. Of course it will not be a loss because you will be attaining something greater, something vaster, something unbounded. You will be attaining a state of no-mind.Only a state of no-mind is an open door; without any judgment it allows you to see things as they are, not as they should be, not as you would like them to be, not to fit with you. Existence has no obligation to fit with your mind. But every mind is struggling somehow to make the existence fit with it. It is impossible; hence the misery, the frustration, the deep despair, the feeling of failure.The great philosophers of the contemporary world, the existentialists, have lost all courage. They have lost their very nerve for the simple reason that they are the most refined, cultured, educated, rational minds. From their minds they cannot see any beauty anywhere, they cannot see any joy anywhere, they cannot see any hope anywhere. They are utterly in deep anguish.But existence is celebrating. It goes on bringing new flowers, it goes on bringing new stars, it goes on bringing every moment something new. It is continuously renewing itself, and there is a song that surrounds the whole existence and there is a dance that you can see in the trees, in the birds, in the animals, in the children, in the sages. But to see this you have to put your mind aside.Sometimes it happens on its own. Listening to me, if you become too attentive, you slip out of your mind. Those few moments when you slip out of your mind, you will become aware of this extraordinary gathering of brothers and sisters.These people have taken a tremendous step. They have risked their established mind to inquire into the unfamiliar and the unknown – and ultimately, the unknowable. They have put aside all their explanations in favor of the miracle and the mystery of existence. They have dropped their ambitions, their desires for money, power, prestige, respectability. Now their whole concern is simple and single: how to know, Who am I?Without knowing yourself, all knowledge is futile; and if you know yourself, you need not know anything that is unnecessary. Knowing oneself, one comes to know the very innermost core of existence, the very center. Experiencing that center is so blissful, so ecstatic that there is no need…. You are no longer a beggar; suddenly you have become an emperor. The whole kingdom of God has become yours.These people have taken a courageous stand against the whole world. It is not ordinary, it is absolutely extraordinary. To stand alone like a lion, and not to be a sheep in the crowd, is the greatest courage in existence. Very few people are able to get out of the mass psychology, of the collective mind. The collective mind gives a certain sense of false security. Naturally it gives you the idea that so many people – there are five billion people on the planet – cannot be wrong. Naturally there is no need for you to search for the truth individually. All these people have discovered it; it is easier and cheaper just to follow them…just to be a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a communist. It is very easy when a crowd surrounds you to feel warm and cozy.Standing alone like a tall Lebanon cedar, utterly alone in the sky, far away from the earth, almost reaching to the stars…But the beauty of the cedars of Lebanon – their courage to go beyond the crowd, their courage to be alone…Gautam Buddha used to call sannyas a lion’s roar. So whenever I am in a gap, if you are in tune with me, you are in a gap. Then you will become aware that you are surrounded by a strange crowd. It is not the ordinary crowd of the marketplace – these are seekers, these are inquirers. These are people who are ready to sacrifice everything for the truth. These are the people who have renounced all borrowed knowledge and are in search of something of their own, because that which is not yours, is not right. It may have been right for Gautam Buddha, it may have been right for Jesus Christ, but it is not right for you.You are a unique individual in your own right.You have to find the truth alone, not by following somebody else’s footsteps. The world of truth is something like the sky where birds fly but don’t leave any footprints. The world of truth also has no footprints of Jesus or Gautam Buddha or Lao Tzu. It is the world of consciousness: where can you leave the footprints?All followers, without exception, are wrong. They are following someone because they are not courageous enough to seek and search on their own. They are afraid that alone, “I may not be able to find anything. And what is the need when Gautam Buddha has found?”But you never think that when Gautam Buddha drinks, his thirst is quenched – but that will not help your thirst. Jesus eats, his hunger is gone, but that will not make you nourished. You have to eat, you have to drink; you cannot simply depend. So many great people have loved, what is the need for you to love? – you can simply follow them. But that will not be love; that will be only a carbon copy. And to be a carbon copy in this world is the ugliest way of being.The only authentic man is always original.He is not a replica, not a repetition. He is a new song, a new dance, a new beginning, always and always.But you are right that “seeing these extraordinary people on the planet, seeing them with this awareness makes me drop from my head to my heart.”That’s a beautiful symbol. That is a great indication. If you can move from the head to the heart, you have attained something which society has been preventing. Society does not want you to be a man of heart. Society needs heads, not hearts.I have never been anywhere…and I have been through many universities. I was visiting India’s greatest university, in Varanasi, and one of the most famous scholars, Doctor Hajari Prasad Dwivedi, was presiding at the meeting I was going to address. He was the head and the dean of the faculty of arts. I asked him, “Have you ever wondered why you are called the head, and not the heart?”He said, “You always ask strange questions” – he was an old man, and now he is dead. He said, “In my whole life nobody ever asked, ‘Why are you called the head and not the heart?’” But he considered that although the question is very strange, “you have something significant in your question. You make me also wonder why people are not called the heart of the philosophy department – that will be more authentic, more essential – but they are called the head of the department of philosophy.”Society is divided between head and hands. Have you noticed that laborers are called hands? Poor people working with their hands, manual workers, are called hands…and there are people above them who are called heads. But the heart is completely missing; nobody is called the heart.It is immensely significant that you start feeling a stirring in your heart, because your heart is far more valuable than your head. Your head is all borrowed…it has nothing of its own. But your heart is still yours. Your heart is not Christian, your heart is not Hindu, your heart is still existential. It has not been corrupted and polluted. Your heart is still original, and it is a tremendously great quantum leap from the head to the heart.Now one step more – from the heart to being – and you have arrived home, the pilgrimage is over. Nobody can come directly from the head to the being. They are strangers; they are not at all connected with each other. They are not even introduced. Neither your being knows anything about the head, nor your head knows anything about the being. They live in the same house but they are absolute strangers. Because their functioning is so different they never come across each other, they never encounter each other.Heart is the bridge. Part of the heart knows the head, and part of the heart knows the being. The heart is a midway station. When you are moving towards your being, the heart is going to be an overnight stay. From the heart you will be able to see something of the being, but not from the head; hence, philosophers never turn into mystics. Poets turn, transform…painters, sculptors, dancers, musicians, singers are closer to the being.But our whole society is dominated by the head, because the head is capable of earning money. It is very efficient – machines are always more efficient – it is capable of fulfilling all your ambitions. The head is being created by your educational systems, and your whole energy starts moving…bypassing the heart.The heart is the most significant thing because it is the gateway to your being, to your eternal life source. I would like all the universities of the world to make people aware of the heart, to make them more esthetic, more sensitive…sensitive of all that surrounds us, the immense beauty, the immense joy.But the heart cannot fulfill your egoist desires, that is the problem. It can give you a tremendous experience of love, an alchemical change. It can bring the best in you to its clearest and purest form, but it will not create money, power, prestige. And they have become the goals.It is very significant that you go on slipping from your head to the heart. Just take a little more risk: slip from the heart to the being. That is the rock bottom of your life. But what happens to you? You are saying, “For in the heat of dealing with my own stuff, I forget to see them as they are, and not how I perceive them.”What is your own stuff? In the first place it is not yours. Just look at the stuff: it is all kinds of junk fed in by people, your parents, your society, your teachers, your leaders, your saints; nothing of it belongs to you. Your head has been used almost like a wastepaper basket – anybody goes on dropping anything in. Your stuff is not yours: that is the first thing to be remembered, because it will change your vision. And the stuff is just an unnecessary burden, a luggage that you are carrying and are being crushed under it.One sannyasin from Africa, Bhavani Dayal, had come for a pilgrimage of the Himalayas. As he was climbing in the hot sun – he was perspiring, his breathing was becoming difficult and he was carrying a bag on his shoulder – just ahead of him he saw a girl not more than ten years old carrying perhaps her brother, a small boy, but very fat, on her shoulders. She was also perspiring, and as Bhavani Dayal came close to the girl, just out of compassion he said, “My daughter, your burden must be killing you.”The young girl was furious at the sannyasin. She said, “You are carrying the burden – this is my brother, it is not a burden.” On the weighing scale both will prove to be burdens, both will have weight, but on the scales of the heart the small girl was right, and the old sannyasin was wrong. He himself has written in his autobiography, “I have never come across such a situation in which a small girl pointed to a fact which I had never thought about.”The head can think only of burden, responsibility, duty. The heart knows nothing of responsibility, although it responds spontaneously. The heart knows nothing of burden because it knows love. Love makes everything weightless. Love is the only force which is not under the control of gravitation. It does not pull you down. It gives you wings and takes you to the beyond.Your stuff is nothing special; everybody is full of the same bullshit. We have to cleanse this whole stuff. Make your mind without any stuff…and with the stuff disappearing, the mind also disappears. The mind is nothing but a collective name for your stuff.The teacher asked her little pupils to tell about their acts of kindness to poor animals. After several of the children had told heart-stirring stories of kindness, the teacher asked little Ernie if he had anything to tell.“Well,” said Ernie proudly, “I once kicked a boy for kicking his dog.”What is your stuff? Just observe…. We get lost into the jungle of it. Stand aside and see.The local ladies group had invited their new neighbor to lunch. After she had left, the other ladies sat around discussing her.“Well,” said Mrs. Finkelstein, “she seems very sweet, but, my god! – yakkety yakkety yak – I thought she would never stop.”“Do you suppose,” asked Mrs. Rosenbaum, “that everything she says is true?”“I should say not,” snorted Becky Goldberg, “there just is not that much truth.”Just watch your stuff. It is our unawareness that goes on collecting all kinds of rubbish. This rubbish becomes so thick that it does not allow you to see things as they are; neither does it allow you to enter into your own innermost subjectivity.The religions of the world have been telling people to renounce the world. I say, Don’t renounce the world. The world has not done any wrong to you. Renounce this rubbish, this stuff that you are carrying within you.But people have, for centuries, renounced the world but carried the stuff. Wherever you will be – in the Himalayas, in the monasteries – your stuff will be there. You can renounce the world because the world is not in any way preventing you, but how are you going to renounce your mind? And if the mind has to be renounced, there is no need to go to a monastery, there is no need to go to the Himalayas; then wherever you are, you can renounce it. There is no need for all kinds of austerities that people have to force upon themselves.I have heard about a Trappist monastery. The rule of the monastery was that you can speak only once in seven years. A young man entered, and the abbot of the monastery asked him, “Are you aware that it is a very austere life, and particularly that you cannot speak for seven years? In seven years only one chance is given to speak; then again for seven years you have to be silent. So are you ready? – because that is the most difficult part.”But the young man was determined, fanatically determined. He accepted the rule and was initiated into the monastery. He got a cell and he saw the situation…. The bed, the mattress, was so dirty – it may have been used for centuries – it was stinking. And for seven years he cannot even say to the abbot or anybody, “Please remove this mattress. It will kill me….” But there was no way to say, so he had to suffer that stinking stuff for seven years.As the seven years were complete, he rushed to the abbot and said, “You have almost killed me. Remove that mattress immediately. It is so dirty it seems Adam and Eve have used it!”The abbot ordered a new mattress. The new mattress came, but it was a little big for the small cell. So the workers somehow forced it in, and by forcing it in they broke one of the glasses of the window. But he could not say anything – and now from that broken glass water started coming, rain would come, and on cold nights, ice would come in the cell.He was in a more dangerous situation than he had been before. He had already become accustomed to that stinking mattress, but this was a more difficult situation. So much cold…he was shivering and it was always wet and no sun was reaching in the cell. He said, “My God, seven years…I hope that somehow things will become right. They have become even worse.”After seven years he again went to the abbot, and he said, “What kind of mattress have you sent? Those idiots have broken the window, and for seven years I have been suffering from cold, shivering day in day out, waiting just for when these seven years will end. It looked almost like eternity.”The abbot said, “Okay, the window should be mended.” The window was mended, but in seven years of rain, snow, the mattress had become so rotten…but now there were again seven years to wait. That young man thought, “Now I cannot survive. Fourteen years have passed. I have come here to find truth, and what have I found? I had never dreamt about it. It is a nightmare.” But finally all those seven years also passed. Now it was twenty-one years that he had suffered.He went to the abbot and said, “This is a strange place. Twenty-one years and I am suffering the same thing in different forms.”The abbot was very angry. He said, “Since you have come, complaints, complaints, complaints…never a single word of appreciation! You are not worthy to be a monk. Get out of the monastery.”He said, “My God, twenty-one years unnecessarily suffering, and now you are throwing me out.”The abbot said, “We cannot allow such negative characters.”Just look at your stuff. It is absolutely unnecessary to suffer it, it can be thrown out. You should cleanse your mind. Why go on piling up garbage upon garbage? But because you call it “my” stuff, there has arisen an identity; it has become your treasure. So the first thing is: don’t call it “my” stuff. It is stuff which has been forced into you by all kinds of stupid people around you.My father had a friend who was thought to be the wisest man around that area, and he used to take me to him just so that I could also learn some wisdom. I used to sit there with my fingers in my ears. My father said, “I have brought you to understand something and you are sitting with your fingers in your ears. Are you mad?”I said, “I am not mad, you are mad. This guy is throwing all kinds of rubbish, and I am not ready to allow it in my head. It will be unnecessary trouble: first gather it, then clean it – what is the point? I am perfectly clean.”That old wise man was very angry. He said, “You have to take care of this boy. He has to be controlled and disciplined. This is very disrespectful towards me. Never in my life has anybody done such a thing.”I said, “Never in your life have you come across anybody who had guts; otherwise, what you are doing is collecting garbage from the scriptures” – his house was full of ancient scriptures – “and then throwing all that stuff into other peoples’ heads. You should be taken to the court. You need to be put in a jail, because you are the greatest criminal in this area. You have destroyed so many people’s minds, and their whole lives they will suffer and they will think this is their stuff.”If you can keep a clear distinction what is your own experience and what is enforced on you, then whatever is enforced, borrowed, has to be discarded. That is the only thing to be renounced.The world is perfectly beautiful. Just your mind has to be silent, empty, open, and you will have the clarity to see people as they are…not only to see people, but to see yourself as you are. This understanding brings a transformation in your being. The world becomes a totally different place – from despair to dance, from darkness to light, from death to eternal life.Osho,What is the difference between sexual power and sexual energy?Sexual energy is another name for your life force. The word sex has become condemned by the religions; otherwise there is nothing wrong in it. It is your very life. Sexual energy is a natural energy: you are born out of it. It is your creative energy. When the painter paints or the poet composes or the musician plays or the dancer dances, these are all expressions of your life force.Not only are children born out of your sexual energy, but everything that man has created on the earth has come out of sexual energy. Sexual energy can have many transformations: at the lowest it is biological; at the highest it is spiritual. It has to be understood that all creative people are highly sexual. You can see the poets, you can see the painters, you can see the dancers. All creative people are highly sexual, and the same is true about the people whom I call the mystics. Perhaps they are the most sexual people on the earth, because they are so full of life energy, abundant, overflowing….But sexual power is a totally different thing. Sexual power is politics. It is using your sex to dominate people. Domination can be done in many ways: somebody dominates because he has money, somebody dominates because he has more physical strength, somebody dominates because he has more knowledge, somebody dominates because he is clever enough to befool people and collect their votes, somebody can dominate through her or his sexual power. More often it is the woman’s way to dominate.The woman can dominate because of her sexual appeal, but it is ugly and mean. It is selling your body just to dominate.One of the most beautiful women in the world was Cleopatra. She was a queen in Egypt. Her country never went into war; whenever there was an attack, she herself would go and offer her body to the invader, to the leader of the armies – and she had such beauty that she easily persuaded the general of the army. She seduced the general by giving her body. She was using her power – her sex, her beauty, her charm – and she remained the queen of Egypt without ever taking her armies to fight with anybody. A very strange woman…But all women in different degrees dominate through their sex. They use it as a power. To use sex as a power is to degrade oneself, is to lose one’s dignity and self-respect. It is pure prostitution.The difference between British and French girls is this: they both know what men like, but the French girl does not mind.Business was brisk for the pretty young prostitute in the bar.“Bill,” she said, “you can come over about seven-ish, and you, George around eight-ish, and Frank, I will have time for you about nine-ish.” She then looked around the crowded bar and called out, “Anyone for tennish?”Using your sexual energy as a profession, selling it as a commodity may give you a certain feeling of power, but you are destroying yourself by your own hands. Sexual energy is not to be used as a political means. Sexual energy is your potentiality for spiritual growth. You can become enlightened only because of your sexual energy.I have been searching for almost thirty-five years, in all kinds of books, strange scriptures from Tibet and Ladakh and China and Japan – India has the greatest number of scriptures in the world – and I have been looking for one thing: has there ever been an enlightened impotent person? There is no incidence recorded anywhere. An impotent person has never been a great poet either, or a great singer, or a great sculptor, or a great scientist. What is the problem with the impotent person? He has no life force; he is hollow. He cannot create anything – and to create oneself as an enlightened being needs tremendous energy.Never use your sex as a commodity, as a strategy to dominate, because you are committing suicide. You are destroying the power that can take you to the highest peak of consciousness.Robert, an American, had been in Italy during the war and had made friends with Giovanni. A few years later he went back to Rome to visit his friend. As soon as Giovanni saw Bob, he could not do enough for him. He showed him the sights and then took him out for a beautiful meal of finest spaghetti. After the meal, Giovanni insisted that Bob meet his sister.“Is she pretty?” asked Bob.“Bella! Bella!” cried Giovanni.“Is she young?” continued Bob.“Si! Si!” cried Giovanni“And is she pure?” asked Bob.“My god!” said Giovanni, “you Americans really are crazy!”Sex has become a thing of the marketplace. On the one hand, religions have been repressing sexual energy and creating perversions which have culminated in the dangerous disease AIDS, which has no cure. The whole credit goes to religions, and if they have any sense of being human, then all the churches and all the monasteries and the Vatican itself should be turned into hospitals for the people suffering from AIDS, because these are the people who have created them. Theirs is the responsibility. They have forced men to live separately from women; they have insisted that celibacy is the very foundation of a religious life. But celibacy is unnatural, and anything unnatural cannot be the foundation of a religious life.Because celibacy is unnatural, and religions have divided men and women into different monasteries, they have created the situation for homosexuality. They are the pioneers of homosexuality, and homosexuality has led to AIDS, which cannot be called simply a disease because it does not come in the category of diseases. It is death itself.So on the one hand religions have created perversions; on the other hand they insisted on monogamy, which in fact means monotony. That has created the profession of the prostitute. The priest is responsible for the prostitute. It is so ugly and sick that we have created objects, commodities, things to be exploited out of so many beautiful women. Even today, it is not understood exactly what sex is. It need not be repressed, because it is your very energy. It has to be transformed certainly; it has to be raised to its highest purity.And as you start moving upwards…the name of the ladder is meditation…sex becomes love, sex becomes compassion, and ultimately sex becomes the explosion of your inner being, the illumination, the awakening, the enlightenment. But it is sexual energy…it can rot, it can go into perversions. But if it is to be understood naturally and helped through meditation to move upwards towards silent spaces, to pass through your heart and reach to the seventh center at the highest point in your body…you will feel grateful towards the energy. Right now you feel only ashamed.This shame and guilt is created by the religious organizations, founders of religion. Naturally the question arises, Why did they make sex a mess? And through making a mess of sex they have messed up the whole world and its mind and its growth. Why? – because this was the simplest way to keep humanity in slavery. This was the simplest way to keep people guilty, and anybody who feels guilty can never raise his head in revolt. So all the vested interests wanted man to lose his dignity, self-respect, to feel guilty, ashamed. They have been condemning sex continuously, and their condemnation has lead the whole world into a very miserable, psychologically abnormal state. And they are still doing their work….Just the other day, one Shankaracharya, Jayendra Saraswati, has given a statement that no religious man can support family planning – and all religions will agree with the Hindu shankaracharya. But I am puzzled. The Christian God has only one begotten son: if that is not family planning, then what is it? The Hindu God Shiva has only two sons: if that is not family planning, then what is it?To say that no religious person can support family planning is simply madness. The world has already become overpopulated because of these religious people. By the end of this century almost half of humanity will have to die through starvation – and who will be responsible for it? These religious people who are not in favor of family planning.I would like to contradict Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati: without any exception, absolutely anyone who is religious is bound to support family planning. And those who don’t support it are not religious; they are cunning politicians. They want the world to remain poor, they want the world to be always in a state of begging, so rich people can enjoy donations and can make reservations in paradise by those donations. If there is nobody poor in the world, who is going to accept their donations?The politicians want people to remain starving because starving people are very obedient; they don’t have the energy to revolt, to be disobedient. Nobody is concerned with humanity; everybody is concerned with his own power. And still in this century, when things are coming to such a great crisis, a shankaracharya – who is the equivalent of a pope to the Hindus – declares that family planning is against religion. Then starvation and millions of people dying through hunger seems to be religious, seems to be the will of God, who is called love, who is called compassionate.What kind of compassion is this? But these religious people are more interested in the numbers; Jayendra Saraswati is interested in numbers. Hindu society should not follow any birth control methods, because if they follow birth control methods then their number will shrink – and Christians will go on growing bigger and bigger. It is politics of numbers.Mohammedans insist that they should be allowed to have four wives, without any consideration that in existence there is a certain balance, an equal number of women and men. If a man is allowed to have four wives, what about the three men who will be deprived of women? They are bound to go to the prostitutes, they are bound to become homosexuals, they are bound to practice sodomy.All these crimes are perpetuated by your so-called virtuous leaders, religious saints. But they have been doing this harm for thousands of years. Rather than helping man to sublimate his energies, to make them creative, they have only been able to force man to repress his energies. And repressed energies become a cancer, repressed energies create all kinds of perversions.The teacher asked her children’s art class to draw on the blackboard their impressions of the most exciting thing they could think of.Little Hymie got up and drew a long jagged line.“What is that?” asked the teacher.“Lightning,” said Hymie. “Every time I see lightning I get so excited, I scream.”“Very good,” said the teacher.Next, little Sally drew a long wavy line. She explained that it was the sea which always excited her. The teacher thought that was excellent too.Then little Ernie came up to the blackboard, made a single dot and sat down.“What is that?” asked the puzzled teacher.“It is a period,” said Ernie.“Well,” said the teacher, “what is so exciting about a period?”“I don’t know,” said Ernie to the teacher, “but my sister has missed two of them and my whole family is excited.”This excitement has made the whole world a mad asylum, and it goes on growing so fast that it always defeats all scientific calculations.Just forty years ago, when India became free, it had four hundred million people. Now, after only forty years, it has nine hundred million people. Five hundred million people have been produced in forty years; and by the end of this century, the calculations of the scientists are that it will be the biggest nation in the world for the first time – up to now China has been the first – it will go beyond one billion people. And Jayendra Saraswati is talking about no family planning, no birth control….Is this country capable of managing one billion people? – their food, their clothes, their education, their medicine? It will not be even able to provide them with drinking water. Food is impossible; even today, half the population of India sleeps hungry in the night because they cannot afford more than one meal a day.I have seen people who have not been able to find even one meal a day. Then sleep is very difficult: your stomach is turning, asking for food, it is aching, it is painful. With my own eyes I have seen people putting a brick on their stomach and tying it around the waist, just to feel some weight, because inside the stomach there is nothing. These people suffering in misery are the responsibility of people like Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati – these are the criminals.When one thousand people were dying per day in Ethiopia, even then the pope was continuously talking about no birth control, Mother Teresa was talking about no birth control. You have to see the implications: Mother Teresa needs orphans; without orphans she does not have any qualifications to have a Nobel prize. But from where can you get orphans if birth control methods are applied? And strangely enough, they condemn birth control methods because they are not God’s creation, but they don’t condemn medicine, which is also not God’s creation. At least there is no mention of medicine in those six days when he made the world.Medicine has given man longer life. There are people in Russia who have passed their one hundred and eightieth year, and they are still young; there is every possibility that they will pass their second century. There are thousands who have passed beyond one hundred and fifty…and no religious leader condemns it, saying that medicine should be stopped from giving people health and longevity. No religious leader goes on saying that diseases should be allowed because they are God-created.Medicine can be used; people can be made more healthy…and naturally when they are more healthy they are more sexually powerful. But birth control methods cannot be used because they will reduce the numbers of their congregations. It is a competition of numbers.Catholics are six hundred million in number. It is the greatest religion in the world – only because of the numbers; otherwise it is the most third-rate religion in the world, there is nothing much in it which can be called religious. But it is the biggest religion, the greatest religion, only on the strength of numbers. It cannot allow numbers to decline – even if these numbers are going to kill the whole of humanity.I am in absolute favor of birth control methods for two reasons: birth control methods will keep the world healthy, nourished; secondly, once birth control methods are used, sex loses its profanity – or its sacredness. It becomes simple fun, it becomes just a joyful exchange of energies. According to me, the birth control pill is the greatest invention that man has made. It is the greatest revolution because it can make man and woman equal, liberated. Otherwise the woman is constantly pregnant, and because of her pregnancy she cannot be independent financially, she cannot be independent educationally, she cannot be independent from man’s domination.Once she is free from being pregnant compulsorily she will have as much time, as much energy to be creative. Until now half of humanity has remained uncreative…no great poets, no great saints, no great musicians, no great artists. Women have had no time. I was surprised to know that even the books on cookery are written by men, not by women. And the best cooks are men, not women: in all the great five-star hotels you will find great cooks, always men. Strange…That has been the domain of the woman forever, but she has no energy left. Because of these religious people, she will never be liberated.Sex energy has to be welcomed and transformed through the alchemy of meditation into higher states of being, into creativity in different dimensions, not only creating more and more children. Life has to be planned, it should not be accidental.I have heard that when God was making the world, he called man aside and gave him twenty years of normal sex life. Man was horrified: “Only twenty years?!” he cried. But God would not budge. That was all he would give him.Then God called the monkey and gave him twenty years. “But, God! I don’t need that much,” said the monkey, “ten is enough.”Man spoke up and said, “Can I have the other ten?” – and the monkey agreed.Then God called the lion and gave him twenty years. The lion, too, only wanted ten. Again the man said, “Can I have the other ten?”The lion roared, “Of course!”Then came the donkey. He was given twenty years, but he also only wanted ten. Man asked for the extra ten, and got them.This explains why man has twenty years of a normal sex life, then ten years of monkeying around, ten years of lion about it, and ten years of making an ass of himself.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 26 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I heard you say that someone who is not yet prepared for enlightenment might die from the experience. I believe it is also possible that the experience remains a short satori and the person comes back to his normal state. This is my own experience. I was in a state of extreme happiness and problemlessness, and had a strong feeling of “I am love,” and then I came back after maybe half an hour. Can you please comment?Diti, you came quite soon! It is really unique – just in half an hour! You made a great comeback. You had gone through the experience of problemlessness, of extreme happiness and of the feeling of “I am love.” But what happened after half an hour? The problems must have come back, and the misery may have deepened. And what to say about the experience of “I am love”? Now who are you? – I mean after half an hour.You really did a great job! I am at a loss what to say to you, from where to begin? – before half an hour or after?Satori is not such a thing. Satori is a miniature experience of samadhi, but once you get into it, you cannot get out of it. That’s the real test and the criterion. Anything that comes and goes is of the mind; it is imagination. Anything that comes and remains, even in spite of you, even if you want it to go it is impossible to get out of it…Satori is forever.Samadhi is just like the total opening of the lotus, and satori is the beginning of the opening of the petals. Satori is the beginning, samadhi is the climax. But you don’t get out of it. It is one-way traffic; nobody has come out of it.But mind is capable of imagining anything. It can imagine that there are no problems, but if you look deep down you will feel that you are uneasy about “no problems.” Deep down you will find absolutely a feeling…”What has happened to me?” You will not feel blissful because there are no problems. You will feel very lonely because all your friends are gone, all your relatives…the whole family has disappeared, leaving you alone in darkness. You will make a problem out of this situation. This situation will not be a blissful state, but a state of deep anguish, anxiety, loneliness and a deep longing to be somehow out of it.What you think is happiness is just a dream of your mind. Your mind is inherently capable of dreaming about everything. It can dream about satori, it can dream about samadhi, in a dream it can become the Buddha – but the dream cannot last long. Even half an hour is too much!But you seem to have fallen into the trap of the mind. You say, “I have heard you say that someone who is not yet prepared for enlightenment might die from the experience.” You have heard it, but you have not understood it. You have not explored all the implications of it.What I am saying is: Enlightenment can happen this very moment, even in your unpreparedness, because it does not depend on your preparedness. It is not something that depends on your efforts, readiness. It is a happening beyond you, beyond your reach. It can happen this very moment. It is not happening because this will be dangerous to your very life.The experience of enlightenment is such a great shock to your body, to your mind, to your very system. It is exactly a lightning experience. Everything that you have been is simply shattered. The shock is so much you may forget breathing, you may forget that your heart has stopped.Preparedness is needed not for enlightenment, but to absorb it. Preparedness is needed not to achieve enlightenment, but so that when it comes, you don’t fall apart but you remain centered and silent and peaceful and let the great experience happen. But it does not destroy you. Your preparedness is necessary to save your life from the great experience, which is almost like fire.Unless you are prepared, enlightenment and death are almost simultaneous. Many people have died because of sudden enlightenment. They were not ready for it, it was too much. Their body, their whole system, was too fragile for the experience. They were too small and the experience was too big.So when people say to you, “Prepare for enlightenment,” they really mean, “Prepare…not for enlightenment, it will not come by your preparedness; prepare so that you can welcome it without being shattered, without being killed by the great joy.” Have you not heard of many people dying out of great excitement?I have heard…A man was continuously purchasing every month a ticket for a million dollar lottery. He had been purchasing it for years, and all his friends and his family had become tired of telling him, “What is the point, why do you go on wasting money in purchasing the ticket? We have seen: almost thirty years have passed, nothing comes.”But the man had become so accustomed to the habit. The day he got his salary, the first thing he did was to purchase a ticket for the coming lottery. Then one day a telegram came. He was in the office, his wife received the telegram – he has won the lottery, and by the evening the money will be delivered.His wife became very much worried. They had been poor, they had lived in poverty; she knew that it will be too much for her poor husband – one million dollars out of the blue! He was not even expecting…Thirty years have passed; he had even forgotten why he goes on purchasing the ticket. He knew perfectly well that it was not going to happen to him. It is not his fate.The wife suddenly remembered the Catholic priest – they were Catholics – “This is the moment I should run to the priest and ask his advice…’What to do? Because the moment he will hear it – one million dollars – I am afraid he will have a heart attack. You are a wise man and this is the time we need your help.’”The priest said, “Don’t be worried. I am coming with you. You need not convey the message; I will convey the message, and I will convey it in installments, so he does not get the shock so suddenly – one million dollars! First I will say, ‘You have got fifty thousand dollars.’ When he has absorbed it I will say, ‘No, you have got really one hundred thousand dollars.’ When he has absorbed that, and I am certain that he is still alive, I will go on. This way by a slow process he will be able to come to the point where he can accept one million dollars.”The wife said, “You are really great! You are certainly the wisest man around and if you can save my husband’s life I will donate fifty thousand dollars to the church.”The priest said, “What? Fifty thousand dollars?” – and he fell down then and there. He never came back after half an hour! Fifty thousand dollars so suddenly…the poor priest, and he was not expecting it at all.Enlightenment is the greatest experience in life. You cannot even conceive what it is – no conceptualization is possible. You can think of pleasure, great pleasure; you can think of happiness, because you have known something of it – a little bit. You can think, “Perhaps there will be no problems.” But these are not the real contents of enlightenment.Because here you are constantly living in the atmosphere full of longings for enlightenment, your mind can start weaving, spinning dreams. But don’t take those dreams seriously. You have done that. You say, “I believe it is also possible that the experience remains a short satori and the person comes back to his normal state.” You don’t understand what is your normal state.Enlightenment is your normal state!The state in which you are is abnormal! Coming back from satori to your so-called normal state is coming back from satori into insanity. It is simply not possible. Once you have seen the light you cannot become blind again. Once you have known love, hate cannot raise its head in your being. Once all problems are dissolved, from where can they come back again?Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. He was getting tired of lying on his back, so he rolled over and sat on the edge of the scaffold. Looking down he noticed a little old lady praying in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Wanting to have some fun, he shouted down in a deep voice, “I am Jesus Christ, I am Jesus Christ! Listen to me and I will do miracles.”The old lady looked up, clasping her rosary, and shouted back, “You shut-up-a your mouth! I am-a talking to your mother!”“The last time I met you,” said the priest, “you made me very happy because you were sober. Today you have made me unhappy because you are drunk.”“True,” said the drunk with a smile, “but today is my turn to be happy.”Beware of your mind – it can deceive you!There is not anything in life which mind cannot hallucinate about, and when you are living in a special atmosphere like this, where meditation, enlightenment, blissfulness, ecstasy are in the very air, where everybody is thinking about these extraordinary experiences…This is not a common place. In the market people are thinking about money, about power, about respectability.This is not a marketplace.This is a temple of silence.Here everything is vibrating, and it is very easy to get caught into imagination. And particularly a woman is more capable of imagination than a man.A man thinks, a woman feels. Feeling is irrational. A man finds it hard to imagine. A woman is very easily capable of imagining anything. Her center of functioning is feeling, emotion, sentiments; her eyes are continuously filled with dreams. These dreams can be useful in poetry, in drama, but these dreams cannot be of any help – on the contrary they are great hindrances – on the path of truth.Truth is not your imagination, it is not your feeling.Truth is your being.But the woman is very easily persuaded…it is not her fault, it is her nature. These are the differences between man and woman. Men are basically skeptical, doubtful about everything, suspicious; hence they are more capable of scientific research.For a woman it is difficult to be a scientist, very rare. But as far as imagination is concerned, if she is allowed – but she has not been allowed for centuries – then no painter can compete with her, no poet can compete with her, no musician can go higher than she can go, no dancer can come even close to her. She can prove of tremendous help in creating a beautiful planet. She can fill it with songs, dances and love.But unfortunately man has not allowed her freedom to stand on her own and to contribute to life. Half of humanity has been deprived of contributing, and perhaps…it is my understanding that this has been done out of fear.Man is afraid of woman’s imagination. He is afraid because once she is allowed freedom to be creative, man will not be able to compete with her. His superiority, his ego, is in danger. Because of this fear that his superiority will be destroyed, that all his great poets will look like pigmies, and all his great painters will look amateur, it is better not to allow the woman education, the opportunity to express her feelings and her heart.But as far as enlightenment is concerned, man’s problem is his reason and woman’s problem is her feeling. Both are barriers to enlightenment. Man has to drop his reasoning, the woman has to drop her feeling. Both are at equal distance from enlightenment. Man’s distance is of reasoning, of mind; woman’s distance is of feeling, of heart – but the distance is equal. Man has to drop his logic and woman has to drop her emotions. Both have to drop something which is hindering the path.In various stages of her life a woman resembles the continents of the world. As a child she is like Africa, virgin territory, unexplored. In her youth she is like Asia, hot and exotic. In her prime she is like America, fully explored and free with her resources. In middle age she is like Europe, exhausted, but not without places of interest. And after that she is like Australia – everyone knows it is down there, but nobody much cares.Man has to drop his approach towards reality; he is always thinking and the woman is always feeling. Both are equally incapable of experiencing enlightenment, because one is filled with thoughts, the other is filled with feelings.Enlightenment is possible only when you are utterly empty – no thought, no feeling, just utter silence. Then what happens remains. It never goes away.So the question is significant for all. In your longing, in your desire, in your passion you are vulnerable to hallucinate, to start thinking or feeling that which you would like to experience. But this is dangerous because it will become your final block. You will never be able to reach beyond this barrier.It is good to be alert from the very beginning. Never imagine! Remember all that you can do for enlightenment is a preparedness, a silent being, a serenity. Enlightenment will come at the right moment, whenever you are absolutely silent.You don’t have to imagine it, you don’t have to even worry about what it is like. You don’t have to find the definition of it, you don’t have to be concerned about the description – what qualities, what experiences are going to happen through it – because all that is dangerous. All that can give your mind beautiful opportunities to imagine, to think and to believe…and Diti has even mentioned the word, saying that she believes: “I believe it is also possible…”The world of experience is not the world of belief: either you know or you don’t know. Belief is deceptive. An authentic religious person has nothing to do with belief. It is the inauthentic, the false, the phony who lives in systems of beliefs. These systems of beliefs make you Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans…they don’t allow you to become simply and purely religious. And remember that unless you are simply religious, you are not religious at all.It is not a question of your believing.It is a question of your experiencing.And for the experience, get prepared! Become the right receptive host…the guest comes.I am reminded of a beautiful story. Rabindranath has made a poem based on the story; his poem is named, “The King of the Night.”There is a great temple, perhaps the greatest because there are one thousand priests in the temple. It is vast and has thousands of statues, and millions of people pass through the temple every day.The high priest one night dreams that God has come into his dream. God says to him, “You have been preparing the temple every day for thousands of years with flowers, with fragrance and you are waiting for me. I am sorry that I could not come before, but tomorrow I am coming.”Just the idea that God is coming tomorrow…in the middle of the night the priest woke up. He was in a very great dilemma – whether to tell the other priests or not, because nobody is going to believe it. They will laugh, they will say, “You have got old and senile. God has never come. It was only a dream after all, and dreams don’t come true. Dreams are dreams! So don’t be worried about it, nobody is going to come.”But then he was also afraid. If it turns out to be true and God comes, then the temple will not be perfectly ready for him. So much work has to be done – the garden has to be cleaned, the path has to be made clean, the whole temple has to be washed, delicious food has to be made – the great guest is going to come. He thought, “It is better to be thought to be mad, senile, but it is dangerous to take the risk of not telling others.” Alone he cannot do it – the work is vast and the time is short. Tomorrow – who knows at what time – maybe in the morning, maybe in the afternoon, or by the evening certainly he will be coming.So he woke up all the priests, one thousand priests. They were all angry that he is talking nonsense in the middle of the night. They said, “You just go to sleep. You have become too old. Thinking and thinking continuously for your whole life that God will come one day, now you have convinced yourself. This is just a dream managed by your own unconscious. You simply go to sleep!”He said, “I will go to sleep, but I don’t want to take any chance. What is the harm if we clean the whole temple? It is good – it has not been cleaned thoroughly for centuries. There is no harm; even if God does not come it is good to clean the temple, to clean the garden, to clean the road as if he is coming. And who knows, he may come!”The other priests also thought that it was not good to take a chance, so the whole garden was cleaned, the whole temple was washed, all the statues were washed and so much incense, so much fragrance, so many flowers…The whole day they were waiting with delicious food prepared, but they could not eat unless the guest had come. And when it was afternoon and he had not come, doubt started arising and a few priests started saying, “It is all nonsense! We have been unnecessarily tortured the whole day; now it is afternoon and he has not come.”Slowly, slowly, more and more skepticism, more and more doubt, and by the evening almost everybody – except the high priest – was against waiting any longer. They said, “You simply managed to torture us. We have been starving the whole day; now it is enough. The sun is setting and the day is complete. Now we should eat, we should be allowed to eat. And we want to go to sleep early; we are tired.” Unwillingly the high priest agreed; they ate and they went to sleep.In the middle of the night a golden chariot comes to the doors of the temple. The noise that the wheels of the chariot make reaches the priests in their sleep.One priest says, “It seems he has come, because I can hear a strange noise which can only come from the great wheels of a chariot.”Others say, “Shut up and go to sleep! There is no chariot, nothing; it is just the clouds in the sky….” (a sudden burst of firecrackers) You listen to the clouds – it feels like he is coming!And finally the chariot stops at the gate. He steps down; he climbs the marble steps up to the main gate. Somebody says, “I hear his steps, he has come. I have even heard a knock on the doors.”But many others shout, “You idiots, will you allow us to sleep or not? We are tired, the whole day waiting and cleaning and working, and now somebody hears the chariot, somebody is hearing the footsteps. Nobody has come, it is just the wind that is knocking on the doors. Just go to sleep!”In the morning when they opened the door, they were shocked: the chariot had come, because there were, on the dirt road coming to the temple, the marks of a chariot. They could see on the steps some footprints.They were all silent. Their eyes were full of tears and the high priest said, “You did not listen to me! For centuries this temple has been waiting, and now the King of the Night has come. And we forgot completely that the temple was known as the temple of the King of the Night. Naturally the King of the Night will come in the night, not in the day. We waited in the day, and we went to sleep when it was time to be awake and alert and to watch and to wait. We missed the opportunity.”All that you need is a waiting consciousness.In absolute silence – aware, conscious – God, enlightenment, truth, whatever you name it, comes.It has always come, whenever somebody was ready; it has never been otherwise. In your readiness is the guarantee, the promise, that the ultimate is going to happen to you. You are not to think about it; you have to drop all thinking. You are not to have any feeling about it; you have to forget all feeling.You have to be just a silent waiting with deep trust, with great love, with infinite gratitude.Osho,During the days you were not speaking, I was in a total emotional and mind crisis. I got so much love, juice and energy from sitting two times a day in discourse – and after you stopped speaking my energy broke down. It seemed that all the dirt and mind came out even stronger than before. Please comment.It is going to happen to you – it is natural. But you have to learn to transcend it. I cannot be always with you. I would love to, but existence does not allow it. Existence gives only so much rope, and it is good; otherwise you will start taking me for granted.One day I will not be amongst you. It is good that once in a while I am absent, so you can start learning that what happens in my absence is your reality. When I am with you, you become overwhelmed with me. You forget yourself.And you have not to forget yourself!You have to remember yourself, because only through remembrance you will be able to transform yourself.It is natural; hence I am not condemning it. But you are in search of something beyond – beyond the normal, the natural – something transcendental. You have to learn the way, and the way has to be traveled alone.I cannot come with you. I can show you the way, I can show you the moon. But my fingers are not the moon, and I cannot continue to show you the moon. Sooner or later you have to forget my fingers and you have to look at the moon yourself. You have to follow the path alone.Naturally when I was not coming daily, morning and evening, to be with you, you started feeling a kind of breakdown. It was not a breakdown; it was simply that your reality was surfacing. It had not been getting the opportunity to surface. I was so much with you that you had gone into the shadow, into the background. I had become more real to you than yourself.When I was not coming, in my absence your reality was exposed to you. It is good, because unless you know what you are, where you are, your pilgrimage cannot begin. So those days were of great importance.Remember: whatever you find within yourself, however much rubbish it may be, it is your reality. It can be cleaned, it can be dropped; you can move away from it. But before anything can be done about it, you have to know it. That is the first and the most significant thing.A farmer, plowing with one ox, kept crying out: “Giddup, Joe! Giddup, Alexander! Giddup, Henry! Giddup, Ronnie!”A man passing by asked him, “How many names does that ox have, anyway?”“Only one,” the farmer replied. “His name is Pete, but he does not know his own strength. So I put blinkers on him, yell a lot of names, and he thinks there are half a dozen other oxen helping him.”That’s what I have been doing with you. You are alone, but I go on shouting, “Giddup, Joe! Giddup Alexander! Giddup, Henry! Giddup, Ronnie!” And you feel relaxed…you are not alone, so many people are on the path.But the truth is that everybody is alone. And it is good to understand that you are alone. It will make you aware of your own strength. You have enough strength to complete the pilgrimage; in fact you have more strength than any pilgrimage needs. You are just not aware of it.When you are with me, you are not with yourself – it is perfectly right. But once in a while you have to be with yourself too, just to get the comparison – the comparison between what you are and what you can be. Otherwise you don’t have any sense of direction, you don’t know where to move, what is the right dimension for you. You don’t know your potential.If my presence can make you aware of your potential, your possibilities, your blossomings, then I have done my work. I have given you a glimpse of your own future. But remember, it is your future not your present.Once in a while you have to be reminded of your present too; otherwise you will start living in a euphoria of the future and you will forget all about your reality in the present. That reality in the present has to be changed: you have to go beyond it. You have to attain that euphoria and make it real. But it has to be your own – not mine, not anybody else’s.The false teacher is one who never gives you a chance to know that his euphoria has become slowly, slowly your euphoria, that his experience and his presence has become a kind of drug. You feel good, but a drug cannot be the source of ultimate transformation.The authentic master goes on continuously giving you glimpses of the beyond, but always reminds you about the earth you are standing upon. He goes on telling you about the flowers and the spring that is going to come, but he never allows you to forget your roots and your reality. Your spring has not come yet. It is possible to experience my fragrance and get into a delusion that it is your fragrance, your peace, your silence, your love.I am not your enemy and I will never do such a thing. I am your friend, and I would like you always to remember your reality – side by side with remembering your ultimate potential. What you are and what you can be, both have to be remembered. Then, and only then, the transformation.The understanding between me and you is not always exactly the way I would like it to be. But I never expect anything impossible from you; in fact I don’t expect anything from you. I share my experience, knowing perfectly well all the possibilities of misunderstanding. So I go on making you alert about the misunderstandings that are possible. They can be avoided if you are alert.All communication is a difficult process, because I want to say something which cannot be said, and yet I have to say it – and I have to say it in words which are absolutely impotent to convey it. I say something, you hear something else. But I know this is natural, and particularly in those sannyasins who are new, who will only listen to my words and interpret those words according to their own prejudices. Those who are old enough, who have lived long enough with me, know perfectly well my ways of working.A girl said to her date, “You remind me of the sea.”“You mean,” he said, “because I am so wild, magnificent, and romantic?”“No,” she said, “because you make me sick.”Human communication is a difficult problem!Walking down the street in New York, Hymie Goldberg said to his wife Becky, “Hey, did you see that pretty girl smiling at me?”“That’s nothing,” said Becky. “The first time I saw you I laughed out loud.”Paddy complained to his friend Sean, that he had seen his wife going into a movie with a strange man.“Did you follow them inside?” asked Sean.“No way,” replied Paddy, “I had already seen the movie.”A hotel night clerk was surprised to see a guest walking through the lobby in his pink pajamas.“Hey there,” he shouted, “what do you think you are doing?”The guest woke up and apologized. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “I am a somnambulist.”“Well,” said the clerk, “you can’t walk around here like that, no matter what religion you belong to.”Farmer Jenkins had two cows, Daisy and Tinkerbell. One day he borrowed the bull from the next farm and instructed his farmhand, Jake, to watch and make sure that the bull did his job properly.That afternoon the local priest came round for tea and just as the farmer’s wife was pouring it, Jake came rushing into the room and shouted, “Mister Jenkins, the bull just screwed the hell out of Daisy.”Jake’s face fell when he saw the priest, and the farmer was furious. He took Jake into the other room and said, “Look, I want to be kept informed of the bull’s progress, but this is too much. Next time use the word surprised, not screwed.”Twenty minutes later Jake came running in again and said, “Boss! Boss! The bull just…the bull…” but seeing the priest he could not say another word. The farmer got up and said, “Jake, did the bull surprise Tinkerbell this time?”“Surprise Tinkerbell? I will say he did,” cried Jake enthusiastically. “He screwed the hell out of Daisy again!”

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 27 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Can you say something about the mystery of women?Devageet, it is one of the ancientmost questions. Man has always puzzled about women, and the real problem is neither man nor woman. Reduced to the factual, to the existential, the problem is between the head and the heart.The head cannot understand the mystery of the heart. The head is logical, rational, mathematical, scientific; the heart knows nothing of reason, nothing of logic. The heart functions in a totally different way. Its functioning creates in the head the idea of the mystery. It is not a question about women; it is a question that arises because women function through the heart and man functions through the head. Have you ever heard any women asking, “What is the mystery of man?” They simply know it.The problem arises out of logical reasoning. It is a very superficial phenomenon. It is good with objects, with dead things; it deals with them perfectly because a dead thing has no interiority, a dead thing has no inner being, it has no life. The scientist is perfectly right about objects, but the moment he comes to think about subjectivity – the interiority – he is baffled, because reason cannot function there.The heart knows without any process of knowing, without any syllogism, without any argument. How do you know that the rose is beautiful? Is it a rational conclusion? If you bring reason in, you will not be able to prove that the rose is beautiful, because reason cannot fathom the phenomenon of beauty.When you say the rose is beautiful, you are functioning from the heart. When you say the starry night overwhelms you, it is not a rational statement; if you are forced to prove it rationally, you will be at a loss. Then suddenly you will become aware that it was the heart that has spoken, and the head is absolutely incapable of figuring out how the heart functions.But the heart is not in the same difficulty about the head, because the head is superficial and the heart is deep down within you. The lower cannot understand the higher. The higher simply understands the lower, there is no need of any reasoning. Your heart is both higher than your head and deeper than your head. The woman can be a poet, but cannot really be a mathematician. Mathematics is purely a game of the mind. Poetry is a totally different phenomenon.I am reminded of Frau Einstein, Albert Einstein’s wife. She was a poet, and Albert Einstein was perhaps the greatest scientific thinker of all the ages. Naturally Frau Einstein wanted her husband to know about her poetry. Einstein tried to avoid the subject as much as he could, but finally one night, the full moon in the sky, Frau Einstein could not resist the temptation. She had composed a beautiful poem about the full moon, and she recited the poem.Albert Einstein looked at her with great surprise, almost shocked. She could not understand, “Why is he looking at me in this weird manner? At the most he can say that the poetry is not great…but he is looking at me as if I am insane!” After the recital of the poem she asked Albert Einstein, “What do you think?”He said, “I had never thought that you are so crazy. You talk about the moon as beautiful, you talk about the moon reminding you of your beloved. It is sheer nonsense! The moon is too big, it cannot be substituted for your beloved. And the moon is not at all beautiful! It is just as ordinary as the earth, even more ordinary because there is no greenery, no water, just barren land. And the light that you see reflected from the moon is not its own. That light is borrowed from the sun, it is not coming from the moon. The sunlight falls on the moon and the rays are reflected back, and those reflected rays are coming to your eyes; the moon is not the source of them. I had always thought that you are well educated, but you don’t know even the ABC of physics!”Now was the chance for Frau Einstein to look at him as if he is insane, because for centuries poets have sung songs about the moon – its beauty, its tremendous magnetic force, its cool light. It has a certain hypnotic spell on the heart…and it is now also proved by facts that it has a certain hypnotic spell.More people – in fact all except Mahavira – have become enlightened on a full-moon night. Mahavira is the only exception; he became enlightened on a no-moon night. Gautam Buddha was born on a full-moon night, became enlightened on a full-moon night, died on a full-moon night. He is a perfect example of the hypnotic spell of the moon. Many more people go mad on the full-moon night – these are approved statistics – and more people commit suicide on full-moon nights.The full moon somehow drives man’s mind into dimensions beyond reasoning. And it is not only man that is affected by the full moon; even the ocean is affected. But a physicist, a mathematician will not be able to understand it – and Frau Einstein never again mentioned poetry to Albert Einstein in her whole life. Although she went on composing, she was not publishing them. It was decided on the first recital that that kind of dialogue is not possible between her and her husband – but it is not any exceptional case.No husband and no wife are in the situation of understanding each other. Misunderstanding is the natural situation. The man says something, the woman immediately understands something else. The man cannot believe how she has come to this conclusion – and to the woman that conclusion is absolutely clear, there is no doubt about it. And whatever she says, the man is at a loss to figure it out.Psychologists have started calling couples intimate enemies. They are…because no one understands each other. But the reason is not the woman and the man. The reason is far deeper. It is the head and the heart.So I would like to emphasize the point, Devageet, that the question from the very beginning has been formed in a wrong way. It is not the mystery of women, it is the mystery of the heart – which the head is incapable of figuring out. The heart has no problem about the head; it is a lower, more superficial layer, and the heart understands it. So when men say that women are mysteries, women simply smile amongst themselves: Look at these idiots! Have you ever heard any woman saying that women are mysteries? They know each other perfectly well. There is no mystery.It will be better to understand in a different dimension too. Forget about man and woman; just think about your own head and your own heart. Do they have a communion? Are they capable of understanding each other? I have not met Albert Einstein, but I would have loved to meet him for the simple reason that I wanted to ask him how he fell in love with Frau Einstein. What physics, what mathematics, what science is behind the experience of falling in love?But perhaps he never thought about it. Love is coming from the heart; it cannot come from the head. Even the greatest scientist once in a while goes astray from the head. One beautiful sunset and he is overwhelmed. He forgets that he is a scientist and he is not allowed to do such things, feminine things; he is a male mind. And every scientist falls in love with a woman without ever thinking what love is. It is a mystery…even your own heart is a mystery to you.My own understanding is that Mahavira at first denied any women to be initiated into sannyas. The same was the case with Gautam Buddha; he denied women to be initiated into sannyas. And the same is the case with other religions; they have all put woman in a secondary place. And the reason, according to me, is that all our so-called religions are head-oriented…too much head. Their God is not their love, their God is their idea. It is a hypothesis. They have created a system – rational, logical, flawless – but it is their own mind which is creating the system. It is not a discovery. It is not unveiling the mystery of existence.And why have all these religions been so afraid of women? There were other reasons, but the most fundamental reason is that all the founders of religions were male, and their theologies were from the head. To allow women among their fellow travelers was to create unnecessary trouble, because they speak different languages, they understand different languages. They are coming from different spaces. At the most, they can tolerate each other.That is what is happening between every wife and every husband: they are just tolerating each other. There seems to be no possibility of a sane conversation. Any conversation between a wife and husband immediately leads to conflict, and the woman starts behaving, according to man, in such a crazy way…throwing things, breaking things. He cannot understand – what argument is this? But the woman knows perfectly well that only this argument will decide the thing – and it decides! The man simply agrees, “You are right, but just don’t destroy more things!” In every argument with a woman, the woman is the winner, although she knows nothing about argumentation.The day he initiated the first woman into sannyas, Gautam Buddha said, “My religion was going to last for five thousand years. Now it will last only five hundred years” – not a great welcome to the poor woman!Asked why he was saying so, he said, “It is impossible to include both women and men without them coming into conflict. The religion will destroy itself from within. If it had remained just confined to males there was a possibility for it to continue at least for five thousand years, because they can understand each other.”You have to be very alert about it…. I am the first man who makes no difference between initiating men and women, and my feeling is – if I were to reply to Gautam Buddha, I would say, “If it was only males it would last for only five hundred years. Now it is men and women together it can last for eternity.”When heart and head are together, you are more complete and more whole. Heart is a part, head is a part, but together…if a communion is possible, your strength is not doubled, it is multiplied. How can the head and the heart come to a point of meeting? And it is a multidimensional question:It is between the woman and the man.It is between the heart and the head.It is between the East and the West.One of the royal poets of England, Rudyard Kipling, has written two famous lines which have become better known than anything else that he wrote. Those lines are, “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Nobody has argued against it…and he was the royal poet of the British Empire.But I disagree absolutely, without any conditions and reservations, because wherever you are standing East and West are meeting. Mumbai is West to Calcutta, Calcutta is East to Mumbai; Tokyo is East to Calcutta, and Calcutta is West to Tokyo. Wherever you are, you cannot say you are in the East or in the West. They are relative terms; they are not fixed territories. Wherever you are, in every man, in every tree, in every bird, East and West are meeting.Rudyard Kipling is simply talking nonsense! But he has a point in his ridiculous statement – and the point is the same. The West is head-oriented and the East is heart-oriented. It is the same question in different directions: How can they meet? How can there be an intimate love between the head and the heart, not intimate enmity? – it is a contradiction in terms.They meet in meditation, because in meditation the head is empty and the heart is empty: the head is empty of thoughts and the heart is empty of feelings. When there are two emptinesses you cannot keep them separate, because there is nothing between them to keep them separate. Two zeros become one zero…Two nothingnesses cannot exist separately; they are bound to become one because there is not even a fence between them.But Rudyard Kipling, although he lived in India almost his whole life, has never heard about meditation. It is meditation in which the head and heart lose each other, melt into each other. It is meditation in which man and woman melt into each other.In India we have an ancient, very ancient statue – one of the most beautiful pieces of art – a statue of Ardhanarishwar. The statue is half man and half woman. It is the statue of Shiva, the Hindu God, and half of the body is of the woman and the other half of the body is of the man. Up to the time of Carl Gustav Jung it was thought that it is only a mythology, metaphor, poetry – but this cannot be true. The whole credit goes to Carl Gustav Jung for introducing to the world that this is not a metaphor, this is a reality.Every man and every woman are both, because every child is born of a father and a mother. So something of the mother and something of the father is present in every child, whether the child is a girl or the child is a boy. The only difference can be that the man is a little more man, perhaps fifty-one percent man and forty-nine percent woman, and the woman is fifty-one percent woman and forty-nine percent man. But the difference is not much.That’s why it has become scientifically possible to change the sexes – because the other sex is also present, just the percentage of hormones has to be changed. What was fifty-one percent has to be made forty-nine, or what was forty-nine has to be made fifty-one…then the man becomes woman and the woman becomes man.But even within you, you are not at ease. There is a conflict, continuous conflict between the head and the heart, between the man and the woman. This conflict can be dissolved only if the head drops its thinking and the heart drops its feeling and both are just pure empty spaces. In that emptiness there is a great meeting and a great understanding.I don’t see any woman as a mystery. I have looked hard, and perhaps there will not be another man in the whole world who has come in contact with so many men and so many women. But neither the man seems to be a mystery nor the woman seems to be a mystery, because within myself the head and heart have melted into each other, and that has given me a new perspective and has changed the whole vision around me.Devageet, if you really want to understand the mystery of women you will have to understand the art of melting your head into your heart. That will not only help you to know the mystery of women, it will also help you to know the mystery of men. Not only that, it will help you to know the mystery of the whole existence.A shy young girl was about to get married, so she went to see her very experienced friend for some advice.“Doris,” she began, “it may sound silly, but there are a few things I just have to ask you.”“That’s okay,” said Doris. “Just go ahead.”“Okay,” said the shy girl, “is it all right to talk to your husband while making love?”“Well,” said Doris, “I must admit that I have never done that, but I suppose there is nothing wrong in it – as long as there is a telephone within reach.”There is mystery but it is not confined only to women. The whole existence is mysterious. This beautiful rain…this music of the falling rain…the joy of the trees. Don’t you think there is great mystery?There was a hill station in the state where I was a professor for many years, and on that hill station was a rest house far away deep in the hills, absolutely lonely. For miles there was nobody…even the servant who used to take care of the rest house used to leave by the evening for his own home. I used to go to that rest house whenever I could find time and sometimes it used to rain just like this…and I was alone in that rest house and for miles there was nobody. Just the music of rain, just the dance of the trees…I have never forgotten the beauty of it. Whenever it rains I again remember it. It has left such a beautiful impact.If you look, then each flower is a mystery. From where do those colors come? Every rainbow is a mystery, every moment of life is a mystery. Just to be here…is it not a mystery that you are nowhere else but here?Once your eyes are clear and your head and heart are no more in conflict, everything starts becoming mysterious. Then you don’t want to de-mystify it – that is absolutely ugly and criminal! The mystery of existence has to be welcomed as it is. Dissecting it, demystifying it, is a violation, aggression, violence.A man of meditation simply enjoys the flowers, the birds, the trees, the rain, the sun, the moon, the people. It is good that we are all engulfed in a mysterious whole. Life will be utterly boring if every mystery is decoded.Science’s whole effort is to demystify existence. Poetry and art are concerned in rejoicing, in welcoming the mystery of existence. And the mystic, the religious man, lives the mystery – not from the outside as a poet, but from the very inside of it. He becomes himself mystery.There is a beautiful story. Unfortunately it cannot be true. I would have loved it to have been true…! In the East there have been many lovers, very famous lovers – Heer and Ranjha, Sheeri and Farhad – and the most famous is the third couple, Laila and Majnu.None of them could meet and live with each other. That is their great fortune; hence they remained loving each other for their whole life.Majnu was a poor man. Laila was a very rich, super-rich girl, and the parents were not willing to give their only girl into the hands of Majnu, who was nobody at all, just a beggar. Just to avoid him, and to avoid any slander, the parents left the town for another city; they had businesses in many cities and houses in many cities.The day they left, Majnu was standing outside the city by the side of a tree, hiding himself in the foliage of the tree, just to see for the last time his beloved Laila moving away. He saw Laila on her camel, and the whole caravan was moving away. He went on looking and looking as far as he could, and in a desert you can see very far, there are no obstructions.Finally, beyond the horizon, they disappeared…but Majnu went on looking. This is where the story becomes a myth, but of tremendous significance. He never left that place. He trusted his love, and he hoped that one day Laila will return from the same route. There was no other route going out from the town.After twelve years, Laila returned. The father was dead and now she was free at last. She never married anyone else; she had insisted that if she was going to marry anyone, she would marry Majnu. Her father had said, “If that is your decision, then my decision is that you will never marry.” But when the father died, Laila came.Now twelve years is a long time. In these twelve years Majnu had been standing by the side of the tree. The foliage had grown much; he had not eaten, he had not drunk water, and by and by he had become joined with the tree. Standing for twelve years was so long…slowly, slowly he became part of the tree.Laila came and she inquired about Majnu in the town. The people said, “It is a very sad story. He had gone to say good-bye to you, but he never came back. Only once in a while in the deep silences of the night, from a certain tree, a sound comes calling your name: ‘Laila, it is too long. When are you going to come back?’ – and people have become afraid of the tree because it seems the tree is haunted by ghosts or something. Nobody comes close to the tree.”Laila went to the tree. She heard the voice, she heard the joyful welcome, but she could not see where Majnu was hiding. She entered into the foliage of the tree. With great difficulty she could figure out that Majnu had become part of the tree.It cannot be factual…but the mystic becomes part of the mystery of existence. And the story of Laila and Majnu is a Sufi story. Perhaps it is symbolic of the ultimate union with existence.Not trying to demystify it, but becoming a part of the mystery yourself, that is the only true understanding. The mystery will remain a mystery, but by becoming yourself a mystery, you will understand.That is the only true understanding. All other understandings are only knowledge borrowed from others.Osho,Is misunderstanding natural to the human mind?Milarepa, misunderstanding is certainly natural to the human mind. Mind is a misunderstanding, and through mind whatsoever you understand is misunderstanding.Understanding arises only when mind is absent, because what is mind after all? – just a collection of thoughts, none of which is your experience. Through that screen of collected thoughts, whatever you see you interpret. You never see what is there, you only see what your mind can interpret. And all interpretations are misunderstandings.When there is no interpretation, you simply see the fact, the truth…that which is. Then the mind does not distort, does not color, does not give meanings to it. You don’t have any mind; you are just an opening, a mirror reflecting reality as it is.What are the differences in the world between people? What is the difference between a Christian and a Hindu, or a Buddhist and a Mohammedan? Nobody is born as a Buddhist or a Christian or a Hindu. The differences are only of the mind and you don’t bring the mind with you when you are born. It is all nurtured.Your mind is created by the society you are born in, and of course they create your mind for their own purposes. It is not for you but for the society, for the state, for the church. Your mind is a slave. Whoever has created it has created it for its own purposes – to exploit you.Every nation fills your mind with nationality. Every religion fills your mind with the idea that even to die for your religion is the greatest virtue or to kill for your religion is not a sin. All these religions, all these nations, these political, social, religious ideologies, go on conflicting, fighting. Man has not done anything much on the earth except fighting or preparing for fighting. There are only two periods in history: one is preparation for war, and the other is war itself. Man has never known peace.My history teacher in the high school was at a loss when I told him this, because he was talking about periods of peace when there was no war, and he was dividing history into war periods and peace periods. I said, “I cannot agree with you because what do you do in your peace time? – you prepare for war. So I would like to divide history into two periods: preparation for war, and war itself.”He was a very nice gentleman, hence he was not angry. For a moment he was silent and then he said, “Perhaps you are right. My whole life I have been dividing history into these two periods…but you seem to be more clear, because if there is a peace period, from where does the war come in?”The day we will have peace, then there will be no war. But up to now we have not known peace. What is the reason for all this conflict and war and violence and murders and massacres? The mind!The world will know peace only when we have learnt how to go beyond mind. Then you are not a Christian and you are not an Indian, you are not a Chinese and you are not a communist. Then you are simply a human being. In that utter purity of humanness, the world will come to know exactly what peace is and what a celebration it brings with itself.Mind as such is nothing but misunderstanding. If you really want to understand, get rid of the mind. But people do just the opposite: in trying to understand they go on strengthening their minds. They think a stronger mind – more nourished, more reformed, more educated – will be able to understand. I have seen the most educated people, but their Christianity remains there, their Hinduism remains there. Even the very highly educated culture remains superstitious…and their misunderstanding becomes even deeper. Now they have more refined arguments for their misunderstanding.One great Christian missionary, Stanley Jones used to stay with me. He had fallen in love with me. He was an old man and a world famous missionary, very educated, very refined and sophisticated. But I asked him one day, “The only thing that puzzles me is that with so much information and so much sophistication, you are still a Christian, you have not yet become just human. Deep down you still think that Christianity is the only true religion, that all other religions are so-so…they may be faraway echoes of truth, but Christianity has the monopoly of truth.“Even with your understanding you have not been able to see that Jesus Christ cannot be compared to Gautam Buddha. Jesus Christ remains a Jew, dies a Jew. He had no idea that his crucifixion would become the beginning of a new religion. He had never thought beyond the boundaries of Jewish thinking. Gautam Buddha was a rebel. He was born a Hindu, but he renounced Hinduism. By renouncing Hinduism, he renounced the whole mind that the Hindus had given to him. He became clear and pure, just a child again. That makes him a totally unique and different person than all other religious people.”Stanley Jones said to me, “Whenever you argue for anything, you argue well! But there are reasons which cannot be dispelled by argument.”I said, “What kind of reasons?”He said, “I cannot refute you on this point, but in the deepest part of me I cannot put anybody above Jesus Christ.”I said, “This is what I call the mind. You don’t have any argument, but still you have a conditioning so deep…with this conditioning you cannot look around the world with open eyes, unprejudiced, impartial.“You go on arguing against other religions without any difficulty. You go on finding superstitions in Hindus, in Mohammedans, in Jainas, in Buddhists, but I have never heard you talk about the superstitions of Christians. Do you mean to say that they don’t have any superstitions? Or is it simply that your mind cannot conceive of it because it has been created by Christians? In Christian colleges, in theological trainings, your mind has been completely filled with Christian ideas, and you think it is your mind. In fact you are being used.”But this is the situation. People think they need a greater mind to understand. I want you to see it clearly: you need no mind if you want to understand. You need only a meditative silent space.Osho,Am I really a good therapist?To be a good therapist is a very difficult job. A good therapist has to be immensely compassionate, because it is not his techniques of therapy that help people, it is his love. There is nothing compared to love as far as healing the wounds of a man’s being are concerned. All other techniques can be helpful, supportive, but the basic is not a technique but a loving heart.A therapist cannot be a professional. The moment a therapist becomes professional things start going wrong, because the profession of therapy means that the patient should never be cured. He should be given hope but he should never be cured, because once you cure him you have lost one customer. The physician or the therapist, their profession is very strange.I have heard about an old doctor. His son came back from the medical college, fresh, and he told the father, “Now you have become old and I can take charge of all your patients. You can rest. If I need any advice I will ask you.”The father said, “I was waiting for this. You are now well educated. You know more than I know, you know the latest researches in medicine, but if I can be of any help, I will be available.”After three days the father asked the son how things were going. He said, “Great, just great. The woman you have been treating for thirty years for arthritis I have cured within three days.”The father said, “My god! You are an idiot. That woman is so rich, she can afford to remain uncured for her whole life. And how do you think I was supporting you in the university? That woman has provided money for your education, and that woman was going to provide money for your younger brother. That woman was almost a gold mine.”The son was shocked. He said, “What are you saying?”The father said, “You are young, you don’t understand. This profession is a contradiction. You have to cure, but in such a way that the cure takes as long as possible.”The poor get cured sooner, the richer get cured on a long term basis…!And psychotherapy in particular is in an even more dangerous contradiction. There is not a single person in the whole world who is totally psychoanalyzed. In the first place, psychoanalysts are making great earnings; they are the most highly paid professionals in the world. They cannot afford to lose rich patients – and they have only rich patients.Poor countries don’t suffer from any diseases which psychoanalysis can help. When people are hungry, what can psychoanalysis do? Psychoanalysis comes only when people are so rich they don’t know what to do with their money. Then psychoanalysis comes in and shows them what to do with it – be psychoanalyzed!A good therapist is one who avoids being a professional. It should be part of your love, not part of your business; only then can you be a good therapist. And as far as I know, you are one of the best therapists around here. I don’t see in you things which lead therapists astray. One is a certain kind of gurudom. A therapist should not become a guru, because the moment you become a guru you start changing your patients into your disciples, you start exploiting their misery for your own aggrandizement, for your own ego. You start playing a role of being superior to you, higher than you.I have not seen in your eyes that ugly ego which changes helping people into exploiting people. I have seen so many therapists who sooner or later fall into the trap. Because they know something more than the ordinary normal human being, they are in a position to exploit, they are in a position to create a following. That is not the work of the therapist.The work of the therapist is to help the patient to drop his tensions, to drop his unnecessary problems, to drop his habit of creating problems. Most of the patients that come to you are hypochondriacs; they are not suffering from any real problem. Seventy percent of their problems are just imaginary.I have seen people looking into medical periodicals, medical encyclopedias to find out what kind of disease they have – they don’t have any disease! But it seems, particularly in the most advanced countries, women are bragging…just as they used to brag in the past about their ornaments, about their mink coats, about their houses, about their luxuries, now they are bragging about psychoanalysis: “Who is your psychoanalyst?” – some poor guy or some great psychoanalyst, only very few people can afford his services…And it becomes an addiction, particularly in societies where people don’t have time to listen to anybody, where everybody is in a rush.Bertrand Russell mentions in his autobiography, “The way psychoanalysis is growing, I can predict that in the next century, if man still remains on the earth, there will be psychoanalysts on every street in the world.” Everybody will need once in a while to go to the psychoanalysts – not because he has a disease, not that he has some mental problem, but just to talk. Nobody listens, nobody has time. You have to pay the psychoanalyst for listening.In fact, if you are attentively listening to somebody a subtle help happens. He unburdens himself; things that he cannot say to other people he can say to you, because it is part of your work that you will keep it secret, that you will not start gossiping about it. So in privacy and secrecy he can open his heart, his wounds which he goes on hiding in the society. And by hiding the wounds, you can never cure them. By exposing them to light they are cured.I have heard about a young psychotherapist who was working as an assistant to a famous old psychoanalyst. He used to get bored because people were coming with the same dreams, the same problems, the same worries…every day from morning till evening you have to listen and listen and listen, and it becomes heavy, so heavy that even in the night you cannot sleep. You have listened so much that until it gets settled you cannot sleep. But he had never seen the old man ever feeling tired or bored.So one day, getting out of the office, in the elevator, the young man asked the old psychoanalyst, “What is your secret? You must have been in psychoanalysis for almost sixty years – sixty years of listening to all kinds of garbage and crap! I have just been here for three months, and I am tired and finished and I am thinking I have to change the profession. These people will drive me crazy!”The old man laughed and he said, “Who listens? There is no need to listen. Just pretend.”That’s why Sigmund Freud has devised a beautiful couch. The patient lies on the couch, and behind the couch – the patient cannot see – sits the psychoanalyst. Whether he is there or not does not matter. Once in a while he goes out and comes in, and the psychoanalysis continues. The man goes on talking about his dreams, about his worries, about his problems, uncoiling his mind, and he feels better. The psychoanalyst is not doing anything; he is simply giving his time and pretending to be attentive.But this becomes an addiction. The patient has to come twice or thrice a week because so much goes on gathering in his head that he has to unburden it. But I will not call that old man a good therapist. He is simply exploiting the weaknesses and the frailties of human beings.Be attentive, be respectful, be loving. That makes a good therapist. The patient is not different from you. You are in the same boat. You not only allow him to open his heart, you also open your heart to him to give him a feeling that he is not alone in his suffering, that perhaps everybody in the world is suffering and hiding it.The good therapist will create a friendliness, a deep intimacy with the patient. He should not remain on a high pedestal, far above, as if he has no problems. The fact is therapists have more problems than anybody else. They have their own problems and they have other people’s problems too; hence four times more therapists go insane than any other profession, and four times more therapists commit suicide than any other profession. It is not just accidental.But if you can be friendly, if you can hold the hand of the patient, if you can tell him that these are your problems too and it is good to have a companion, to have a friend, “We can work it out together. It is not only that you will be helped, I will be helped also….”Unless a therapist comes to this humbleness, he is not going to help. And I can see in your eyes the possibility of this humbleness.In the middle of her psychiatric session, Mrs. Blossom suddenly exclaimed, “Doctor, I simply can’t resist you! How about a little kiss?”“Absolutely not!” the doctor replied indignantly. “That would be contrary to the ethics of my profession. Now continue what you were telling me.”“Well, as I was saying,” the patient reluctantly resumed, “I am always having arguments with my husband about his father, and just yesterday…I am sorry, doctor, I just can’t go on talking. I have this overwhelming impulse. Come on! What harm would there be if you gave me just one little kiss?”“That’s absolutely impossible!” the doctor snapped. “In fact, I should not even be lying here on this couch with you!”Patients are being exploited sexually, financially, in every possible way. The patient has to be given as much respect and dignity as you can manage. You should be a humble helper, not a savior, then you can help people immensely. You can be a good therapist. You have to be.My therapists have to be in a different way than the therapists in the outside world. There they are business people. Here you are helping your fellow travelers, your brothers, your sisters. And by helping them, you are helping yourself because their problems and your problems are not different.The village idiot was very famous. His name was Elmer. One day a village resident wanted to show a visiting friend just what an idiot Elmer was.“Watch this,” he said. “Hey, Elmer! I have got something for you.” He then held out his hand, and on the outstretched palm were a nickel and a dime. “Go ahead, Elmer,” he said, “take one.”So Elmer said, “Thank you, I will take the big one,” and picked up the nickel.The man winked at his friend and then said, “See what an idiot he is?”But as Elmer shuffled off, the visitor felt sorry for him and ran after him.“Listen, Elmer,” he said earnestly, “don’t you know that the small coin is worth twice as much as the big one?”“Of course I do,” said Elmer, “but the first time I pick up the dime, they will stop playing the game.”Even idiots are not so much idiots as you think; they have their own intelligence. Your patients are not just to be treated objectively. You have to bridge yourself with your patient. You have to become a friend before you can be a therapist – and particularly the therapists who are working in the field of sannyas. Their function is not the same as the function of the psychotherapist in the outside world.In the outside world, psychotherapy is nothing but a strategy of the society to keep people within their normal limits; the psychologist, psychoanalyst, therapist are all helping the society. Whenever somebody starts going beyond the normal standards, they pull him back down. It is not necessarily helpful…One can go below mind, and then it is good to pull him up. But if somebody is going beyond mind, then to pull him down is not a help. It is just the opposite of help.Here within my field therapy is used only as a cleaning process. It is just preparing the ground, taking out the wild weeds, the stones, so that I can manage to bring the roses of meditation into your life. Here therapy is only a preparation for meditation; its function is totally different from in the outside world. There you have to bring the person back into mind. Here you have to help the person to be courageous so that he can step beyond mind.You are preparing people for me. The ultimate push is going to be through me. You have just to give them courage and encouragement. This can be done not by being special, not by being higher, not by being holier. You are not priests and you are not professionals. You are just fellow travelers in this vast caravan, and you have to help people, prepare people because now there is a gap that never used to be in the past.Buddha never needed any psychotherapy for his sannyasins; those people were innocent. But in these twenty-five centuries, people have lost their innocence, they have become too knowledgeable. People have lost their contact with existence. They have become uprooted.I am the first person who uses therapy but whose interest is not therapy but meditation, just as it was with Chuang Tzu or Gautam Buddha. They never used therapy because there was no need. People were simply ready, and you could bring the rosebushes without clearing the ground. The ground was already clear.In these twenty-five centuries man has become so burdened with rubbish, so many wild weeds have grown in his being that I am using therapy just to clean the ground, take away the wild weeds, the roots, so the difference between the ancient man and the modern man is destroyed.The modern man has to be made as innocent as the ancient man, as simple, as natural. He has lost all these great qualities. The therapist has to help him – but his work is only a preparation. It is not the end. The end part is going to be the meditation.As far as you are concerned, you are doing perfectly well.

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The Great Pilgrimage 01-28Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Great Pilgrimage 28 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I still study in school and I want to know: What is the secret of education?It may be a little difficult for you to understand the secret of education. But I cannot come down from my vision, so I will tell what I feel is the secret, knowing perfectly well perhaps you may not be able to understand it yet, you are too young. But through you perhaps others may understand, and one day you will also grow up and be in a position to understand it.The question is very complex and I can see that you have asked it without knowing its implications. It is the question that is one of the most fundamental for the future of man. I would like to begin from the very beginning.Up to now, man has been living an accidental life. No one knows what your potential is, what you are supposed by nature to be. And the question – the secret of education – cannot be decided without knowing what your potential is. Are you going to become a musician? A poet? An engineer? A doctor? Without knowing anything about your possibilities, almost groping in the dark, we go on deciding people’s destiny for strange reasons.The very word education, in its roots, means to draw out. It has the very secret in its root-meaning. Whatever is within you as a seed has to be drawn out, given full opportunity, so that it can blossom. But no one knows what is hidden within you, what kind of soil you need and what kind of gardener, what is the right climate and the right season and the right time for you to be sown.Parents decide about their children according to their own ambitions. Somebody wanted to be very rich and could not be: he is hoping through his children that his ambitions should be fulfilled. Although he could not manage it, he will manage through his children. Naturally he would not like his children to move in directions where possibilities of becoming rich are scarce. As a musician you cannot earn much; as a flute-player you cannot compete with engineers, with doctors, with politicians, with industrialists.Naturally the parents who have been interested in money would like to send their children into a certain pattern of education which brings them the right qualification to be rich. The decision is arbitrary. The person about whom it is being decided, his potential has not even been taken into consideration. He may have the potential of becoming a great dancer, or a great painter, he may not have any greed for money, but you are forcing him into a direction where greed for money is an essential to be successful.Even if he succeeds…of which there is not much chance, because unless you have an inner urge, an instinct for money, the chances of your success are rare. You will be a failure, and your life will become a long, drawn-out misery. But if by chance you succeed and you become rich, still your misery will not be dropped, because you never wanted to be rich in the first place. This was not your destiny. You are living somebody else’s life – how can you be happy? You are trying to fulfill somebody else’s ambition and you are not in a position to fulfill your own nature.Hence the immense misery in the world: the person who could have been a great musician has become just a pigmy industrialist. A person who could have been a great mystic has been forced to become a mathematician. Almost everybody is in the wrong place. And to be in the wrong place is very painful. You yourself are not aware of why you are suffering, because you yourself are not aware that you have missed your target. You are following somebody else’s idea of what you should be.So the first thing, according to me, begins with genetic engineering. There lies the secret of all education. Up to now what we have been calling education is a chaos.People have been consulting astrologers about what their children should be. Now stars are not interested in your children – I don’t see any possibility that stars are even aware of your children. That the congregation of stars in a certain position is going to give your child a certain potential is an unproved hypothesis. Millions of children are born in the world almost at the same moment, but those millions of children cannot have the same destiny although the stars were the same.It is such a far-fetched idea that stars can decide your life. And if stars are deciding, then they are deciding in an insane way. Life on the earth shows that the decisions made about man are made wrongly, whosoever is making them.People consult palmists, who decide by reading the lines of the hand. It is all sheer nonsense! Birth-charts cannot say anything about you, but all marriages are made by consulting birth-charts…and you can see what those birth-charts are doing! I used to live in a city for a few years, and just opposite me lived a very famous astrologer who was deciding people’s marriages by reading their birth-charts. As we were living opposite each other, it did not take long to get introduced to him.I told him, “Do you really believe that what you are doing is sane?”He said, “What do you mean? I am the best astrologer around this area. People come to me from hundreds of miles away.”I said, “That I can see myself. But I also see that your wife beats you. Did you look at your birth-charts when you got married to this woman? And if you could not decide even for yourself, don’t you feel ashamed that what you are doing is simply stupid – and not only stupid, inhuman?”He was at a loss. I said, “Remember, I am a strange man. I will spread this news to everybody, and I will sit in the front of my garden to prevent people coming to you. I will tell them what is happening in your life.”At that very moment his wife came in from the kitchen and she said, “You are right. I will support you. This man is simply an idiot. He knows nothing; he has destroyed my life, he has destroyed his life, and he is destroying thousands of other people’s lives!”But this goes on. There are people who will consult the I-Ching, who will consult the Tarot cards…But the real thing is somewhere else. And it is known, but religious prejudices are preventing humanity from using it.The secret is in genetic engineering. Now it is scientifically possible to find the program of each human being, even before his birth. The male sperm carries many of the programs for his life and what he can become; whether he will be male or female, whether he will be a strong-bodied man or a weakling, whether he will live a life of health or will remain continually sick, his resistance against disease, how long he will live…and what kinds of potentialities are hidden in him – whether he can become a great mathematician or a great painter or a great poet or a great industrialist. Your destiny is written in the biological beginnings of your life, not in the birth-chart, nor in the stars, nor in the lines of your hands.Now there are scientific openings to a new world: each sperm can be read almost like an open book. You can decide your child’s life. Before he is born, you can choose what you want your child to be. To me, the real education begins from there.In each lovemaking the man releases at least one million sperms, but only one sperm may be able to reach the female egg. It is a marathon race. The small sperm – which is not visible to the bare eyes – in proportion to his size, the track that he has to follow towards the mother’s egg is almost two miles long, and he has only two hours’ life span. So if he does not reach within two hours, he will die. Such competition he will never again face in his life.The whole life will be competitive, but the beginning is the worst competition you can conceive: one million people rushing towards the female egg, and only one is going to win the race! The remainder are going to die.Rarely it happens that two sperms reach at the same time – that’s why twins are born. Sometimes even nine children have been given birth to by a woman, because nine sperms reached at the same time. The reason is this: the female egg remains open only for the first sperm reaching to it. The moment the sperm has entered the egg, the egg automatically becomes hard, it is no more porous, so others reaching are rejected. But if two reach at the same time, then their entry is possible because the egg is still porous.Now it is a blind game – most probably the idiots will reach first. That’s why the world is full of idiots! The idiots will not take any care, any consideration of anybody; they will simply rush blindly with full force. The wiser ones may stand by the side and see what is happening. The really wise ones may not even participate in the race, it is so stupid.These problems can be solved. But religious superstitiousness is a great barrier in the world for every kind of progress and new idea.I will be opposed by all the religions – it does not matter, I have been opposed my whole life – but my proposal is that every male who wants children should donate his sperms to a hospital and the medical science board should work out for those sperms what the possibilities are.In those one million sperms there may be Albert Einsteins, Bertrand Russells, Martin Heideggers, great musicians like Yehudi Menuhin, great dancers like Nijinsky, great philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, great novelists like Fyodor Dostoevsky. They can be picked out and the father and mother can choose what they want. When you can choose the great diamonds, why go for the colored stones? And when you can be the chooser, why be accidental?They can choose, if they want, a Henry Ford, who will make great riches possible. Money is an art, just as anything else; it has its own geniuses. Everybody cannot be a Henry Ford!If you want your child to be a Gautam Buddha, then you have to see, according to the genetic analysis, which sperm has the potentiality of being a mystic. The sperm has to be injected, so he need not be in competition with all kinds of fellows in a crowd. From that choice starts your education.This is only the beginning of genetic engineering. Finally it is going to happen, the work is growing every day…the chosen sperm has a program, but the program can be changed a little bit. It may be possible that he has the mind of an Albert Einstein, but not the body, not the health – that can be added, the program can be changed a little bit. He may have just a life of fifty years, but that program can be changed. He can be given as long a life as you want – the maximum life span can be almost three hundred years – and as much health and as much resistance against disease. All these things can be added to the program.The child now starts the journey with the parents’ full awareness of what he is going to become, to what school he should be sent, and what kind of education he should be given according to the genetic code. Then the world will be full of geniuses, talented people, healthy people. It is possible to avoid old age completely…a man can go on living youthfully up to the point of death.Now these are not fictions, these have become scientific facts. But religions are even preventing these scientific facts from being known to the public, to the people. They are afraid of strange things. Their fear is that morality will be disturbed. So let it be disturbed…! Anyway, what kind of morality exists in the world? Except hypocrisy, there exists no morality.Genetic engineering can decide even the character, the morality, the discipline of the individual who is going to be born. From there many things become possible. For the child, a clear-cut, non-accidental career, and for the parents – because the child is not be given birth through sex – sex becomes pure fun. It does not carry any responsibility, any danger.Now there are one hundred percent safe pills for males. For the women the pill is not one hundred percent safe; she has to take it every day. If she misses one day, because she is not thinking she will make love on that day, then suddenly the husband turns up, or suddenly the husband is gone…either way it works. The opportunity of love arises, and mind tends to take chances. Mind just thinks, “Every time you make love you don’t become pregnant.”A man in the ordinary course of his sexual life has intercourse at least four thousand times. That is the norm; I am not talking about sex maniacs! This is the very average shopkeeper…four thousand times means forty million people. Existence is really abundant. The man may have only two or three children out of forty million people. Forty million people can make a whole country.Now they have developed two other pills. The first pill that they have developed was a great revolution, because it prevented women from becoming pregnant. In the past a woman’s whole life was nothing but a factory to produce children. She was continuously pregnant; her life was nothing more than the life of a cow. So the first pill prevented her being pregnant, but it was not one hundred percent safe.The second pill is a greater revolution, because it can be taken after you make love. The first was before you make love; the second is a great advancement, because now you need not be worried; you can make love whenever, with whomsoever the possibility arises. And one never knows when the possibility will knock on your door – perhaps in a train, and you may have forgotten to bring your pills and the possibility may not strike again. It is just a stranger and suddenly you feel like this is the man you are made for, he is made for you…although when the next station comes, he will be gone. The next pill is a greater advancement: you can take it afterwards.The third pill is even more significant: the woman need not take it, the man can take it.Within these three pills all accidental birth can be avoided. Sex becomes just a playfulness, loses all seriousness that it has carried in the past; and you can get a child of which you can really be proud. You can fill the whole earth with the right kind of people.Criminals can be avoided, politicians can be avoided, priests can be avoided, murderers can be avoided, rapists can be avoided, violent people can be avoided, or if they have some special quality in them, then their program can be changed, their violence can be taken out. Rather than teaching people not to be violent, not to be thieves, not to be criminals…For thousands of years we have been teaching and it seems to have no effect.On the other hand, we have been making laws against criminals. The laws goes on becoming more and more complicated – more courts, more jails, more legal experts – but nothing has been of any help. Criminals go on increasing. Our whole approach is unscientific. If a child is born with a program of being a murderer, you cannot do anything. No moral preaching is going to help, no legal threat, “If you murder somebody, you will be sent to the gallows,” is going to help.In England in the middle ages it was thought that if criminals were punished in the middle of the town, so that the whole town can see what happens if you steal or if you do something wrong, against the law…criminals were beaten, naked, and thousands of people were watching them. The idea was that these thousands of people will get the idea that stealing is dangerous: you have to stand naked before your whole town, you lose all your dignity. Not only that, one thousand lashes…your whole body starts losing blood, your skin is broken everywhere, it was sheer humiliation, torture.But the process had to be stopped, because then it was found that when thousands of people were attentively watching a criminal being tortured, thieves were working in the crowd, picking people’s pockets. When it was found that even in that crowd many people had lost the contents of their pockets…they were so attentive that they forgot about pockets and they forgot that there may be thieves…. Finally the government came to the conclusion that this is not going to help. If people are picking people’s pockets while another thief is being tortured, you cannot teach…!People have been sentenced to death in thousands, but it has not prevented murderers. The reason is that the murderer has a program in which he is not able to make any change. It is intrinsic in his biology, in his physiology, in his chemistry, about which he is not able to do anything. It is in every cell of his body, and he will have to fulfill his destiny.All your laws are stupid, all your courts are idiotic, and all your lawmakers are utterly ignorant people. They want to do something which no individual is capable of and which can be done only before the child is conceived – not afterwards. The world is full of blind people, crippled people, paralyzed people, deaf people. They cannot respect themselves.Just the other day I received a letter from England. Now I feel at a loss what to do. A young man…he is a sannyasin…but he is so ugly that people feel a kind of repulsion, sickness, even to be near him. Now his biology demands that he should fall in love with some woman, some woman should accept him. But no woman even comes close to him. He has written a letter, What should I do?Now really he is not responsible for his ugly face; his parents should have taken care. He had no necessity to be born; a beautiful face could have been chosen, because even the face, the beauty, the color, everything is in the program…But now it is too late, so what to say to him? No meditation can make him beautiful.Meditation can help him to go beyond this urge, biological urge, but he does not want to go beyond the biological urge. His question is: “Why am I deprived when everybody else is enjoying the love of somebody? What sin have I committed?” He has not committed any sin, it is just that his parents were ignorant. The only thing that can be suggested to him is to go through plastic surgery.But there are blind people, there are deaf people, there are crippled people, there are people who are retarded. They don’t have any more possibilities of intelligence – and who is responsible for this? The priests of all the religions have been deceiving humanity. They are the great deceivers. They have been telling people, “You are suffering from blindness, from crippledness, from paralysis because of your past life’s evil acts.”This is not true. The scientific truth is that people are unnecessarily suffering because we are listening to the priests and not to the scientists. The priests are absolutely against interfering as far as human life is concerned. They start great protests immediately that you should not interfere in the work of God.But I cannot see what kind of work God is doing. Now what about this young man who is created ugly? – this is God’s work? And all these people who are retarded, stupid – this is God’s work? And the priests are not ready to have a different world. They are against family planning, they are against birth control, they are against everything that man is now capable of doing to create a better world, a better humanity.So this is my first thing: education will never be right unless children are born through genetic engineering, not through the old bullock cart method that you have followed up to now. This is one of the most significant secrets: unless we listen to sanity and intelligence, we are not going to revolutionize human life.Secondly, a few things about education. I want education to be divided in two parts: the first part should be given in the beginning and the second part should be given at the time a person retires.The first part of education should be for attaining the highest possible standard of livelihood. It should consist of the art of living and love. It should teach people how to be total in their acts, how to use the opportunity of life without losing anything, to squeeze every drop of juice that existence provides. The first part will be for the young people – training for life and training for love, training for intensity, training for totality.The second part will be after retirement, which will depend how long we can allow man to live. It may be according to the present average life span, sixty years, seventy years – but as the person retires. There are people in the area of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan who have passed the one hundred and fiftieth year – thousands of people. That small area of Kashmir seems to be the most healthy area. They are poor people, with no medical facilities, but even at the age of one hundred and fifty, they are young.But there are other places also in the world, particularly in Russia, in Kazakhstan, in Azerbaijan, in the Caucasus, where people have lived even longer – one hundred and eighty years – and thousands of people, not just one. They are still working in the fields, in the gardens, in the orchards; you cannot call them old, they are still capable of producing children.So it will depend…If genetic engineering succeeds in destroying the superstitions of humankind, then the second part will come very late. The second part will be preparation for death. Just as the first part was preparation for life, the second part will be preparation for death – how to die meditatively, silently, peacefully; how to meet death with a song and a dance and a welcome.The second part will be basically religious, just as the first part was basically scientific. The education will be complete, but it has to be at both the ends – the beginning and the end. Each university should have a double structure: one for the young people who are going to enter into life, and the other for the old people who are going to enter into the unknown world of death.The first part of education will be of many dimensions – all sciences, all arts, all kinds of crafts. Somebody is a great carpenter, somebody is a great shoemaker, somebody is a great scientist, somebody is a great moneymaker – they are all contributing whatever their potential allows them to life, with totality, not holding anything back. Naturally they should have equal opportunity to grow, and they should have equal respect. Just because a man is a president of a country does not mean that he should have respect and the man who makes perfect shoes should not. Both are fulfilling certain needs of the society; both should have the same honor and the same dignity.This equal opportunity, equal respect will begin from the very world of education. And for education to make all these changes, education will have to go through many changes itself.For example, examinations should be dissolved, because examinations emphasize people’s memory, not their intelligence. Memory is not a great thing; particularly in the future it is not going to be of any importance. You can carry your small computer in your pocket which will have all the memories that you need, and any time…immediately the computer will supply. There is no need to fill your head with unnecessary rubbish.The computer is going to replace the whole system of education which has depended up to now on memory. Whoever can memorize more comes first class, gets a gold medal, tops the university. But have you ever thought about what happens to these gold medalists in the world? They don’t show anywhere any genius. Somebody is just a head clerk, somebody is just a stationmaster, somebody is a postmaster – what happened to their gold medals? What happened to the great respect that their university paid to them?In fact the university paid respect to their memories and memories are of not much use in actual life. In actual life you need intelligence. And the difference should be made clear to you. Memory is a ready-made answer. But life goes on changing, it is never ready-made – so all your ready-made answers are lagging behind life.Life needs a living response…not a ready-made answer, but a spontaneous response this moment; it needs intelligence.Up to now education systems have not been creating intelligence at all. Intelligence needs a totally different kind of structure. Examinations are for memory, they are a memory test of how much you can memorize. But if questions are asked which you have not memorized, you are at a loss. You don’t have the intelligence to respond to a new question for which the answer has not been memorized before.The whole system of examinations is futile. A different structure should be created: each student, every day, should get his credit marks from the teacher to show if he is behaving intelligently, if he is answering things intelligently – not just a repetition of the textbooks, but something original.Originality should be respected and honored, not repetition – not being a carbon copy. And there is no need to wait for one year; if a student can get enough marks within six months, he should pass into a higher standard. There is no question of anybody failing or anybody passing. Just as you start getting closer to the standard beyond your standard…there is no examination. Just with your teachers watching your responses and your intelligence, you will be moving on. Somebody may come one month later, somebody may come a few months later, but there is no question of a fixed year program. I have been a teacher in the university and I know…. There were students who were so talented that they could have passed the whole course set for one year in two months; now ten months are wasted. Who is responsible for that? And there were retarded students; even one year was not enough for them.I have seen one person failing ten times in his matriculation examination. You will ask what happened the eleventh time? – he did not appear in the examination. Enough is enough! He was the most experienced matriculate, although he never passed in ten years continuously. People who had been colleagues with him became his teachers and he was still there – ready, stable and permanent.Each individual should be given credit for his own intelligence. There should not be any time limit, because that time limit wastes the more talented, the more genuinely intelligent, the geniuses, and waits for the retarded, for the idiotic and the stupid. It is an ugly system.Of course with genetic engineering the idiots and the stupid will not be allowed to enter into life. Move somewhere else! – there are fifty thousand planets in the universe where life exists – why bother us? Move on, go somewhere else where people are still idiots and still listen to the priests and go to the churches. This planet is no more for you.The classroom will have a totally different form. It will not be the classroom where the teacher teaches you; although he knows more and you know less, his knowledge is out of date. He has learned everything thirty years ago, when he was a student. In thirty years everything has changed. It is such an insane structure that people who are teaching in the universities are all out of date. What they are teaching is no more relevant.According to me, the library can be the only classroom. The teacher can only be a guide to help the students to find the latest, the recentmost researches in every subject. In the library the students should be there, and the teacher should be there just to help them, because he is more acquainted with the library, he has been longer in the library, he knows about the new discoveries and the latest inventions which have arrived. His function should be that of a guide to lead the students to the up to date knowledge.This can be facilitated very easily with computers, with television sets. In the twentieth century you need not teach people geography with a map when television can bring you exactly to the place you are learning about – New York or London or Peking – you need not bother yourself looking at maps, looking at pictures, descriptions. On the television screen you can be instantly in New York, and what is seen is remembered more easily than what is heard, than what is read.The future belongs to the televisions, to the computers, because they are the memory systems. The teacher will have a totally new function that will not be of teaching but only of guidance – where you can find the right book in the library, where you can find the right video in the library, where you can find the right information in the computer.Teaching becomes more alive, more colorful, more real. And the day is not far away when television will be three-dimensional. Then it will seem exactly as if people are walking and may come out of the television set any moment. Only two three-dimensional films were made, then the idea was dropped because they were too costly. But they will come back. With better techniques they will not be that costly.I have seen one of the films. It was a strange experience. A man throws a spear – and the whole audience in the movie hall gives way, because it is as if that spear is going through the hall. It is three-dimensional; it is as realistic as any actual spear can be. A man comes running on his horse and people shriek and divide to give way to the horse…it is just entering into the hall. It never enters! Slowly they become accustomed, by the end of the film: “Don’t be worried. Just sit tight in your seat. Nothing is coming out of the screen. It comes only up to the screen and stops.”When things can be taught in three-dimensional televisions and films, when everything that you need to memorize can be done by a small computer…It can be connected with the national computer, which carries all the knowledge that has been found since man started coming down from the trees. You can get every information, information which will be very difficult to remember.For example, if I ask you – and you are all educated people here – “On what day was Socrates married?”…Now, how educated are you? You cannot remember the date Socrates was married; it was such a great date that he suffered his whole life, and you don’t even have compassion enough to remember the date! But your computer can remember all that you want. It can contain whole libraries immediately at hand.The future of education, if scientifically worked out, is going to be a tremendous adventure. Up to now it has been a kind of enforcement; students have to be forced, bribed.Education can become so colorful, so actual, so real that you will not need to say to the students, “Be attentive!” They will be attentive automatically.And the same for the second part of education. All scientific technology can be used to give you experiences very close to death. You can be taught meditations, you can be taught relaxation, you can be taught how to go deeper in your sleep. Hypnotism will play a great role in the second part of education, because you can be hypnotized so deeply that you can almost touch the territory of death.Hypnotism became condemned by the same people who are always condemning everything that can make man’s life more easy, more pleasant, more juicy. The organized religions have been such poisoners. They condemned hypnotism, which is a science in itself and has to be revived again. It is the only way to take you to the whole area that you will pass through when you die.If you have passed that area many times death will not be anything to be feared. On the contrary, you will be tremendously excited. You have lived, you have lived so fully, you are contented with life; you would love to know what death is…a new challenge, a new beginning, entering into the universal, getting out of the imprisonment of the body, becoming just pure consciousness.Unless education can teach you both life and death it is not complete education. Unless education can make everybody dignified, self-respectful, neither inferior to anybody nor superior to anybody, it is not education.So I begin with genetic engineering.I end up with meditation, enlightenment.Before death you must realize what tremendous beauty and splendor is contained within your consciousness. Then education covers your whole life, and gives you the most perfect possibility of your growth.Osho,These days I feel like a fruitcake. Also I'm reading The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Do you think there is any connection?There is nothing wrong in feeling like a fruitcake. It is really delicious. It is so nice…and it cannot have any connection with the reading of the great masterpiece of Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot. The Idiot is only the name, but the person he calls the idiot in that great novel…That novel has to be considered one of the ten great novels in the whole world literature. There is no way to think that anything better than Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot can be created.The idiot is a sage. He is called idiot by the people because they can’t understand his simplicity, his humbleness, his purity, his trust, his love. You can cheat him, you can deceive him, and he will still trust you. That’s why people think he is an idiot. He is really one of the most beautiful characters ever created by any novelist.The novel could just as well have been called The Sage. His trust is so much that it does not matter that you deceive. It does not matter that you cheat him; that is your problem, it is not his problem. His love, his trust will continue. Dostoevsky’s idiot is not an idiot; he is one of the sanest men amongst an insane humanity.But this is the problem: if you are living in a society where everybody is blind and only you have eyes, you will be in constant difficulty. Those blind people will not believe that you have eyes; those blind people would like to destroy your eyes, because your eyes are giving them constant anxiety and tension. But somebody has something which nobody else has…so most probably they will destroy your eyes.In an insane world, to be sane is the most difficult situation. If you can become the idiot of Fyodor Dostoevsky, it is perfectly beautiful; it is really a fruitcake! There is no harm in it. It is better than to be a cunning politician, better than to be a cunning priest.Humbleness has such a blessing.Simplicity has such a benediction.Solomon Fiegenbaum came home one evening and was startled to find a young girl ransacking his apartment. Looking at her sternly, he said, “Young woman, you are a thief! I am going to call the police.”“Please, sir,” she pleaded, “if I get in trouble again, I will be put away for years. Please don’t call the police.”“I’m very sorry, but I have to,” replied Sollie.“Please, sir,” she begged him tearfully, “I will do anything for you. I will even give you my body.”Sollie thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said, “take off your clothes and get into my bed.”The girl did so and Sollie quickly followed. He tried and tried and tried for about half an hour. Exhausted, he finally gave up.“It’s no use,” Sollie cried, “I just can’t make it. I will have to call the police.”Such cunning people…but the world is full of them. Be simple like a small child – that is the idea of Dostoevsky in The Idiot.Elmer, aged nine, was puzzled over the girl problem and discussed it with his friend, Ernie.“I’ve walked her to school three times,” said Elmer, “and carried her books, and I have bought her an ice cream twice. Now, do you think I ought to kiss her?”“No, you don’t need to,” said Ernie. “You have already done enough for that girl.”Children have a beauty, and they have an insight which, as you grow old, you lose.The village priest approached a group of small boys sitting in a circle around a dog. When he came up to them, he asked, “What are you doing to the dog?”Little Ernie answered, “Whoever tells the biggest lie, wins the dog.”“Ah!” exclaimed the priest, “I’m surprised at you boys. When I was young like you, I never told a lie.”There was silence for a while, until little Ernie shouted out,“Give him the dog!”The printed sign on the church lawn said, “If Tired of Sin – Come In.” Scrawled underneath in lipstick, “If not, call The Star Hotel and ask for Lucy.”

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,A while ago you said something about silence which startled me. In my sleepiness, I'd simply thought of it as just an absence – an absence of noises. But you were saying it had positive qualities, a positive sound. And in my meditations, I've noticed the distinction between a silence in my body and a silence in my mind. I can have the first, without the second. Beloved master, please talk to me about silence.Silence usually is understood to be something negative, something empty, an absence of sound, of noises. This misunderstanding is prevalent because very few people have ever experienced silence. All that they have experienced in the name of silence is noiselessness. But silence is a totally different phenomenon. It is utterly positive. It is existential, it is not empty. It is overflowing with a music that you have never heard before, with a fragrance that is unfamiliar to you, with a light that can only be seen by the inner eyes. It is not something fictitious; it is a reality, and a reality which is already present in everyone – just we never look in. All our senses are extrovert. Our eyes open outside, our ears open outside, our hands move outside, our legs…all our senses are meant to explore the outside world.But there is a sixth sense also, which is asleep because we have never used it. And no society, no culture, no educational system helps people to make the sixth sense active. That sixth sense, in the East, is called “the third eye.” It looks inward. And just as there is a way of looking in, so there is a way of hearing in, so there is a way of smelling in. Just as there are five senses moving outward, there are five counter-senses moving inward. In all, man has ten senses, but the first sense that starts the inner journey is the third eye, and then other senses start opening up.Your inner world has its own taste, has its own fragrance, has its own light. And it is utterly silent, immensely silent, eternally silent. There has never been any noise, and there will never be any noise. No word can reach there, but you can reach. The mind cannot reach there, but you can reach because you are not the mind. The function of the mind is again to be a bridge between you and the objective world, and the function of the heart is to be a bridge between you and yourself.The silence that I have been talking about is the silence of the heart. It is a song in itself, without words and without sounds. It is only out of this silence that the flowers of love grow. It is this silence that becomes the garden of Eden. Meditation, and only meditation, is the key to open the doors of your own being.You are asking, “A while ago you said something about silence which startled me in my sleepiness. I had simply thought of it as just an absence – an absence of noises. But you were saying it had positive qualities, a positive sound. And in my meditations, I have noticed a distinction between a silence in my body and a silence in my mind.”Your experiences are true. The body knows its own silence – that is its own well-being, its own overflowing health, its own joy. The mind also knows its silence, when all thoughts disappear and the sky is without any clouds, just a pure space. But the silence I am talking about is far deeper.I am talking about the silence of your being.These silences that you are talking about can be disturbed. Sickness can disturb the silence of your body, and death is certainly going to disturb it. A single thought can disturb the silence of your mind, the way a small pebble thrown into the silent lake is enough to create thousands of ripples, and the lake is no longer silent. The silence of the body and the mind are very fragile and very superficial, but in themselves they are good. To experience them is helpful, because it indicates that there may be even deeper silences of the heart.And the day you experience the silence of the heart, it will be again an arrow of longing, moving you even deeper.Your very center of being is the center of a cyclone. Whatever happens around it does not affect it; it is eternal silence. Days come and go, years come and go, ages come and pass, lives come and go, but the eternal silence of your being remains exactly the same – the same soundless music, the same fragrance of godliness, the same transcendence from all that is mortal, from all that is momentary.It is not your silence.You are it.It is not something in your possession; you are possessed by it, and that’s the greatness of it. Even you are not there, because even your presence will be a disturbance.The silence is so profound that there is nobody, not even you. And this silence brings truth, and love, and thousands of other blessings to you. This is the search, this is the longing of all the hearts, of all those who have a little intelligence.But remember, don’t get lost in the silence of the body, or the silence of the mind, or even the silence of the heart. Beyond these three is the fourth. We, in the East, have called it simply “the fourth,” turiya. We have not given it any name. Instead of a name we have given it a number, because it comes after three silences – of the body, of the mind, of the heart – and beyond it, there is nothing else to be found.So, don’t misunderstand. Most of the people…for example, there are people who are practicing yoga exercises. Yoga exercises give a silence of the body, and they are stuck there. Their whole life, they practice, but they know only the most superficial silence.Then there are people who are doing concentrations like transcendental meditation, of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It can give you a silence which will be only of the mind. Just by repeating a name or a mantra…the very repetition creates in its wake, a silence in the mind. But it is not meditation, and it is not transcendental.And there are Sufis who know the third, which is the deepest of the three. But still it is not the goal, the target; your arrow is still falling short. It is very deep because Sufis know the heart more than anybody else. For centuries they have been working on the heart, just as yogis have been working on the body, and people of concentration and contemplation have been working on the mind.The Sufis know the immense beauty of love. They radiate love, but still the home has not been reached. You have to remember the fourth. Unless you reach the fourth, continue the journey.People misunderstand very easily. Just a little bit of experience and they think they have arrived. And mind is very clever to rationalize.There is a Sufi story about Mulla Nasruddin. The Mulla hears a commotion in the street outside his house in the middle of the night. His wife tells him to go down, and after many arguments he puts a blanket on his shoulders and goes down to the street. There were many people in the street and a lot of noise, and in the crowd somebody steals his blanket.The Mulla goes home naked, and his wife asks him, “What was that all about?” The Mulla says, “It seems to be about my blanket, because as they got the blanket they all disappeared. They were just waiting for the blanket. And I was telling you ‘Don’t force me to go there.’ Now I have lost my blanket and I have come naked. It was none of our business.”He has found a rationalization, and it looks logical, that as they got his blanket they all disappeared. And the poor Mulla thinking that perhaps that was the whole problem…. “Their argument and their noise just in front of my house in the middle of the night, and my foolish wife persuaded me finally to lose my blanket!”Mind is continuously rationalizing, and sometimes it may appear that what it is saying is right, because it gives arguments for it. But one has to beware of one’s own mind, because in this world nobody can cheat you more than your own mind. Your greatest enemy is within you, just as your greatest friend is also within you.The greatest enemy is just your first encounter, and your greatest friend is going to be your last encounter – so don’t be prevented by any experience of the body or the mind or the heart. Remember always one of the famous statements of Gautam Buddha. He used to conclude his sermons every day with the same two words, charaiveti, charaiveti. Those two simple words – just one word repeated twice – means “Don’t stop; go on, go on.”Never stop until the road ends, until there is nowhere else to go – charaiveti, charaiveti.Osho,Is it really worth putting any energy into improving my personality?Have you ever heard me? I have been constantly telling you that the personality has to be dropped so that your individuality can be discovered. I have been insisting that the personality is not you; it is a mask people have put over you. It is not your authentic reality, it is not your original face. And you are asking me, “Is it really worth putting any energy into improving my personality?”Put your energy into destroying your personality. Put your energy into discovering your individuality. And make the distinction very clear: individuality is that which you have brought from your very birth. Individuality is your essential being, and personality is what the society has made of you, what they wanted to make of you.No society up to now has been able to give freedom to their children to be themselves. It seems risky. They may prove rebellious. They may not follow the religion of their forefathers; they may not think the great politicians are really great; they may not trust in your moral values. They will find their own morality, and they will find their own lifestyle. They will not be replicas, they will not repeat the past; they will be beings of the future.This has created fear that they may go astray. Before they go astray, every society tries to give them a certain direction how to live, a certain ideology of what is good and what is evil, a certain religion, a certain holy scripture. These are ways to create the personality, and the personality functions like an imprisonment. You are asking me, that you want to improve this personality. Are you your own enemy?But this is not only you. Millions of people in the world know only their personality; they don’t know that there is anything more than personality. They have completely forgotten themselves, and they have forgotten even the way to reach themselves. They have all become actors, hypocrites. They have become puppets in the hands of the priests, of the politicians, of the parents; they are doing things which they never want to do and they are not doing things which they are hankering to do.Their life is split in such a diametrically opposite way that they can never be at peace. Their nature will assert itself again and again, will not leave them at peace. And their so-called personality will go on repressing it, forcing it deeper into the unconscious. This conflict divides you and your energy – and a house divided cannot stand long. This is the whole misery of human beings – why there is not much dance, much song, much joyfulness.People are so much engaged in warfare with themselves. They don’t have energy, and they don’t have time to do anything else except fight with themselves. Their sensuality they have to fight, their sexuality they have to fight, their individuality they have to fight, their originality they have to fight. And they have to fight for something which they don’t want to be, which is not part of their nature, which is not their destiny. So they can pretend to be false for a time – again the real asserts.Their whole life goes on, up and down, and they cannot figure out who really they are: the repressor or the repressed? the oppressor or the oppressed? And whatever they do, they cannot destroy their nature. They can certainly poison it; they can certainly destroy its joy, they can destroy its dance, they can destroy its love. They can make their life a mess, but they cannot destroy their nature completely. And they cannot throw away their personality, because their personality carries their forefathers, their parents, their teachers, their priests, their whole past. It is their heritage; they cling to it.My whole teaching is, don’t cling to personality. It is not yours, and it is never going to be yours. Allow your nature full freedom. And respect yourself, be proud of being yourself, whatever you are. Have some dignity! Don’t be destroyed by the dead.People who have been dead for thousands of years are sitting on your head. They are your personality – and you want to improve on them? So call a few more dead! Graves have to be searched for…bring out more skeletons, surround yourself with all kinds of skeletons. You will be respected by the society. You will be honored, rewarded; you will have great prestige, you will be thought to be a saint. But living with the dead, surrounded by the dead, you will not be able to laugh – it will be so out of place – you will not be able to dance, you will not be able to sing, you will not be able to love.Personality is a dead thing. Drop it! – in a single blow, not in fragments, not slowly, today a little bit and then tomorrow a little bit, because life is short and tomorrow is not certain.The false is false. Discard it totally!Every real human being has to be a rebel…rebel against whom? – against his own personality.The Japanese-American was a long-time customer at this Greek restaurant, because he had discovered that they made specially tasty fried rice. Each evening he would come in the restaurant, and he would order “flied lice.” This always caused the Greek restaurant owner to nearly roll on the floor with laughter. Sometimes he would have two or three friends stand nearby just to hear the Japanese customer order his “flied lice.”Eventually the customer’s pride was so hurt that he took a special diction lesson just to be able to say “fried rice” correctly. The next time he went to the restaurant he said very plainly, “Fried rice, please.”Unable to believe his ears, the Greek restaurant owner said, “Sir, would you repeat that?”The Japanese-American replied, “You heard what I said, you flucking Gleek!”How long can you go on pretending? The reality is going to come up some day or other, and it is better that it comes sooner.There is no need to improve your diction! Just drop that whole personality thing. Just be yourself. Howsoever raw and howsoever wild it appears to be in the beginning, soon it starts having its own grace, its own beauty.And the personality…you can go on polishing it, but it is just polishing a dead thing which is going to destroy not only your time, your energy, your life, but also the people who are around you.We are all affecting each other. When everybody is doing something, you also start doing it. Life is very contagious; everybody is improving his personality – that’s why the idea has arisen in your mind.But my people are not doing that. My people are not a herd, not a mob. They are respectful of themselves, and they are respectful of others. They are proud of their freedom and they want everybody else to be free, because their freedom has given them so much love and so much grace. They would like everybody else in the world to be free, loving and graceful.This is possible only if you are original – not something put together, not something false, but something that grows within you, which has roots in your being, which brings flowers in its time. And to have one’s own flowers is the only destiny, is the only significant way of life.But the personality has no roots; it is plastic, it is phony. Dropping it is not difficult; it needs just a little courage. And my feeling of thousands of people is that everybody has that much courage, just people are not using it. Once you start using your courage, sources which are dormant become active, and you become capable of having more courage, of more rebelliousness.You become a revolution in yourself.A man who is a revolution unto himself is a joy to see, because he has fulfilled his destiny. He has transcended the ordinary mob, the sleeping crowd.Osho,In these days I feel a little plant growing inside of me, which is still very delicate and fragile. I feel like I have to take immense care of this little flower just starting to open, not to water it too much, nor too little, nor to expose it too much to the wind. My beloved Osho, please tell me how to take care of this little plant, since in this moment it would still be very easy for me to destroy it.It is good news that you are feeling a little plant growing inside you. Naturally it will be, in the beginning, very delicate and very fragile. And your feeling is right, that you “have to take immense care of this little flower just starting to open, not to water it too much, nor too little, nor to expose it too much to the wind.”All that is needed are three things.When your consciousness starts growing, you need more meditation. And there is no limit to meditation, so you need not be worried that meditation can be too much and can kill the flower. Meditation is always too little, because there is always too much ahead of you, and meditation will make the fragile and delicate flower more and more strong.You need a silent being.Caring too much can be dangerous, it can become an anxiety. Being worried too much that you should water less or you should water more, that you may expose it to the winds, to the sun, to the rain too much or too little…caring can become a tremendous turmoil in your being, and your very caring can destroy the flower. Instead of caring, you need a more silent, more conscious, more peaceful being, which will give a strength to something new that is growing in you.Secondly, care is not enough; love is needed. Care is more a technical word; love is totally different. Care needs a certain education. Care is just like a nurse who knows what has to be done, what is right to be done – but there is no love in her heart, she functions technically.Love is more like a mother, who may not know the art of nursing, but she need not know. Love is enough unto itself. Love is a mysterious phenomenon; it knows what is needed. It simply knows without any education.So what you need is meditation, love, and the third thing – which you may not have thought of at all – a joyous life, because all that is great in you only grows when joy is showering on it. It grows only when you are in a space of blissfulness, when there is laughter, there is song and there is dance.And I know perfectly your fear. You say, “Please tell me how to take care of this little plant.” I will not say how to take care, because I don’t want you to become a nurse. I want you to become a mother. I want you to be love, not technical knowledge, because these flowers don’t need technical knowledge.You are afraid, “since in this moment, it would still be very easy for me to destroy it.” That danger is very real. When something inside you grows it brings new responsibilities, because now you need more meditation, you need more love, you need more joy.This flower inside you can become a burden to you if you don’t understand the language of meditation, the language of love, the language of blissfulness. You can destroy the flower by your own hands, just to get rid of the responsibility. But this flower is not only responsibility: it is also your growth, your maturity.This flower is not something separate from you.It is your own being.To destroy it means to commit suicide.But your question is more concerned about the technicalities of care, and I would like you to change the focus.Inner growth does not need any technical knowledge, any technical expertise. All that it needs is very simple and very joyful, and it is not a burden. Meditation will make you lighter, less loaded with all kinds of rubbish. Love will also give you new skies, new freedoms. Blissfulness will give you wings to move into those new skies and new spaces.But the question carries the implication that for centuries in the West the mind has become technically oriented. It has created great technology, great science, but it has destroyed man completely. The house is full of all kinds of gadgets, just the master of the house has disappeared, is lost in the gadgets.The East has never been technically oriented; it is more concerned with values than with techniques. For example, in the East if somebody is sick, then the wife will not be ready for her husband or her lover to be taken care of by a nurse. It simply will not come to her mind. This is the time when she is needed, and if love cannot heal, then no other technique is going to heal. It is not a question of expertise.In the West the same situation will have a totally different response. The wife or the husband would like to call a nurse to take care. And he seems, or she seems, to be more logical because the nurse is trained in taking care; She knows the know-how.But in the East it is almost inconceivable that love can be replaced by expertise of any kind. Expertise can be called in only when there is no love, when the wife feels it is a burden and it is a good chance to get rid of this fellow…call a nurse. And she has good reason; every logic is in her support. The doctor will support her, that this is a very loving decision. But the reality is just the opposite; it is not a loving decision.So don’t ask me about how to take care. Ask me how to be more meditative, how to be more loving, how to be more joyful, because that which is growing within you needs nourishment – and your meditation will give it nourishment, your joy will give it warmth, your love will give it dignity.A man, narrowly reared by a widowed mother, got married. He telephoned back to his mother from the honeymoon hotel to say that he knew there was something he had to do in bed, but he did not know what it was.“Why,” said his mother, “you put your…eh, that is, you put the hardest part of yourself in the place where your wife wee-wees.”At midnight the hotel rang the fire brigade for help. “We have got a young man with his head jammed in a chamber pot.”Avoid technical knowledge!Osho,How come I have always felt, ever since childhood, that I am more than two people? Could you say something please?Everybody is born as one single individual, but by the time he is mature enough to participate in life he has become a crowd. It is not anything special that you are feeling; it is almost the case with everybody. The only difference is that you are becoming aware of it, which is good. People are not aware of it.If you just sit silently and listen to your mind, you will find so many voices. You will be surprised, you can recognize those voices very well. Some voice is from your grandfather, some voice is from your grandmother, some voice is from your father, some voice is from your mother, some voice is from the priest, from the teacher, from the neighbors, from your friends, from your enemies. All these voices are jumbled up in a crowd within you, and if you want to find your own voice, it is almost impossible; the crowd is too thick.In fact, you have forgotten your own voice long before. You were never given freedom enough to voice your opinions. You were always taught obedience. You were taught to say yes to everything that your elders were saying to you. You were taught that you have to follow whatever your teachers or your priests are doing. Nobody ever told you to search for your own voice – “Have you got any voice of your own or not?”So your voice has remained very subdued and other voices are very loud, very commanding, because they were orders and you had followed them – in spite of yourself. You had no intention to follow, you could see that this is not right. But one has to be obedient to be respected, to be acceptable, to be loved.Naturally only one voice is missing in you, only one person is missing in you, and that is you; otherwise there is a whole crowd. And that crowd is constantly driving you mad, because one voice says, “Do this,” another voice says, “Never do that! Don’t listen to that voice!” And you are torn apart.This whole crowd has to be withdrawn. This whole crowd has to be told, “Now please leave me alone!” The people who have gone to the mountains or to the secluded forests were really not going away from the society; they were trying to find a place where they can disperse their crowd inside. And those people who have made a place within you are obviously reluctant to leave.But if you want to become an individual in your own right, if you want to get rid of this continuous conflict and this mess within you, then you have to say good-bye to them – even when they belong to your respected father, your mother, your grandfather. It does not matter to whom they belong. One thing is certain: they are not your voices. They are the voices of people who have lived in their time, and they had no idea what the future was going to be. They have loaded their children with their own experience; their experience is not going to match with the unknown future.They are thinking they are helping their children to be knowledgeable, to be wise, so their life can be easier and more comfortable, but they are doing just the wrong thing. With all the good intentions in the world, they are destroying the child’s spontaneity, his own consciousness, his own ability to stand on his feet, and to respond to the new future which their old ancestors had no idea of.He is going to face new storms, he is going to face new situations, and he needs a totally new consciousness to respond. Only then is his response is going to be fruitful; only then can he can have a victorious life, a life that is not just a long, long drawn-out despair, but a dance from moment to moment, which goes on becoming more and more deep to the last breath. He enters into death dancing, and joyously.It is good that you are becoming aware that it seems you are more than one person. Everybody is! And by becoming aware, it is possible to get rid of this crowd.Be silent, and find your own self.Unless you find your own self, it is very difficult to disperse the crowd, because all those in the crowd are pretending, “I am your self.” And you have no way to agree, or disagree.So don’t create any fight with the crowd. Let them fight among themselves – they are quite efficient in fighting among themselves. You, meanwhile, try to find yourself. And once you know who you are, you can just order them to get out of the house – it is actually that simple! But first you have to find yourself.Once you are there, the master is there, the owner of the house is there. And all these people, who have been pretending to be masters themselves, start dispersing. A man who is not a crowd is truly the “superman” of which we have been talking as Zarathustra’s great hope.The man who is himself, unburdened of the past, discontinuous with the past, original, strong as a lion and innocent as a child…he can reach to the stars, or even beyond the stars; his future is golden.Up to now people have always been talking about the golden past. My people have to learn the language of the golden future.There is no need for you to change the whole world; just change yourself and you have started changing the whole world, because you are part of the world. If even a single human being changes, his change will radiate in thousands and thousands of others. He will become a triggering point for a revolution which can give birth to the superman.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When you said that if we don't achieve total consciousness in this life, we will have to start from the very beginning again, and go through the whole evolution of mankind one more time, I was very touched. Is it possible that we will totally lose these few glimpses of light, beauty, and consciousness that we've got through being sannyasins?It is a very complicated question. Whatever you achieve in this life will remain with you, but it has to be an achievement not just a glimpse. And there is a great difference between an achievement and a glimpse. You can see the Himalayan peaks from thousands of miles away – it is a glimpse; but to reach those peaks will be an achievement.A glimpse helps you to move onward, toward achievement; but unless something becomes a crystallized experience in your life, it is going to be lost – you will have to start from the very beginning.There will be a little difference, and that will be that in your unconscious a shadow of your past life, a faraway echo – as if you have seen something – will remain. And when you again get the glimpse you may feel that this is not new, I have known it before. But otherwise, only crystallized achievements go with you, consciously, into the other life…knowingly, not just a dark shadow, a faraway echo in the unconscious, but consciously knowing that these Himalayan peaks exist, and you have been on those peaks. There will be no doubt about it, no wavering about it, no question about it.You are asking, “Is it possible that we will totally lose these few glimpses of light, beauty, and consciousness that we have got through being sannyasins?” Such glimpses you have got in many lives before too, and you have lost them. They never became part of your being; they remained only beautiful memories. But the memories are not achievements. It is as if you have seen something in a dream – perhaps it may be true, perhaps it may not be true.So if you feel that there is something happening now, make every effort that it does not remain only a glimpse but becomes an actual experience, becomes part of your being. Only then can it go with you into another life.It is possible to take all your experiences with you into another life, and never to begin from scratch but always to begin where you had left off in the past life. But be clear that just a glimpse is very fragile, just a glimpse is very superficial. Howsoever touching it may be in the moment, even tomorrow you may start doubting whether it really happened or you imagined it. And the life after this life is a faraway journey.Glimpses are simply incentives to move toward crystallization. Make it an experience so deep that it becomes part of you, and there is no way to forget it or to lose it. Don’t remain satisfied with glimpses. Enjoy them, but use them only as an indicator toward greater things to happen.To see something from far away is one thing, and to become that thing is totally another. A glimpse of love is just like a breeze that passes within seconds; a glimpse of silence is just like the fragrance of a rose flower that you felt for a moment, and now you don’t know where it has gone.When I say, “Crystallize your experience,” I mean it is not enough to have beautiful glimpses. It is good, but not good enough. You should become the fragrance of the rose itself; the glimpse was only an arrow pointing toward the possibility – it did its work, but you remain there. In the past life also, many times you have come across many beautiful experiences and right now you don’t know even that there have been past lives.Only once in a while you see somebody, and you have a very strange feeling, almost weird, as if you have seen this man before – and certainly not in this life. You come to a place, and suddenly you are startled, as if you had come to this place before too – although certainly not in this life. Everything seems to be known, but has been dormant in your unconscious.Life has a mechanism that whenever a person dies, unless he is enlightened, he becomes almost unconscious; he goes into a coma before death, actual death, happens. So he knows nothing about the death, and he remains in a state of coma till he is born again. All those nine months in the mother’s womb are a state of coma; the child is fast asleep twenty-four hours a day for nine months.It rarely happens that somebody dies consciously. It happens only to great meditators, who know well the path death will be coming on because in their meditations they have traveled on the path again and again – it is the same path. As they go deep in their meditation the body is left far away, mind is left far away, the heart is left far away; only a beautiful silence – fully alert and conscious – remains.The same happens when you die. If you have been meditating, then death is not a new experience. You will be surprised that in your meditation you have been dying every day, and you have been coming back to life every day. Such a person dies very consciously, so he knows what death is – and such a person remains conscious in the mother’s womb. He is also born consciously. From his very first moment on the earth, he knows all that has passed before in the past life, and he remembers it.I have come across many children…. And this happens most particularly in India, because outside India – where Christianity is prominent or Judaism is prominent or Mohammedanism is prominent – they have conditioned the mind that there is only one life. They don’t know anything about meditation. They have substituted meditation with prayer, and prayer is praising a fictitious god; it is very childish.Meditation needs no god – you are enough. You are a reality, and you explore your reality to the deepest core.In India all the religions are agreed on one point; they differ in their philosophies, they differ on every other thing, but on one thing they are all agreed – that life is a continuity; death comes millions of times. Death is only a change of the body, a change of the house, and this process goes on – unless you become totally enlightened. Then there is no need to enter another womb, because life was just a school, a training; you have completed it. Your enlightenment is the culmination of your education about existence. Now you need not enter into another body. You can enter into the womb of the universe itself – you are prepared for it.So whenever you are having glimpses, don’t be satisfied with them. Your glimpses should create great discontent in you, not content. They should create a longing that what is seen far away you would like to come closer, and closer, and closer. You don’t want just to see it, even from c closeness; you want to become it.You can become love, you can become silence, you can become joy, you can become all these experiences: beauty, light, consciousness. These are not things that you cannot become; they are your potentials. So take every glimpse to its ultimate end. That’s what I call crystallization.Once it is crystallized, once you have known yourself to be love, yourself to be light, yourself to be consciousness, then there is no problem of forgetting it. Then these experiences will go with you. And in your future life you will be growing further ahead, from consciousness to super-consciousness; you will be going beyond these experiences. But if you remain satisfied with your glimpses, there is every danger they will be erased. Death is such a shock and such a surgery and such a long coma that when you wake up, you will have forgotten all those glimpses.“Someone stole my bike,” complained a priest to his minister friend.“Bring up the Ten Commandments in your sermon tomorrow, and as soon as you mention, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ look around in your congregation; you will find the guilty party. Invite him to come forward. Tell him that this is the way to confess, and this is the way to get the forgiveness of God,” the minister said confidently.The next day the priest visited the minister and happily reported that he had found his bike. “Yes”, he went on, “when I came to ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ I remembered where I had left it.”Osho,Is it possible that I always transform my feelings and experiences into words and images only to get rid of them? Is it possible that I come to your feet with tremendous thirst, and when I am filled with energy, I am overwhelmed with this absolute need of sharing – only to get rid of it? Is it possible that this urge for sharing is only my illusion, or just my way to escape? Somebody told me that I should be more generous with myself. What can I do if I know not any other way to be generous with myself than sharing? Is it time for me to learn another way? Please help me with your guidance.What you are experiencing and what you are doing is perfectly right. Sharing your experiences, your energy, your love, your blissfulness, is not an escape from them, neither is it a way to get rid of them. On the contrary, the more you share, the more you will have.It is not the ordinary economics. In the ordinary economics you share and you lose; in the spiritual economics you share and you get more. In ordinary economics you have to be a miser, then only you can become rich…accumulate, never share. In the spiritual economics, if you are a miser whatever you have will be lost. It can live only if you share; it is a living experience. By sharing it continues a dynamic movement.I have heard about a young man who had just received a great lottery prize, and he was immensely pleased. He stopped his car because a beggar was standing there. He used to stand there every day, but he had never stopped his car. But today was different. He gave him a note of one hundred rupees. The beggar laughed.The man said, “I don’t understand. Why are you laughing?”He said, “It reminds me…once I used to have my own car and I used to be just as generous as you are. I am laughing because soon you will be standing by my side. Don’t be so generous! Learn something from my experience.”In the ordinary economics, the moment you give something, that much is less. But have you felt that by giving love you have less love? Or by sharing your joy, have you felt that your joy is a little bit less?If you have watched, you will be surprised: by sharing, your joy is a little bit more; by loving, your sources of love are flowing more – you are juicier. By dancing…just to share yourself with your friends you will not find yourself losing something, but gaining something.Don’t listen to other people. They know only about the ordinary economics. They don’t know anything about a higher economics, where giving is sharing and where not giving is very destructive.The more you give, the more you will have, the less you give, the less you will have. And if you don’t give at all, you will not have anything at all.But the people who are suggesting to you that this is not right are creating a problem in your mind about whether you are doing right or wrong. You are doing absolutely right. Do it with more totality, without any hesitation, and without holding anything back. Don’t listen to others. Listen to your own experience; watch your own experience – when you give, do you lose something or do you gain something? That should be the decisive thing, not people’s advice. The advice of others is dangerous….When the Eisenbergs moved to Rome, little Hymie came home from his school in tears. He explained to his mother that the nuns were always asking these Catholic questions and how was he, a nice Jewish boy, supposed to know the answers?Mrs. Eisenberg’s heart swelled with maternal sympathy. “Hymie,” she said, “I’m going to embroider the answers on the inside of your shirt, and you just look down and read them the next time those nuns pick on you.”“Thanks Mum,” said Hymie, and he didn’t bat an eye when Sister Michele asked him who was the world’s most famous virgin. “Mary,” he answered.“Very good,” said the nun. “And who was her husband?”“Joseph,” answered the boy.“I see you have been studying. Now, can you tell me the name of their son?”“Sure,” said Hymie, “Calvin Klein.”Osho,To me, your fantastic variation of dynamic meditation you do with us at the end of every evening discourse is one of the most energy-laden experiences I've ever had. All your lovers are radiating, everything is vibrating. I feel we are broadcasting energy waves like a huge radio antenna. The glow must even be visible from outer space. Osho, if we don't wake up this time, then what? Or are you keeping even louder alarms up your sleeve?It is almost impossible for you not to wake up this time. I am going to do everything to wake you up. I have ice cold water prepared; I am preparing people to pull you out of your bed and give you a good beating.But anyway, you have to wake up, because for me this is the last time. I will not be here again, so I have to do everything that I can do. And if you miss it will be really unfortunate, because one never knows when you will come across a man who loves you so much that he can be so hard and so cruel as to hit on your head, not bothering what happens to your skull – but somehow you should get up and open your eyes.The masters in the past have done strange things to wake up their disciples. One Zen master, Fui Hai, had a big monastery. It had two wings, right and left, and in the middle was his cottage. He had a beautiful cat, and all the monks of the monastery loved it. There were almost one thousand monks, five hundred on one side and five hundred on the other side. And they all used to fight, particularly when the master was not at home. The problem was the cat – who should have it?The right wingers said, “It belongs to us, we are older than you.” It was true; the right wing was made first and the left wing was added later on. But the left wingers said, “It is true that your wing was made first, but then there was no cat. The cat came when the left wing was being made. We own it.”It was a constant fight, and the cat was being taken from this wing to that wing, and the master got fed up with this whole thing – every day complaints.One day he gathered all the monks, except one monk who was not present; he had gone to the city to purchase a few things for the monastery.The master said, “Today I am going to decide this constant quarrel among the two wings.” He took a knife and said, “Either you say that this cat belongs to one wing, then it’s life can be saved; otherwise I’m going to cut it in two and give to both wings half of the cat. There seems to be no other way; it has to be divided.”They all loved the cat, they all wanted it to be in their wing…they were all silent.The master said, “If somebody can do something which shows his understanding and his deep meditation, to whichever wing he belongs, he will be the owner of the cat and that wing will have the cat. Come out! You can save the life of the cat; otherwise the cat is finished.”But people knew that you cannot deceive the master. He had such a clarity of vision that you cannot pretend that you are great meditators; so nobody came out. He cut the cat in two and gave half of the cat to each wing. Everybody was sad – because what can you do with half the cat? And the master was also sad that out of one thousand monks not a single man could do something to save the cat.At that very time, when he was sitting sadly and the whole monastery was sad, the man who had not been in the monastery came back from the city. He heard the whole story of what had happened. There was blood, the cat had died, and both the wings had half of the cat.They said, “We had never expected that our master will be so cruel, so hard; he is such a loving and compassionate person. But we cannot blame him; he had given us chances.”But the man came in front of the master and gave him a good slap on the face.The master laughed and said, “If you had been here, the poor cat would have been saved. You show your meditativeness. Without your meditations you cannot hit your master; to hit your master you have to know that the body is not you, so the master’s body is also not the master. You are not hitting the master but just the body, and that’s what I have done. I have cut only the body, not the cat. The cat is still alive, must be born somewhere else. But you have come a little late.”There is another story about Lin Chi, a Japanese Zen master. He had a disciple to whom he had given the traditional Zen koan to meditate – “Meditate on the sound of one hand clapping.” Now this is absurd. One hand cannot clap, and one hand cannot make any sound. Without clapping there is no possibility of any sound. “Meditate on it and when you have found the sound of one hand clapping, come and report.”The young monk went out into the garden, sat under a tree, tried in many ways to think what could be the sound of one hand clapping. Suddenly, he heard a cuckoo in the bamboo grove and he said, “This must be it!” He rushed and told the master, “I have found it. It is the cuckoo in the bamboo grove.”The master hit him hard on the face and said, “Don’t be foolish; next time be a little more intelligent. Go and meditate again!”Every day he would come, and by and by it became such a situation; sometimes he would come…the wind passing through the pine trees creates a certain sound, perhaps that is the…. Or sometimes the water running down creating sounds, perhaps that is it…. Or sometimes the lightning in the clouds. Slowly, slowly it became a routine thing. The master would not even ask; as he entered he would slap him, and tell him, “Go back and meditate.”But the monk said, “I have not even told you….”The master said, “I know what it will be. You just go. Meditate more!”He said to many other monks, “This seems to be too much. First he used to at least hear my answer; now he assumes that the answer is going to be wrong!”But one day he did not come. Two days passed, and seven days passed…. The master went to the tree where he used to sit and meditate, and the monk was sitting there, utterly silent.His master shook him and told him, “So at last you have heard it. This is the sound of one hand clapping, this silence…. But why did you not come to report?”He said, “I forgot everything; the silence was so sweet, so blissful. I am grateful to you that you never listened to my answers, and you went on giving me hard hits. Your compassion is beyond the grasp of ordinary people.”So don’t be bothered and don’t be concerned about others. You have to wake up. And waking up is such a simple thing – just the way you wake up in the morning. Have you ever observed…do you do some gymnastics, some exercises, some chanting? You simply wake up! The night is over and you open your eyes and jump out of the bed.Spiritual awakening is not different from that. Once you understand that you are spiritually asleep…. and that is the problem. People don’t think they are spiritually asleep, that’s why they go on sleeping. Once you understand you are spiritually asleep, then waking is a very simple matter.The hardest thing is to accept that deep in your being there is a sleep, an unconsciousness. Whatever meditations are being done here are just to shake you, to bring you to a point where the sleeping consciousness cannot sleep anymore; it has to wake up. It is only a question of simple understanding: You can wake up right now! This silence is enough.Brigitte lay in bed on the first night of their honeymoon while Pat sat fully clothed on an armchair in the bedroom. “Why don’t you come to bed?” Brigitte asked him.“My mother told me that this would be the most exciting night of my life,” said Pat, “and I don’t want to miss any of it by going to sleep!”It is very easy to misunderstand.It is also very easy to understand.It all depends on you.Are you ready to wake up? Then nothing can prevent you, and no technique is needed. But if you are not ready to wake up, then no technique can help you. You have to see your life as the life of a somnambulist who is sleep-walking, doing things asleep…fighting, saying the same things which he has said before and have always brought anger, irritation, in other people.It is a question of watching your life. Is it a life of a man who is awake? Can a man who is awake behave the way the world is behaving?You have been angry, you have been sorry for it thousands of times, and it has still not become clear to you that again you will be angry and again you will be sorry. What you are doing, it cannot be said that you are doing it fully awake. Your whole life is more like a robot; you are just going through mechanical actions. You suffer, and you decide to change, but when the time to change comes, you forget it completely.I have heard about a Christian monk who used to give sermons in different places, and his basic sermon was based on Jesus’ teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. He would say again and again that if somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other cheek too.One man had been listening to this so many times, he got bored. One day he stood up when the monk was saying this, and went ahead and slapped him. There was great anger in the Christian monk’s eyes, but seeing the crowd – and remembering what he has been telling them for so many years – he gave the other cheek, hoping that this idiot will not hit it. But that man was also a unique individual – he hit even harder!And that very moment, chaos broke; the Christian monk jumped on the man and started hitting him. The man said, “What are you doing? It is against your preachings! I have been listening to your sermons.”The monk said, “Forget all my sermons. Jesus only said ‘Give the other cheek.’ There is no third cheek. Now I am free, and I will show you….”But the man said, “Giving the other cheek means you should not be revengeful.”The monk said, “Forget all that nonsense! Giving the other cheek simply means giving the other cheek, and there is no third cheek. You have made me completely free, and now I will teach you the real lesson!”And he has been teaching his whole life…but perhaps that was also talking in his sleep, never penetrating to the meaning of the words he is saying and what he is doing.Gurdjieff remembers his father. His father died when Gurdjieff was only nine years old, and must have been a very unique man. He called Gurdjieff close to him and told him, “I’m dying, and I don’t have anything as a heritage for you. I’m leaving you poor and orphaned. Just one advice I want to give to you – that is the advice given to me by my father. I have found that that advice has proved to me the richest thing that any father can give to his son. You are so young; perhaps you may not be able to understand it. Just remember it; soon you will be able to understand it also, and whether you understand it or not, start behaving accordingly. Listen very closely and then repeat to me what I’m saying.”It was simple advice. The advice was that “If somebody insults you, humiliates you, hurts you, you are not to react immediately. You have to say to that person, “You will have to wait twenty-four hours, and then I will come to answer you. This is something sacred to me; I have given a promise to my dying father. So wait twenty-four hours and then go to the person. In those twenty-four hours you will see that he was right, or you may see that he was not right, but it is absolutely stupid to get into a quarrel. Those twenty-four hours will have given you a chance to be more alert. People react immediately – there is not time enough to be aware. They react just like machines. So if you find that he was right, go and thank him. If you find he was wrong, there is no need to go; or if you want to go, you can go and say ‘You seem to be in a misunderstanding.’“And Gurdjieff used to say, later in his life, “That simple advice of my dying father has transformed my whole life because it gave me a certain awareness, a certain awakening. I could not do anything immediately, instantly. I had to wait for twenty-four hours. And you cannot remain angry for twenty-four hours.”A man who is awake behaves in a totally different way from the whole humanity, which is fast asleep.One of my friends, he was a colleague in the same university where I was a teacher, said to me “I have been trying to drop my smoking, for almost twenty years.”I said, “That is too long a time to drop a cigarette; just give me a cigarette and I can drop it right now.”He said, “Don’t make a laughing stock of me. I have worked hard to drop it, and sometimes for a few hours, or sometimes even for few days, I manage not to smoke. But finally I have to give way. And now I have even dropped fighting; it is meaningless – twenty years fighting.”I said, “You don’t understand simple laws of life. You are a man fast asleep, and in sleep you cannot make any decisions, any commitments. My suggestion is that you do one thing: you smoke more consciously.”He said, “What – smoke? I want to drop it.”I said, “Just listen to what I am saying, you smoke more consciously. Take the packet from your pocket very slowly and consciously. Pull the cigarette out very slowly – there is no hurry. Look at the cigarette from all sides, put it in your mouth, wait. There is no hurry. Go very slow-motion, just as if a film is going in slow motion.He said, “What is that going to do?”I said, “That we will se later on…then take your lighter, look at it.”He said, “You are making me a fool – what is that going to do?”I said, “You just…. Twenty years you have done it your way; twenty days you do it my way. Look at the lighter, then light the cigarette, then smoke as slowly as possible. And be watchful that the smoke is going in, then the smoke is going out. That is the oldest meditation, vipassana. Gautam Buddha may never have thought that it will be used with a cigarette and a cigarette lighter – but I have to manage for him.He would not do Vipassana, but this…. He said, “Okay, I will try it, twenty days it is not much.”But the second day he came to me and said, “This is strange. Doing things so slowly makes me so alert; smoking, and watching the smoke going in and the smoke going out makes me so silent that already, in two days, I am smoking almost fifty percent less.I said, “Just wait twenty days.”He said, “I don’t think it will last twenty days; at the most five days and it will be finished.”I said, “Don’t be in a hurry to finish it, because if anything remains clinging it will enforce you again. So go very slowly; there is no hurry, and there is no harm. It does not matter – at the most you may die two years earlier. But anyway, what were you going to do in those two years – just smoke…more! So there is no harm anyway; the world is too populated, and if people go on disappearing a little earlier, making space for other people, it is very compassionate of them.”He said, “You are a strange fellow.” And after the fourth day he told me, “Now, as my hand moves toward the pocket, suddenly a stop comes – from where, I don’t know. I have not been smoking for one whole day because each time I try to take a cigarette, I cannot take the packet out. What is the secret of it?”I said, “There is no secret; you have just learned to smoke consciously, with awareness. And nobody can smoke with awareness, because smoking is not a sin – smoking is simply a stupidity. If you are alert and awake, you cannot be so stupid. There is fresh air available; you can go and have good breathing, deep breaths, fresh air, perfumed with flowers. You must be an idiot if you have to pay money to make your breathing dirty, dirty with nicotine, harming your lungs, harming your life; and there is no point in it.”People are really fast asleep; it is a wonder they don’t snore with open eyes.King Arthur, going on a two-year dragon hunting expedition, ordered Merlin the Wise to make a chastity belt for Guinevere to wear whilst he was away. Merlin came up with a very unorthodox design – one that had a large gaping aperture in the area that would normally be most strongly fortified.“That’s absurd,” said Arthur. “This belt is not functional.”“Yes, it is,” said Merlin. Picking up a spare magic wand, he passed it through the opening – instantly a guillotine-like blade came down and chopped the wand in two.“Ingenious!” cried Arthur.After outfitting Guinevere with the belt, he rode off to slay dragons, his mind at peace.Two years later, when Arthur came back, his first official act was to assemble all of the Knights of the Round Table and send them to the court physician for a special inspection. His frown grew severe as he learned that every member of the Round Table was nicked, cut, or scratched – all but one. Sir Lancelot was impeccable.Arthur called for him immediately, and smiled at his best knight. “Sir Lancelot,” he declared, “you are the only one of my knights who did not assail the chastity of my lady while I was off slaying dragons. You have upheld the honor of the Round Table and I am proud of you. You shall be rewarded. You may have anything in the kingdom you desire, you have but to name it. State your wish Sir Lancelot.”But Sir Lancelot was speechless….

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Many years ago, it seems, I used to be able to meditate – I think. A beautiful, silent, transparent state would arrive from somewhere; I presumed this was meditation. Now, nothing comes except a racing mind. What happened?Prema Veena, it always almost happens this way. The days when you were feeling a kind of meditation happening to you were the days you were not looking for it – it was happening to you. Now you are trying to make it happen, and that makes all the difference. All the things that are really valuable in life only happen; you cannot make them happen, you cannot do them. It may be meditation, it may be love, it may be blissfulness, it may be silence.Anything that goes beyond your mind is beyond your capacity to do it; you can only do things which come in the territory of the mind.The mind is the doer, but your being is not a doer. Your being is just an opening, and a deep acceptance of whatever happens, with no complaint, with no grudge – just a pure gratefulness. And that, too, is not done by you; that is also part of the happening. We have to make this distinction very clear; almost everybody gets confused. Something happens to you – it is so beautiful, so blissful – the mind starts immediately desiring that it should happen more, that it should happen more often, that it should go deeper. The moment mind comes in, it disturbs everything. Mind is the devil, the destroyer.So one has to be very aware that mind should not be allowed to interfere in things of the beyond. Mind is perfectly good as a mechanic, a technician. Give your mind what it can do, but don’t let it interfere in things which are beyond its capacity. But one of the problems is that mind is nothing but desiring – desiring for more. As far as the world of doing is concerned, you can have a bigger house, you can have a better house, you can have better furniture – you can do everything better; it is within the capacity of the mind.But beyond the mind…mind can only desire, and each desire is going to be frustrated. Instead of bringing more meditation, it will bring you more frustration. Instead of bringing you more love, it will bring to you more anger. Instead of silence and peace, it will bring more traffic of thoughts – and that happens to almost everybody. So it is something natural that one has to grow out of.You are saying, “Many years ago, it seems, I used to be able to meditate. A beautiful, silent, transparent state would arrive from somewhere; I presumed this was meditation.” Neither were you expecting it, nor were you desiring it; it was just a guest, like a breeze that comes to you. But you cannot keep it, and you cannot order it to come. It comes when it comes. And once you understand this, you stop trying.You have heard the expression, “Try and try again. I would like to say to you: Untry and untry again. Whenever the idea of trying arises, immediately drop it. It is going to lead you into failure, into frustration, and if you can drop it…and everybody can drop it, because it never brings anything. What is the problem in dropping the failure, frustration, despair and hopelessness? Just drop them and forget all about meditation.One day, suddenly, you will find a window opens, and a fresh breeze with new rays has filled your heart. Again, don’t commit the same mistake! Be thankful for what is happening, but don’t ask for more – and more will be coming. Don’t ask, “Come again” – your asking will become the barrier.It will come again, it will come more often. Slowly, slowly it becomes your heartbeat; waking, sleeping, it is always there, it never goes. But it is not your doing. You cannot brag that “I have done it.” You can only say, “I have allowed the unknown to do it to me.” It is always from the unknown that great experiences enter into our small hearts, and when we are trying hard to get them, we become so tense that the very tension prevents them.When you are not trying, and you are relaxed – you are not even bothered about meditation and things like that – you suddenly find the footsteps of the unknown, something from nowhere, approaching you. Look at it with wonder, not with desire. Look at it with gratitude, but not with greed.You are saying, “Now, nothing comes except a racing mind. What happened?” You became aware of the unknown. A little taste of meditation, and you became greedy, desirous. Your desire, your greed spoilt the whole game. Still, everything can be put right. You see the mind continuously racing; let it race – you simply watch, just be a bystander, an observer.Just watching the mind is one of the greatest secrets of life, because it does not show that it works – but it works! Just as you watch, indifferent, uninterested, as if it has nothing to do with you, those thoughts start getting thinner; there is less traffic on the track of the mind.Slowly, slowly there are small gaps, and in those gaps you will have a glimpse of what you used to have. But don’t jump upon it, don’t be greedy. Enjoy it, it will also pass; don’t try to cling to it. Thoughts will start coming again; again a gap will come, a bigger gap. Slowly, slowly bigger gaps will be happening when the mind will be empty.In that empty mind the beyond can enter into you, but the basic condition is that you should not cling to it. If it comes – good; if it does not – good. Perhaps you are not ripe, perhaps it is not the time – still, be grateful. One has to learn watchfulness and gratefulness. Even when nothing is happening that you deep down want to happen, still be grateful. Perhaps it is not the right time for you, perhaps it will not help your growth.I have often told you the story of a Sufi mystic, Junnaid. He was the master of Al Hillaj Mansoor and because of Mansoor he became very famous. Mansoor was killed by the orthodox, traditionalist fanatics, and because of Mansoor, Junnaid’s name also became famous – Mansoor was Junnaid’s disciple.Junnaid used to go for a pilgrimage every year to the Mohammedan holy place, Kaaba. It was not very far from his place, and Mohammedans are expected by their tradition at least once in a life to go to Kaaba; otherwise they are not complete Mohammedans. But Kaaba was so close to his place that every year he used to go with his disciples. He was the revolutionary kind of saint. In fact, any kind other than the revolutionary are not saints – just facades, actors, pretenders, and hypocrites.The people in the villages where Junnaid had to pass were very angry with him. A few villages were so angry that they would not give him anything to eat, or even water to drink and would not allow him to stay in the village.It was Junnaid’s usual prayer – Mohammedans pray five times a day – and after each prayer he would raise his hands to God and he would say, “I am so grateful to You. How should I express my gratefulness? You take care of me in every possible way; Your compassion is infinite, your love knows no bounds.”The disciples were tired because five times every day, and in situations where they could see there is no care taken by God – they have not received food, they have not received water, they have not received shelter from the hot sun in the desert…. Once it happened that for three days continually they were thrown out, stoned, given no food, no water, no shelter; but Junnaid continued his prayer the same way.On the third day, the disciples freaked out. They said, “Enough is enough. Why are you saying, ‘You are compassionate’, ‘Your love is great’, ‘You take care of us in every possible detail?’ For three days we have not eaten a single thing, we are thirsty, we have not slept under shelter, we have been sleeping in the desert, shivering in the cold night. For what are you being grateful?”The answer that Junnaid gave to his disciples is worthy of being remembered. He said, “For these three days, do you think I cannot see that food has not been given to us, that we have been thrown out, that we have been stoned, that we are thirsty, that for three days we had to remain in the open desert…? Don’t you see that I am also aware of it? But this does not mean that he is not taking care of us. Perhaps this is the way he is taking care of us; perhaps this is what we need at this time.“It is very easy, when life is going comfortably, to thank God. That thankfulness means nothing. These three days I have been watching. slowly, slowly, all of you have stopped thanking Him after the prayer; you failed the test. It was a beautiful test. Even if death comes to me, I will die with gratefulness. He gave me life; He took it away. It was His, it is His, it will be His. Who am I to interfere in His affairs?”So there will be times when you will not find any moment of peace, silence, meditation, love, blissfulness. But do not lose hope. Perhaps those moments are needed to crystallize you, to make you strong. Be grateful not only when things are going good, but be grateful when everything is going wrong. A man who can be grateful when everything is going wrong is really grateful; he knows the beauty of gratefulness. For him, things can go wrong forever, but his gratefulness is such a transforming force, it is going to change everything.So don’t be worried about the racing mind; let it race. Allow it to race as fully as possible; don’t prevent it, don’t try to stop it – you just be a watcher. You get out of the mind and let the mind race, and soon, without fail, as a natural law, gaps will start happening. And when gaps happen, don’t get too happy that, “I have got it.” Remain relaxed. Enjoy those gaps also, but without greed and without desire, because they will disappear; and they will disappear soon if you become greedy. If you are ungreedy, undesirous, they may stay longer.This is the whole training of meditation. Soon, the day comes when the mind is completely silent, filled with great joy, silence. But remember, it is not your doing. If even for a single moment you think it is your doing, it may disappear. Always remember that you are the doing of existence. All that is great is going to happen to you not by your effort, but by your relaxed openness, availability.Just keep your doors open.The guest will come – it has never been otherwiseThe guest always comes.Pat’s son became an actor, and one evening rushed home to his father in a state of great excitement, “Guess what Dad,” he announced, “I have just been given my first part. I play a man who has been married for twenty-five years.”“Keep it up my son,” said Pat, “someday you may get a speaking part, too.”In the case of Veena, it is just the opposite. Right now you are in the speaking part; just keep on, someday you will certainly get the silent part too. But there is nothing to be worried about. Life has to be taken very playfully, with a great sense of humor. In good times and bad times, when things are happening and when things are not happening, when the spring comes and when, sometimes, the spring does not come to you….Remember, we are not the doers as far as things beyond mind are concerned; we are only receivers. And to become a receiver, you have just to become a watcher of your mind because through watching those gaps appear. In those gaps your door is open. And through that door stars can enter into you, flowers can enter into you. Even when stars and flowers enter into you, don’t be greedy, don’t try to keep them in. They come out of freedom and you should remember, they will remain with you only in freedom. If you destroy their freedom, they are destroyed too. Their freedom is their very spirit.It is my continual experience of thousands of people that when they come for the first time to meditate, meditation happens so easily because they don’t have any idea what it is. Once it has happened, then the real problem arises – then they want it, they know what it is, they desire it. They are greedy for it; it is happening to others and it is not happening to them. Then jealousy, envy, all kinds of wrong things surround them.Always remain innocent as far as things beyond mind are concerned. Always remain amateur, never become an expert. That is the worst thing that can happen to anybody.Osho,A few days ago, I heard you say that the voice speaking inside of us is always the mind, so I wonder who in me is hearing this voice. When I try to find the answer, I only find silence.Chidvilas, the moment you look into your self you only find silence. But are you not aware that you are also there? Who finds the silence? Silence itself can not find itself; there is somebody as a witness who is finding the silence. Just your focus is wrong; you are still focusing on the object. It is just an old habit, perhaps cultivated for many, many lives, that you always focus yourself on the object, and you always forget yourself.An ancient Eastern story is that ten blind men crossed a stream. The current was very strong, so they took hold of each other’s hands because they were afraid somebody may be taken away by the current. They reached the other shore, and somebody among them suggested, “It is better we should count because the current and the stream were really dangerous. Somebody may have slipped, and we may not even be aware.”So they started counting. It was a great shock, and they were all crying and weeping; everybody tried, but the count was always nine – because nobody was counting himself. Naturally, he would start counting, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine…. My God, one has gone!” So they all were crying.A woodcutter was watching all this drama and he said…he had never seen ten blind men together, in the first place. Second, what a stupid idea these people had. What was the need to cross the stream when it was so strong and flooded? And, above all, now they were counting, and crying and weeping for someone – they did not know who, but certainly someone had been taken away by the current. Watching them counting, he was simply amazed how was it possible that they were ten persons, but the count always came to nine?Some help was needed, so he came down from his tree and he said, “What is the matter?”They all said, “We have lost one of our friends. We were ten, and now we are only nine.”The man said, “I can find your tenth man. You are right, you used to be ten, but there is a condition.”They said, “We will accept any condition, but our friend….”He said, “It is not a very big condition, it is a simple condition. I will hit on the first man’s head; he has to say “one.” Then I will hit on the second person’s head two times; he has to say “two.” Then I will hit on the third person’s three times; he has to say “three.” As many times as I hit, the person has to speak the number.”They said, “If this is the way to find the lost friend, we are ready.”So he enjoyed hitting very much, and he hit them in turn. When he had hit the tenth man ten times he said “ten.” All the nine said, “You idiot, where have you been? Unnecessarily we have all been beaten! Where you have been hiding up to now?”He said, “I was standing here, I was myself counting, and it always came to nine. This man seems to be a miracle man; he managed to find the tenth man.”The story is significant for the simple reason that it has become our habit not to count ourselves. So when you are watching your thoughts, inside, you are not aware that there is a watcher too. When you are watching silence, you are not aware that you cannot watch silence if you are not there.Chidvilas, you are asking, “A few days ago I heard you say that the voice speaking inside of us is always the mind, so I wonder who in me is hearing this voice?” Certainly I am not hearing it, and as far as I know nobody else is hearing it. You must be the guy who is hearing this voice. Everybody else has his own problem!“When I try to find the answer I only find silence.” But then too the question arises: Who finds the silence? It is the same guy who was hearing the voice. His name is Chidvilas.You have to become more subjective, more alert to yourself; we are always alert to everything around usPat followed his friend Mike’s example and left Ireland to work in England. Though they had since lost contact, Mike had mentioned how easy it was to get a job at Whipsnade Open Zoo, so Pat applied. Unfortunately they had no keeper’s jobs available; there was not even the position of a sweeper vacant.“But I tell you what, Pat,” the manager said, “the gorilla died a couple of days ago, and what is a zoo without a gorilla? But we have kept his pelt entire; now if you crawl into that skin and take over his enclosure, we will feed and house you, and pay you handsomely as well.”Pat had a look over the lovely field that was the gorilla enclosure; he surveyed the comfortable gorilla house, and tested the bed provided. He agreed to take the job. Very soon Pat had become a great favorite with visitors to the zoo. Being a bit of an extrovert, he would always put on a good act – tumbling, chest-thumping, and growling. But the climax of his performance was most popular. Whenever there was a good crowd, Pat would scale a large oak tree at the side of his enclosure where it adjoined the lion’s pen and pelt the lioness with acorns. The big-maned lion, in particular, would roar with rage and stamp about, and the crowd would roar with delight.One public holiday a particularly large crowd had gathered, and Pat was aloft and reaching the peak of his performance. He had just finished off the acorn pelting with a bit of chest-thumping when the branch he was balanced on broke; he fell to the ground at the lion’s feet. Pat jumped up, shouting for help, and was about to scarper when the lioness whispered, “Hold your tongue Pat, sure do you want to lose us the best jobs we have every had?”Here, everybody has different skins only; inside is the same consciousness. Whether you are hearing a voice, or you are hearing silence, remember more about yourself – who is the watcher? who is the witness?In every experience, when you are angry, when you are in love, when you are in greed, when you are in despair, it is the same key: just watch – are you really in danger, or are you only a witness. Here we are, just sitting. Deep down, who are you? Always a witness.Whatever happens on the outside – you may be young, you may be old, you may be alive, you may be dead – whatever happens on the outside, inside is the same witness. This witness is our truth. This witness is our ultimate reality, our eternal reality.So all your work is concerned with shifting your focus from the object to the subject. Don’t be bothered about anger, or silence, or love. Be concerned about whom all this is happening to, and remain centered there. This centering will bring you the greatest experience of your life. It will make you a superman.Osho,Eleven years ago, when I first sat in front of you, I was so overwhelmed by your energy, by your love, by you, that I could do nothing but cry and bow down to your feet in silent expression; and yet I felt very much understood by you. At that time you told me to keep my energy inside and bring it to my hara. Since then this suggestion stays with me, and my belly has become my best friend, and the place below my navel a mirror of my feelings. In all this time tears and laughter of joy and gratitude for being able to spend this life with you have kept back most of my words. My beloved master, I feel that behind this small suggestion of yours lies more than I can imagine. Would you please say something more about the hara, and guide me further?Deva Radhika, hara is the center from where a life leaves the body. It is the center of death. The word hara is Japanese; that’s why in Japan, suicide is called hara-kiri. The center is just two inches below the navel. It is very important, and almost everybody in the world has felt it. But only in Japan have they gone deeper into its implications.Even the people in India, who had worked tremendously hard on centers, had not considered the hara. The reason for their missing it was because they had never considered death to be of any significance. Your soul never dies, so why bother about a center that functions only as a door for energies to get out, and to enter into another body? They worked from sex, which is the life center. They have worked on seven centers, but the hara is not even mentioned in any Indian scriptures.The people who worked hardest on the centers for thousands of years have not mentioned the hara, and this cannot be just a coincidence. The reason was that they never took death seriously. These seven centers are life centers, and each center is of a higher life. The seventh is the highest center of life, when you are almost a god.The hara is very close to the sex center. If you don’t rise toward higher centers, toward the seventh center which is in your head, and if you remain for your whole life at the sex center, then just by the side of the sex center is the hara, and when then life will end, the hara will be the center from where your life will move out of the body.Why have I told Radhika this? She was very energetic, but not aware of any higher centers; her whole energy was at the sex center, and she was overflowing. Energy overflowing at the sex center is dangerous, because it can start releasing from the hara. And if it starts releasing from the hara, then to take it upward becomes more difficult. So I had told her to keep her energy in, and not to be so expressive: Hold it in! I simply wanted the hara center, which was opening and which could have been very dangerous, to be completely closed.She followed it, and she has become a totally different person. Now when I see her, I cannot believe the expressiveness that I had seen at first. Now she is more centered, and her energy is moving in the right direction of the higher centers. It is almost at the fourth center, which is the center of love and which is a very balancing center. There are three centers below it, and three centers above it.Once a person is at the center of love, there is very rarely a possibility for him to fall back down, because he has tasted something of the heights. Now valleys will be very dark, ugly; he has seen sunlit peaks, not very high, but still high; now his whole desire will be….And that is the trouble with all lovers: they want more love, because they don’t understand that the real desire is not for more love, but for something more than love. Their language ends with love; they don’t know any way that is higher than love, and love does not satisfy. On the contrary, the more you love the more thirsty you become.At the fourth center of love, one feels a tremendous satisfaction only when energy starts moving to the fifth center. The fifth center is in your throat, and the sixth center is your third eye. The seventh center, the sahasrar, is on the top of your head. All these centers have different expressions and different experiences.When love moves to the fifth center then whatever talents you have, any creative dimension, is possible for you. This is the center of creativity. It is not only for songs, not only for music; it is for all creativity.Hindu mythology has a beautiful story. It is a myth, but the story is beautiful, and particularly for explaining to you the fifth center. Indian mythology says that there is a constant struggle between evil forces and good forces. They both discovered that if they made a certain search in the ocean they could find nectar, and that whoever drank it would become immortal. So they all tried to find it.But as life balances everywhere, there too…. Before they found the nectar they found poison which was hiding the nectar underneath it. Nobody was ready to test it; even the very sight of it created sickness. One of them thought that the first hippie of the world, perhaps might be willing – he was the god Shiva. So they asked Shiva, “You test it.” He said, “Okay.”He not only tested it, he drank it all, and it was pure poison. He kept it just in his neck, at the fifth center. The fifth center is the creative center. It became completely poisoned, and Shiva became the god of destruction. So Hindus have three gods: Brahma who creates the world, Vishnu who sustains the world, and Shiva who destroys the world. His destructiveness came from his creative center being poisoned. And the poison was so great that it cannot be a small destruction; he can only destroy the whole of existence.When Vishnu is tired of maintaining it, Shiva destroys it. By that time Brahma has forgotten – millions of years have passed since he created the world; he again starts creating it – just an old routine! Brahma is the creator god, but in the whole of India there is only one temple devoted to Brahma, because who cares about him? He has done his work; it is futile to say anything to him. Vishnu has millions of temples, because he is the sustainer god. Krishna and Rama are all incarnations of Vishnu.But nobody can compete with Shiva. Shiva has more shrines to him than anybody else. He is a hippie, so he does not need very great temples or anything – just anywhere, under any tree. Just put a round stone, oval shape, and he does not ask much – a few leaves, not even flowers. A few leaves you can drop there, a few drops of water on his head, just to keep him cool…so people have created devices; they just hang a small pot on top of his head with a small drip, drip, drip. It keeps him cool, so he does not get annoyed with anybody and destroy the world.Everybody is afraid of him, so naturally he has many more worshipers, many more temples, and many more shrines. In every small village you will find at least a dozen Shiva shrines, because they cost nothing; any poor man can afford it. And he has to be concerned about it because Shiva can destroy. Keep him satisfied! And he does not ask much; just keep his head cool. Flowers are costly, but any two leaves and his worship is finished.Shiva became the destroyer of the world because his fifth center had accumulated the whole poison of existence in it. It is our creative center, that’s why lovers have a certain tendency to creativity. When you fall in love, you suddenly feel like creating something – it is very close. If you are guided rightly, your love can become your great creative act. It can make you a poet, it can make you a painter, it can make you a dancer, it can make you reach to the stars in any dimension.The sixth center which we call the third eye is between the two eyes. This gives you a clarity, a vision of all your past lives, and of all the future possibilities. Once your energy has reached your third eye, then you are so close to enlightenment that something of enlightenment starts showing. It radiates from the man of the third eye, and he starts feeling a pull toward the seventh center.Because of these seven centers, India never bothered about hara. Hara is not in the line; it is just by the side of the sex center. The sex center is the life center, and hara is the death center. Too much excitement, too much uncenteredness, too much throwing your energy all over the place is dangerous, because it takes your energy toward the hara. And once the route is created, it becomes more difficult to move it upward. Hara is equally parallel to the sex center, so the energy can move very easily.It was a great discovery by the Japanese: they found that there was no need to cut your head off, or shoot your brains out to kill – they are all unnecessarily painful; just a small knife forced exactly at the hara center, and without any pain, life disappears. Just make the center open and life disappears, as if the flower opens and the fragrance disappears.The hara should be kept closed. That’s why, Radhika, I had told you to be more centered, to keep your feelings inside, and to bring it to your hara. “Since then this suggestion stays with me, and my belly has become my best friend, and the place below my navel a mirror of my feelings.”If you can keep your hara consciously controlling your energies, it does not allow them to go out. You start feeling a tremendous gravity, a stability, a centeredness, which is a basic necessity for the energy to move upward.You are asking, “I feel that behind this small suggestion of yours lies more than I can imagine.” Certainly, there is much more…A Pole is walking down the street, and passes a hardware store advertising the sale of a chain saw that is capable of cutting seven hundred trees in seven hours. The Pole thinks that it is a great deal and decides to buy one.The next day he comes back with the saw, and complains to the salesman, “The thing did not come close to chopping down the seven hundred trees that the ad said it would.”“Well,” said the salesman, “let us test it out back.” Finding a log, the salesman pulls the starter cord, and the saw makes a great roaring sound.“What is that noise?” asked the Pole.So he must have been cutting by hand and it was an electric saw!Radhika, your hara center has so much energy that, if it is rightly directed, enlightenment is not a faraway place.So these two are my suggestions: keep yourself as much centered as possible. Don’t get moved by small things – somebody is angry, somebody insults you, and you think about it for hours. Your whole night is disturbed because somebody said something…. If the hara can hold more energy, then naturally that much more energy starts rising upward. There is only a certain capacity in the hara, and every energy that moves upward moves through the hara; but the hara should just be closed.So one thing is that the hara should be closed. The second thing is that you should always work for higher centers. For example, if you feel angry too often you should meditate more on anger, so that anger disappears and its energy becomes compassion. If you are a man who hates everything, then you should concentrate on hate; meditate on hate, and the same energy becomes love.Go on moving upward, think always of higher ladders, so that you can reach to the highest point of your being. And there should be no leakage from the hara center.India has been too concerned about sex for the same reason: sex can also take your energy outside. It takes…but at least sex is the center of life. Even if it takes energy out, it will bring energy somewhere else, life will go on flowing.But hara is a death center. Energy should not be allowed through the hara. A person whose energy starts through hara you can very easily detect. For example, there are people with whom you will feel suffocated, with whom you will feel as if they are sucking your energy. You will find that, after they are gone, you feel at ease and relaxed, although they were not doing anything wrong to you.You will find just the opposite kind of people also, whose meeting you makes you joyful, healthier. If you were sad, your sadness disappears; if you were angry, your anger disappears. These are the people whose energy is moving to higher centers. Their energy affects your energy. We are affecting each other continually. And the man who is conscious, chooses friends and company which raises his energy higher.One point is very clear. There are people who suck you, avoid them! It is better to be clear about it, say good-bye to them. There is no need to suffer, because they are dangerous; they can open your hara too. Their hara is open, that’s why they create such a sucking feeling in you.Psychology has not taken note of it yet, but it is of great importance that psychologically sick people should not be put together. And that is what is being done all over the world. Psychologically sick people are put into psychiatric institutes together. They are already psychologically sick, and you are putting them in a company which will drag their energy even lower.Even the doctors who work with psychologically sick people have given enough indication of it. More psychoanalysts commit suicide than any other profession, more psychoanalysts go mad than any other profession. And every psychoanalyst once in a while needs to be treated by some other psychoanalyst. What happens to these poor people? Surrounded by psychologically sick people, they are continually sucked, and they don’t have any idea how to close their haras.There are methods, techniques to close the hara, just as there are methods for meditation, to move the energy upward. The best and simplest method is: try to remain as centered in your life as possible. People cannot even sit silently, they will be changing their position. They cannot lie down silently, the whole night they will be turning and tossing. This is just unrest, a deep restlessness in their souls.One should learn restfulness. And in these small things, the hara stays closed. Particularly psychologists should be trained. Also, psychologically sick people should not be put together.In the East, particularly in Japan in Zen monasteries, where they have become aware of the hara center, there are no psychologists as such. But in Zen monasteries there are small cottages, far away from the main campus where Zen people live, but in the same forest or in the same mountain area. And if somebody who is psychologically sick is brought to them, he is given a cabin there and he is told to relax, rest, enjoy, move around in the forest – but not to talk. Anyway there is nobody to talk to! Only once a day a man comes to give food; he is not allowed to talk to that man either, and even if he talks, the man will not answer. So his whole energy is completely controlled. He cannot even talk; he cannot meet anybody.You will be surprised to know that what psychoanalysis cannot do in years, is done in three weeks. In three weeks time the person is as healthy as normal people are. And nothing has been done – no technique, nothing. He has just been left alone so he cannot talk. He has been left alone so he can rest and be himself. He is not expected to fulfill somebody else’s expectations.Radhika, you have done well. Just continue whatever you are doing, accumulating your energy in yourself. The accumulation of energy automatically makes it go higher. And as it reaches higher you will feel more peaceful, more loving, more joyful, more sharing, more compassionate, more creative.The day is not faraway when you will feel full of light, and the feeling of coming back home.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I keep going where you are and can't move away. Still, something is missing. At the junction of two paths, the inner one and the outer one, with tears in his eyes, the stubborn donkey is starving. The outer path does not attract him much anymore, and when it does the hope is quickly smashed. Seeing your finger pointing to the moon, still he is not going very much on the inner path. I do not know quite how to speak to him. Disgusted with tunafish sandwiches, he became accustomed to starvation. Is this just fear, laziness, impatience? Does he just need a juicy joke? Beloved Osho, give him a little push.It is one of the significant things to understand that unless you attain the ultimate, the feeling of something missing is going to remain with you. And this feeling is not against you; this feeling is a kind of reminding you that you have not reached yet, that you have to go on and on.Don’t take the feeling of missing as negative; it is healthy and positive. It shows that you are aware of where you are and you are also sensitive to where you should be, and between the two, the gap is the feeling of missing.I would like to read your question: “I keep going where you are and can’t move away.”I have been aware of it. For the whole year I have been moving from one place to another place and you have remained constantly moving with me. It is not just attachment with me – it is something more. It is not a question of being with me: it is a question of being in the same state of being as I am.You don’t want to miss any opportunity, any single moment. And one never knows – your time may come and you may be far away from me.Still something is missing. It will go on missing for a little time more. You are growing, but to reach to the flowers, to reach to the fruits, it takes a long time to grow. And spiritual growth is not like seasonal flowers; they come within weeks and they are gone. The spiritual growth is of the eternal: once it comes, it remains – remains forever.Naturally, compared to eternity our time scale is very small. A few days pass or, a few months or a few years; we start feeling, is there something wrong? Am I doing right? And these are natural feelings. But I have been watching you. Nothing is wrong, everything is as it should be. You are silently growing. All growth is silent, it makes no noise. And suddenly one day…the flowers appear.Just by the side of Chuang Tzu hall there were no flowers three days ago. Then one day the storm came and the rains came, and in the morning suddenly there were beautiful sunflowers – just in one night. I had seen the place; in the evening there were no flowers, in the morning there were flowers.It takes time for the growth, but when the right moment comes it is an explosion. Suddenly, all over, is the spring. And it is good that until it happens you go on feeling that something is missing. You should not forget for a single moment that something is missing. That will be dangerous.Millions of people have forgotten it completely. They are absolutely content and feeling that all that they need they have – nothing is missing. They are the poorest people in the world. They don’t have a longing for higher reaches, they don’t want to climb mountains, they don’t want to go to the stars – in their dark caves they are perfectly comfortable. One should have compassion for them. Their contentment is their spiritual death.You need a spiritual discontentment which constantly moves you, like an arrow, toward faraway goals.“At the junction of two paths, the inner one and the outer one, with tears in his eyes, the stubborn donkey is starving. The outer path does not attract him much anymore, and when it does the hope is quickly smashed. Seeing your finger pointing to the moon, still he is not going very much on the inner path.”The inner growth is very still and very silent.You cannot hear your own footsteps.You only become aware when you reach a certain stage. And it is a surprise because all the time you were thinking nothing is happening…suddenly, the flowers have come. This is what I mean by patience.To grow cedars of Lebanon one needs great patience. They are not seasonal flowers and you cannot see the growth. It is happening every moment, all these trees are growing every moment. But existence functions very silently.You are growing, and even you cannot be aware of it unless something totally new happens and makes you aware that you have reached some space that was unknown to you. And that can happen any moment.On your part great patience is needed, and a trust that the whole existence is in support of all those who are trying to grow spiritually. It is not you who are trying to grow spiritually; it is existence who, through you, is trying to reach to its utmost heights.“I do not quite know how to speak to him. Disgusted with tunafish sandwiches, he became accustomed to starvation. Is this just fear, laziness, impatience? Does he just need a juicy joke?”It is a combination of many things. Fear is always there, and will remain until you come to know that there is no death. Fear is the shadow of death. When death disappears the shadow disappears.There is impatience, but you have to use your impatience not against your growth, but in favor of it. Be impatiently very patient. Your impatience should only show your longing. It should not be against your patience; it should be simply a tremendous desire of your being to crystallize, to reach somewhere where life becomes meaningful, blissful, where fear disappears, death disappears, where one becomes acquainted with one’s own immortality.And it is not laziness. It appears so, because you don’t see every day new spaces; it almost seems as if you are standing, not moving. In the inner journey this has been felt by many many people, by almost everybody. And the reason is the nature of movement.You are sitting in a train and the train is moving; how do you know that the train is moving? Because you cannot see the wheels; the only idea that the train is moving is given to you by the trees and the houses and the stations that are passing by on both sides. They are going in the opposite direction; the faster they are going, the faster you feel your train is moving.Just for a moment imagine that your train is moving in a place where there is nothing on either side, you cannot see anything that is moving backward. Will you feel that your train is moving? For example if the train is moving in the sky – no trees, no houses, no stations – you will not be able to feel the movement of the train. This is the reason why we cannot feel the movement of the earth. It is moving faster than any train, but there is nothing against which you can feel its movement.In the inner journey this is the problem. You are alone. There are no trees, no stations, no houses; it is just like the sky. How can you feel if there is any movement happening or not? One becomes aware of the movement only when one comes to certain definite spaces which are different from those with which he is acquainted. Then suddenly one realizes that one has moved very fast. In fact, even if in many lives you can achieve enlightenment, it is too early. But I am saying you can achieve it now; all that is needed is that you don’t look at things negatively.Our mind is a very negative phenomenon. Relaxation it will call laziness, deep longing it will call impatience. Always remember mind is negative. It does not know how to say yes. And that is the meaning of trust: saying yes.You are in a perfectly good situation. Say yes to it, and say yes as deeply and as totally as possible. And any negative thing that mind brings, change it into the positive. It says it is laziness. Tell it, it is not; it is relaxation, it is restfulness. It says it is impatience. Tell it, it is not; it is a great longing, a great passion to realize oneself, to realize one’s treasures – not to die without realizing oneself.And you are asking, “Does he just need a juicy joke?”That I can do! Whenever it needs any juicy joke, you bring your donkey to me.Patrick’s wife lived way out in the country and was taken ill one day, shortly before her child was due. It was quite dark when the doctor arrived and he asked, “Where is the little lady?”Patrick: “She is over there in the barn where she collapsed.” With Patrick holding the lamp the doctor set about his job.“Patrick, you are the proud father of a little boy.”Patrick said, “Doctor, we will have a drink.”“Just a minute, hold the light a little closer. You are the father of two!”“We will open a bottle,” said Patrick.“Wait!” said the doctor. “Hold the light a little closer. You are the father of three.”“And sure it is going to be a celebration and all,” said Patrick.“Just a minute,” said the doctor, “hold the light a little closer.”“I don’t want to be difficult, doctor,” said Patrick, “but do you think this bloody light is attracting them?”Children go on coming as the light is coming closer….Remain joyous, wait with great love. Everything takes its own time, impatience makes no sense. Patience is the way of existence. Remain relaxed, because the more excited you become the farther away is the goal. The experience is going to happen only when you are utterly silent, just a pool of silence…your whole energy so relaxed, as if it is absent.When you have become just a zero you become a womb. And out of this nothingness is born your original, your authentic reality.Osho,I feel that I don't love you enough, don't appreciate you enough, am not open enough. I feel like I am trundling along in a creaky old bullock cart, while you are flying by in all your beauty and grace and vastness. Beloved Osho, I am exasperated by my state of retardation. Why is it that I don't respond?Prem Veena, it is something intrinsic to love that it always feels it is not enough. Only a small love feels enough. The greater the love, the more you are aware of the feeling that “I don’t love enough.” That is one of the signs of a great love.If somebody comes and says to me, “I love you very much – I love you totally,” then his love is certainly going to be very small. Otherwise to love totally is a tremendous phenomenon; it will change you entirely.So there is no need to be worried that your love is not enough. You want to love more, and if your love is great it will never be enough; it will always be something less than you wanted it to be.And the same is true about appreciation. You say, “I don’t appreciate you enough, am not open enough.” Just a little appreciation and just a little opening is enough for my purposes. I can sneak in from any small opening! One thing is certain – you are not a China wall.I can understand. You have been long enough with me and it is natural to expect…. But you don’t know how much you have changed. I remember exactly, photographically, the day you came to me. You had not come for yourself, you had come for a totally different reason. You had brought a young man; you had come for him.He was a complete crackpot; he wanted to live only on water. And because in one of my lectures I had mentioned that I know a man who has lived for many years only on water, you brought that young man – because he was moving from place to place, inquiring for somebody who can teach him the art of how to live on water.You had not said a single word about yourself. You were only concerned that somehow either he drops this idea or he finds some way – it had become a torture. There are ways people can live…but they need years of training, and they lead nowhere. What is the point? Even if you can live only on water that does not make you spiritual; that does not bring liberation to your being. And it takes fifteen to twenty years’ long training to come to the point where you can drop all food, and just air and water are enough for you.So I told the man, “It is possible and I can give you the address. But if you want my advice I would say don’t go there because that man is cracked. You are only half cracked right now; there is still time to come back. What are you going to gain? Why are you obsessed with the idea?” The obsession was that if you live only on pure water and air, you become physically immortal.I said, “That is nonsense! Many people have lived on water and air and none of them are alive; not a single one has become immortal. If you really want to become immortal, I can show you the way; because it is not a question of becoming immortal, it is a question of discovering. You are immortal already – you are just not aware. Awareness has to be brought…” and just as I was talking to the man about awareness and meditation – he was not interested; he disappeared, he never came again.But Veena was caught. That was accidental! Since then she has been doing meditation, sometimes successfully, and whenever you succeed in meditation there are moments of failure; there are days and there are nights.Naturally, after so many years, fifteen or sixteen years, she feels like “I’m trundling along in a creaky old bullock cart, while you are flying by in all your beauty and grace and vastness.”You should be happy, at least you have a creaky old bullock cart! There are millions who don’t have even that. And if it is too creaky just ask some Italian sannyasin to make it a little greasy. Sarjano can do it. And to make a flying bullock cart will be a great joy and a miracle – just take a little care with the bullock cart. Anyway it is moving. Or perhaps you would like it to go on being creaky because that gives you the idea that you are moving. But there is no hurry. You need not fly. Sometimes it is dangerous.Just the other day I received a letter from Canada. A young woman wants to come here, but the problem is she is very much afraid of flying. Now from Canada to here, coming in a creaky old cart will really take so long. So she has asked me, “First help me to get rid of this paranoia. I cannot enter an airplane.”I have all kinds of crackpots all over the world! But they are very nice people. Just a day before another woman from Germany asked – her problem is even more difficult – her problem is that she is afraid to leave her house. “Help me, I want to come to Pune!”Now this woman who is afraid of flying can have other means suggested to her: trains, cars, buses, a horse; but the woman who is afraid to leave the house…. But I have to suggest something to them – and just because the suggestion is coming from me, it works. It has nothing in it; I just have to invent suggestions: “Just keep an onion in your mouth, and leave the house and no danger will ever happen to you! And when I am suggesting there must be some great secret in onions…soon the woman will be here, because these fears are all just mind-made, mind-manufactured.There is no fear in flying, there is no fear of coming out of the house; millions of people are coming out of the house every day, and thousands are flying. And the rate of accidents is not much more than the rate of death which naturally happens, so whether you are sleeping on your bed or flying in an airplane does not make any difference. The rate of death is the same.In fact, on the bed it is more, because 99% of people die on the bed. If somebody wants to be really afraid of any place, it is your bed. Avoid it! Keep it for show but never sleep on it! In the night close the doors and sleep on the floor, because I have never heard of anybody dying on the floor. And there are people who are trying….My legal secretary Anando sleeps in her bath, just to avoid death! – because nobody has ever died in the bath. She keeps her bed ready; that is just for show. Whenever I ask Shunyo to find her I have to tell her, “Look in her bathroom.” And she is sleeping with her blanket and with her clothes in the bathtub. A great device to avoid death!Veena, don’t be exasperated by your state. You are growing. Everybody has his own pace of growth. Some people grow fast, some people grow slowly – whatever is natural to them – and there is no question of superiority or inferiority. But if you ask me I will say you are going perfectly right. You are responding to me as deeply as your nature allows in this moment.Forcing anything is going against nature. Accepting, relaxing, contented, allowing the flow of nature to take you, is what Lao Tzu used to call ‘the watercourse way.’ Sometimes the river flows fast. Sometimes it flows very slowly. Sometimes it falls with great speed in waterfalls from the mountains to the plains. But one thing is certain: whether slow, fast or very fast, every river reaches to the ocean.And it does not matter that somebody reaches a little earlier and somebody reaches a little later. What matters is that one reaches.Just think of the moment – your joy, your peace, your centeredness. The more you enjoy them, the more they grow, and faster. But don’t think in terms of becoming rich very fast. Even if the richness is of the inner world, to become rich fast one has to use wrong means – and in the inner world you cannot use wrong means. That will not be profitable; that will be a loss. In the outside world, if you want to become rich faster then you have to use wrong means.But to be with me, at least one thing has always to be remembered: we are not looking for any profit, we are not looking for any reward. Our reward is in this moment. Our profit is our joy in this moment.Farelli came from Italy, opened a restaurant and became very successful. He still practiced the simplest form of bookkeeping. He kept the accounts payable in a cigar box, accounts due on a spindle, and cash in the register. One day his youngest son, who had just graduated as an economics major, said to him, “Pa, I don’t see how you run your business this way. How do you know what your profits are?”“Well, sonny boy,” replied Farelli, “when I got off-a the boat I no have nothing but-a the pants I was-a wearing. Just-a the pants. Today your brother is a doctor, your sister is-a the teacher and you just-a graduate.”“I know, papa, but….”“Your mama and me have a nice-a car, a nice-a house, a good-a business and everything is-a paid for. So you add all-a that together, you subtract-a the pants and that’s-a the profit.”Why get into so much unnecessary detail? That poor Italian was doing very well! Now to count all these things and then to subtract the pants-a…and the remaining is all the profit.On the path there is no need to keep any accounts. Each moment live totally, joyously, and move on. Don’t carry even the memory of that moment: that too becomes a burden, that too prevents you from responding to reality spontaneously. If you want to be spontaneous and responsive then you need a very clean, mirror-like mind. No dust should gather on it.And Veena, as far as I see you are doing perfectly well. But these are human desires that again and again arise in people – perhaps things can be done better; perhaps rather than going by a bullock cart I can go by an airplane. These ideas simply create anxiety in you and disturb your natural growth.Live each moment and don’t let it gather in your memory. Keep your memory clean.And everything that you have never imagined, never dreamt of, is going to happen to you.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Nietzsche wrote: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster, and when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” The last phrase seems such a beautiful description of the art of meditation. Would you comment?Friedrich Nietzsche is a strange philosopher, poet and mystic. His strangeness is that his philosophy is not the ordinary rational approach to life; his strangeness is also that he writes poetry in prose. He is also a strange mystic, because he has never traveled the ordinary paths of mysticism. It seems as if mysticism happened to him.Perhaps being a philosopher and a poet together, he became available to the experiences of the mystic also. The philosopher is pure logic, and the poet is pure irrationality. The mystic is beyond both. He cannot be categorized as rational, and he cannot be categorized as irrational. He is both, and he is neither.It very rarely happens that a philosopher is a poet also, because they are diametrically opposite dimensions. They create a tremendous inner tension in the person. And Nietzsche lived that tension to its very extreme. It finally led him into madness, because on the one hand he is one of the most intelligent products of Western philosophy, without parallel, and on the other hand so full of poetic vision that certainly his heart and his head would have been constantly fighting. The poet and the philosopher cannot be good bedfellows. It is easy to be a poet, it is easy to be a philosopher, but it is a tremendous strain to be both.Nietzsche is not in any way mediocre – his philosopher is as great a genius as his poet. And the problem becomes more complicated because of this tension between the heart and the mind. He starts becoming available to something more – more than philosophy, more than poetry. That’s what I am calling mysticism.His statement is of tremendous importance: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.”I have always been telling you that you can choose a friend without being too cautious, but you cannot afford an enemy without being very alert – because the friend is not going to change you, but the enemy is going to change you. With the friend there is no fight, with the friend there is no quarrel; the friend accepts you as you are, you accept the friend as he is. But with the enemy the situation is totally different. You are trying to destroy the enemy and the enemy is trying to destroy you. And naturally you will affect each other, you will start taking methods, means, techniques from each other.After a while it becomes almost impossible to find who is who. They both have to behave in the same way, they both have to use the same language, they both have to be on the same level. You cannot remain on your heights and fight an enemy who lives in the dark valleys down below; you will have to come down. You will have to be as mean, as cunning as your enemy is – perhaps you will have to be more, if you want to win.Nietzsche is right. “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”The second part of the statement is actually the very essence of meditation: it is gazing into emptiness, nothingness, into an abyss. And when you gaze into an abyss it is not one-sided; the abyss is also gazing into your eyes.When I am looking at you, it is not only that I am looking at you; you are also looking at me. The abyss has its own ways of gazing into you. The empty sky also gazes into you, the faraway star also looks into you. And if the abyss is allowed to gaze into you, soon you will find a great harmony between yourself and the silence of the abyss, you will also become part of the abyss. The abyss will be outside you and also inside you.What he is saying is immensely beautiful and truthful. The meditator has to learn to gaze into things which he wants to become himself. Look into the silent sky, unclouded. Look long enough, and you will come to a point when small clouds of thoughts within you disappear, and the two skies become one. There is no outer, there is no inner: there is simply one expanse.For thousands of years meditators have been gazing at the early sun in the morning, because later it becomes too difficult to gaze into it. But the early sun, just rising above the horizon, can be looked into without any danger to the eyes. And if you allow, then the light and the color that is spread all over the horizon starts spreading within you – you become part of the horizon. You are no longer just a gazer; you have become part of the scenery.An ancient parable in China is that an emperor who was very interested in paintings, and had a great collection of paintings, announced a great prize for the best painting. All the great painters of the country arrived in the capital and started working.One painter said, “It will take at least three years for me.”The emperor said, “But I’m too old.”The painter said, “You need not be worried. You can give me the award right now. If you are not certain of your life, I am certain about my painting. But I’m not asking either. I am just saying that I am going to do a job that has never been done. I want to show you what a painting should really be; so forget about your death and forget about the award. You allow me three years and a separate place in the palace. Nobody can come while I’m working; for three years I have to be left alone.”Each day was such an excitement for the emperor. The man was a well-known painter, and not only a painter – he was a Zen master too. Finally those three years passed, and the painter invited the emperor…he took him into the room. On the whole wall he had painted a beautiful forest with mountains, with waterfalls, and a small footpath going round about and then getting lost into the trees behind the mountains.The painting was so alive, so three-dimensional, that the emperor forgot completely that it was a painting and asked the painter, “Where does this footpath lead to?”The painter said, “I have never gone on it, but we can go and have a look at where it goes.”The story is that the painter and the emperor both walked on the path, entered the forest, and have not returned since then. The painting is still preserved; it shows the footprints of two persons on the footpath. It seems to be absolutely unbelievable, but the meaning is of tremendous importance.The painter is saying that unless you can be lost in a painting, it is not a painting. Unless you can become part of the scene, something is dividing you; you are not allowing yourself, totally, to be one with it, whether it is a sunrise or a sunset….A meditator has to learn in different ways, from different sides of life, to be lost. Those are the moments when you are no more, but just a pure silence, an abyss, a sky, a silent lake without any ripples on it. You have become one with it. And all that is needed is – don’t be just a passer-by, don’t be a tourist, don’t be in a hurry. Sit down and relax. Gaze into the silence, into the depth, and allow that depth to enter into your eyes, so that it can reach to your very being.A moment comes when the gazer and the gazed become one, the observer and the observed become one. That is the moment of meditation – and there are no more golden experiences in existence. These golden moments can be yours…just a little art, or rather a little knack, of losing yourself into something vast, something so big that you cannot contain it. But it can contain you! And you can experience it only if you allow it to contain you.Friedrich Nietzsche is right; he must have said what he had experienced himself. It was unfortunate that he was born in the West. In the East he would have been in the same category as Gautam Buddha or Mahavira or Bodhidharma or Lao Tzu. In the West he had to be forced into a madhouse.He himself could not figure it out. It was too much: on the one hand his great philosophical rationality, on the other hand his insights into poetry, and those sudden glimpses of mystic experiences…it was too much. He could not manage and started falling apart. They were all so different from each other, so diametrically opposite…he tried hard somehow to keep them together, but the very effort of trying to keep them together became a nervous breakdown.The same experience in the East would have been a totally different phenomenon. Instead of being a nervous breakdown, it would have been a breakthrough. The East has been working for thousands of years; its whole genius has been devoted to only one thing, and that is meditation. It has looked into all possible nooks and corners of meditation, and it has become capable to allow poetry, to allow philosophy, without any problem, without any opposition and tension. On the contrary they all become, under meditation, a kind of orchestra – different musical instruments, but playing the same tune.There have been many misfortunes in the world, but I feel the most sorry for Friedrich Nietzsche because I can see what great potential he had. But being in a wrong atmosphere, having no precedent and having no way to work it out by himself, alone…. It was certainly too much for an individual, for any individual, to work it out alone.Thousands of people have worked from different corners, and now, in the East, we have a whole atmosphere in which any kind of genius can be absorbed. And meditation will not be disturbed by genius; meditation will be enhanced, and his own particular dimension – poetry, literature, science – will also be enhanced.Nietzsche was just in a wrong place, surrounded by wrong people who could only think of him as mad. And to them, he appeared mad.Two kids were playing on the sea beach. One of them asked the other, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”He said, “When I grow up I want to be a great prophet. I’m going to speak of profound truths.”The first boy said, “But they say nobody listens to the prophets, so why become a prophet?”“Ah,” he said, “us prophets are very obstinate.”This very obstinacy became a problem, because the whole society was against him, a single man single-handedly fighting for truths which people cannot even understand, but are absolutely ready to misunderstand. If a man is sincere and if he cannot understand a thing he should say, “I do not understand it.” But people are not so sincere. When they don’t understand a thing they immediately start misunderstanding it. Misunderstanding is their way of hiding their ignorance.The people who have come to know some truth are certainly obstinate. You can crucify them, but you cannot change their minds. You can throw them into madhouses, but they will go on repeating their insights. Their insights become more valuable than their lives themselves.The East, at least in the past, has been the best soil for prophets, for philosophers, for poets, for mystics. It is no longer the case, but still something of the past goes on echoing in the atmosphere. The West has corrupted the East too. The West knows the tradition of Socrates being poisoned, it knows Jesus Christ’s crucifixion; the East was absolutely innocent. It was an accepted fact that everybody had the right to say his truth. If you don’t agree with him, that does not mean that you have to kill him. Don’t agree – that is your right; at least we can agree to disagree with each other, but there is no need to bring swords when you don’t have arguments. Swords cannot become arguments.But the atmosphere has been changing for almost two thousand years, since this country became invaded again and again by barbarous, uncivilized, uncultured people who had no idea what philosophy was. And finally, for three hundred years the West has tried in every possible way to corrupt the mind of the East through its educational system – through schools, through colleges, through universities.Now even in the East crucifixion is possible. Just the other day one of the great Hindu religious leaders, equivalent to the pope of the Catholics, Shankaracharya Swarupananda, was here for a few days. I told Neelam, when she informed me of this, that he would say something against me certainly. But he spoke against me only on the last day, before leaving, so when the information came to me, he had already gone.What he had spoken against me is so poor that one feels great pity. What has happened to the great philosophical traditions of the East? – and these people represent those traditions. He said about me: “He is the most dangerous man, unparallelled in the history of mankind.” He has not given any reason why. To me this is a compliment. But at least I have the right to ask what is the reason for giving me such a great compliment – “unparallelled in the whole history of mankind.” And what danger am I?This was not the way of the East. When I was listening to his statement I remembered about the original shankaracharya, Adi Shankaracharya. He is a predecessor of nearly fourteen hundred years ago. He died a young man, he died when he was thirty-three. He created a new tradition of sannyasins, he created four temples in all the four directions, and he appointed four shankaracharyas, one for each direction. I remembered about him that he traveled all over the country defeating great, well-known philosophers – that was in a totally different atmosphere.One great philosopher was Mandan Mishra; he had a great following. Still in his memory a town exists. I have been there many times. It is on a beautiful bank of the Narmada, one of the most beautiful rivers. That is the place where the river descends from the mountains, so it has tremendous beauty. The city is called Mandala, in memory of Mandan Mishra.Shankara must have been at the age of thirty when he reached Mandala. Just on the outskirts of the town, by a well, a few women were drawing water. He asked them, “I want to know where the great philosopher Mandan Mishra lives.”Those women started giggling and they said, “Don’t be worried, you just go inside. You will find it.”Shankara said, “How will I find it?”They said, “You will find it, because even the parrots around his house – he has a big garden and there are so many parrots in the garden – they repeat poetries from the upanishads, from the Vedas. If you hear parrots repeating, singing beautiful poetries from the Upanishads, you can be certain that this is the house of Mandan Mishra.”He could not believe it, but when he went and he saw, he had to believe. He asked Mandan Mishra – he was old, nearabout seventy – “I have come a very long way from South India to have a discussion with you, with a condition: If I am defeated, I will become your disciple, and if you are defeated, you will have to become my disciple. Naturally, when I become your disciple all my disciples will become your disciples and the same will be true if you become my disciple – all your disciples will become my disciples.”Old Mandan Mishra looked at the young man and he said, “You are too young and I feel a little hesitant whether to accept this challenge or not. But if you are insistent, then there is no way; I have to accept it. But it does not look right that a seventy year old man who has fought thousands of debates should be fighting with a young man of thirty. But to balance, I would suggest one thing” – and this was the atmosphere that has a tremendous value – “to substitute, I will give you the chance to choose the judge who will decide. So you find a judge. You are too young, and I feel that if you are defeated at least you should have the satisfaction that the judge was your choice.”Now where to find a judge? The young man had heard much about Mandan Mishra’s wife. Her name was Bharti. She was also old, sixty-five. He said, “I will choose your wife to be the judge.”This is the atmosphere, so human, so loving. First Mandan Mishra gave him the chance to choose, and then Shankara chose Mandan Mishra’s own wife! And Bharti said, “But this is not right, I’m his wife, and if you are defeated you may think it is because I may have been prejudiced, favorable toward my husband.”Shankara said, “There is no question of any suspicion. I have heard much about your sincerity. If I’m defeated, I’m defeated. And I know perfectly well if your husband is defeated, you will be the last person to hide the fact.”Six months it took for the discussion. On each single point that man has thought about they quarreled, argued, quoted, interpreted, and after six months the wife said, “Shankara is declared victorious. Mandan Mishra is defeated.”Thousands of people were listening for these six months. It was a great experience to listen to these two so refined logicians, and this was a tremendous experience, that the wife declared Shankara to be the winner. There was great silence a for few moments, and then Bharti said, “But remember that you are only half a winner, because according to the scriptures the wife and husband makes one whole. I’m half of Mandan Mishra. You have defeated one half; now you will have to discuss with me.”Shankara was at a loss. For six months he had tried so hard; many times he had been thinking of giving up – the old man was really very sharp even in his old age. Nobody has been able to stand against Shankara for six months, and now the wife says his victory is only half. Bharti said, “But I will also give you the chance to choose your judge.”He said, “Where am I going to find a better judge than Mandan Mishra? You are such simple and fair and sincere people. But Bharti was very clever, more clever than Shankara had imagined, because she started asking questions about the science of sex.Shankara said, “Forgive me, I am a celibate and I don’t know anything about sex.”Bharti said, “Then you will have to accept your defeat, or if you want some time to study and experience, I’m willing to give you some time.”He was caught in such a strange situation; he asked for six months and six months were given. “You can go and learn as much as you can because this will be the subject to begin with, then later on, other subjects. It is not easy,” Bharti said, “to beat Mandan Mishra. But that half was easier! I am a much harder woman. If I can declare the defeat of my husband, you can understand that I am a hard woman. It is not going to be easy. If you feel afraid don’t come back; otherwise we will wait for six months.”This atmosphere continued for thousands of years. There was no question of being angry, there was no question of being abusive, there was no question of trying to prove that you are right by your physical strength or by your arms or by your armies. These were thought to be barbarous methods; these were not for the cultured people.Nietzsche was in a very wrong place in a wrong time; he was not understood by his contemporaries. Now, slowly, interest in him is arising; more and more people are becoming interested in him. Perhaps it would have been better for him to delay his coming a little. But it is not in our hands when to come and when to go. And people of his genius always come before their time. But he should have his respected place in the category of the Buddhas. That day is not far away.When all other so-called great philosophers of the West will be forgotten, Friedrich Nietzsche will still be remembered, because he has depths which have still to be explored, he has insights which have been only ignored; he has just been put aside as a madman.Even if he is a madman, that does not matter. What he is saying is so truthful that if to get those truths one has to become mad, it is a perfectly good bargain.Osho,Recently you spoke about the will to power. You explained the importance of having this will, this longing, to become a master over one's self. You also often declare that every desire is the basic reason for man's frustration. Can you please explain the difference between will and desire?The difference between will and desire is great, although they appear almost similar.Desire is always for things. More money, more prestige, more respectability, more knowledge, more virtue, a better place in the afterlife – these are all desires. Desires can be millions, because there are millions of things in the world which can become objects of desire. A desire always needs an object.Will is not objective; it does not want something else to be added to it. Will is simply your very life force, which wants to assert itself in its totality, in its wholeness, to bring all the flowers that are hidden in you, to be yourself.The will knows only one thing and that is you and your golden future. You, right now, are only seeds. But you can become great trees, reaching to the stars.Vincent van Gogh, one of the most significant Dutch painters, was also thought of just like Nietzsche – a madman. He also had to live in a madhouse, and he was not a harmful man; his paintings were just not according to the ideas of people. Strange…in this world you are not even free to paint something according to your own idea, which is not harming anybody.He had painted his trees so tall that stars were left far behind – they go above the stars. Naturally people used to ask him, “This is sheer madness. Where have you seen these trees going beyond the stars?”And what was always his answer is immensely significant. He used to say, “To me, trees represent the will of the earth. The earth is trying to reach beyond the stars, and you will see one day that the earth has succeeded. It is just the beginning, that’s why you don’t see the trees that high. But I can see far away in the future.”But we cannot even forgive poets, we cannot forgive even visionaries for their harmless visions. But what a beautiful idea – that the earth wants to reach beyond the stars. That defines will.Desire is always for possessions.Will is always for consciousness.Will is a life-force; a flame of your very being. It does not want anything else – it simply wants itself to be actualized in its totality. It does not want to remain a seed, it does not want just to remain a dream; it wants to become a reality, it wants to become an actual phenomenon.I can understand your problem. It may have arisen in many people’s minds, because I have always spoken against desire, and while speaking on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra I supported totally his idea of the will.When on a rosebush flowers blossom, it is the will. They were hidden inside the bush and they were trying to come into manifestation – just as a Gautam Buddha is hidden in you, or a Zarathustra is hidden in you and is trying to come out. You are a seed. Once this idea settles in you, you will find inside the seed a serpent starts uncoiling itself – that is the will. Nietzsche has called it will to power. I myself would like to call it will to realization, will to actualization, will to become absolutely yourself.Desire is a very dangerous thing, because you can get lost in desire and millions are lost. The jungle of desires is very thick, and there is no end; one after another you will find desires and desires and desires. And no desire is fulfilling. Every desire only gives you a new frustration, every desire gives you a new desire. But this whole process of desiring takes your energy away from becoming a will to realization, a will to bring your potential into flowering, into its ultimate expression.Desire is going astray from will.My effort here is to pull you back from your desires to one single-pointed will – the will that wants to know yourself, the will that wants to be yourself, the will that wants whatever is hidden in you to become manifest.Mendel saves up for years to buy a really fine tailor-made suit, his very first, but after he has been out in it for an hour or so he notices there are things wrong with it. He goes back to the tailor.“The arms are too long,” says Mendel.“No problem. Just hold your arms out further and bend at the elbows.”“But the trouser legs are too long.”“Right, no problem. Walk with your knees bent.”“The collar is too high; it is halfway up the back of my head.”“Okay. Just poke your head out further.”So Mendel goes out into the world with his first tailor-made suit. As he is passing a couple in the street the woman says, “Look at that poor man, he must have had polio.”The man says, “But what a fine suit he is wearing!”Your desires may give you a fine suit, but they will also make you suffer from polio; everything will be wrong. Your desires will not allow you to be simply yourself, to be exactly your destiny.Will is a longing to achieve one’s destiny.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You said the other day that we are born alone, we live alone and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we seek to relate to others; in addition, we are usually attracted to being intimate with one person in particular. Would you please comment?The question that you have asked is the question of every human being. We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Aloneness is our very nature, but we are not aware of it. Because we are not aware of it, we remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace, at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness.Loneliness is a misunderstood aloneness. Once you misunderstand your aloneness as loneliness, the whole context changes. Aloneness has a beauty and grandeur, a positivity; loneliness is poor, negative, dark, dismal.Everybody is running away from loneliness. It is like a wound; it hurts. To escape from it, the only way is to be in a crowd, to become part of a society, to have friends, to create a family, to have husbands and wives, to have children. In this crowd, the basic effort is that you will be able to forget your loneliness.But nobody has ever succeeded in forgetting it. That which is natural to you, you can try to ignore – but you cannot forget it; it will assert again and again. And the problem becomes more complex because you have never seen it as it is; you have taken it for granted that you are born lonely.The dictionary meaning is the same; that shows the mind of the people who create dictionaries. They don’t understand at all the vast difference between loneliness and aloneness. Loneliness is a gap. Something is missing, something is needed to fill it, and nothing can ever fill it because it is a misunderstanding in the first place. As you grow older, the gap also grows bigger. People are so afraid to be by themselves that they do any kind of stupid thing. I have seen people playing cards alone; the other party is not there. They have invented games in which the same person plays cards from both sides.Somehow one wants to remain engaged. That engagement may be with people, may be with work…. There are workaholics; they are afraid when the weekend comes close – what are they going to do? And if they don’t do anything, they are left to themselves, and that is the most painful experience.You will be surprised to know that it is on the weekends that most of the accidents in the world happen. People are rushing in their cars to resort places, to sea beaches, to hill stations, bumper to bumper. It may take eight hours, ten hours to reach, and there is nothing for them to do because the whole crowd has come with them. Now their house, their neighborhood, their city is more peaceful than this sea resort. Everybody has come. But some engagement….People are playing cards, chess; people are watching television for hours. The average American watches television five hours a day; people are listening to the radio…just to avoid themselves. For all these activities, the only reason is – not to be left alone; it is very fearful. And this idea is taken from others. Who has told you that to be alone is a fearful state?Those who have known aloneness say something absolutely different. They say there is nothing more beautiful, more peaceful, more joyful than being alone.But you listen to the crowd. The people who live in misunderstanding are in such a majority, that who bothers about a Zarathustra, or a Gautam Buddha? These single individuals can be wrong, can be hallucinating, can be deceiving themselves or deceiving you, but millions of people cannot be wrong. And millions of people agree that to be left to oneself is the worst experience in life; it is hell.But any relationship that is created because of the fear, because of the inner hell of being left alone, cannot be satisfying. Its very root is poisoned. You don’t love your woman, you are simply using her not to be lonely; neither does she love you. She is also in the same paranoia; she is using you not to be left alone.Naturally, in the name of love anything may happen – except love. Fights may happen, arguments may happen, but even they are preferred to being lonely: at least somebody is there and you are engaged, you can forget your loneliness. But love is not possible, because there is no basic foundation for love.Love never grows out of fear.You are asking, “You said the other day that we are born alone, we live alone and we die alone. Yet it seems as if from the day we are born, whatever we are doing, whoever we are, we seek to relate to others.”This seeking to relate to others is nothing but escapism. Even the smallest baby tries to find something to do; if nothing else, then he will suck his own big toes on his feet. It is an absolutely futile activity, nothing can come out of it, but it is engagement. He is doing something. You will see in the stations, in the airports, small boys and girls carrying their teddy bears; they cannot sleep without them. Darkness makes their loneliness even more dangerous. The teddy bear is a great protection; somebody is with them.And your God is nothing but a teddy bear for grown-ups.You cannot live as you are. Your relationships are not relationships. They are ugly. You are using the other person, and you know perfectly well the other person is using you. And to use anybody is to reduce him into a thing, into a commodity. You don’t have any respect for the person.“In addition,” you are asking, “we are usually attracted to being intimate with one person in particular.”It has a psychological reason. You are brought up by a mother, by a father; if you are a boy, you start loving your mother and you start being jealous of your father because he is a competitor; if you are a girl, you start loving your father and you hate your mother because she is a competitor. These are now established facts, not hypotheses, and the result of it turns your whole life into a misery. The boy carries the image of his mother as the model of a woman. He becomes conditioned continuously; he knows only one woman so closely, so intimately. Her face, her hair, her warmth – everything becomes an imprint. That’s exactly the scientific word used: it becomes an imprint in his psychology. And the same happens to the girl about the father.When you grow up, you fall in love with some woman or with some man and you think, “Perhaps we are made for each other.” Nobody is made for anyone. But why do you feel attracted toward one certain person? It is because of your imprint. He must resemble your father in some way; she must resemble your mother in some way.Of course no other woman can be exactly a replica of your mother, and anyway you are not in search of a mother, you are in search of a wife. But the imprint inside you decides who is the right woman for you. The moment you see that woman, there is no question of reasoning. You immediately feel attraction; your imprint immediately starts functioning – this is the woman for you, or this is the man for you.It is good as far as meeting once in a while on the sea beach, in the movie hall, in the garden is concerned, because you don’t come to know each other totally. But you are both hankering to live together; you want to be married, and that is one of the most dangerous steps that lovers can take.The moment you are married, you start becoming aware of the totality of the other person, and you are surprised on every single aspect – “Something went wrong; this is not the woman, this is not the man” – because they don’t fit with the ideal that you are carrying within you. And the trouble is multiplied because the woman is carrying an ideal of her father – you don’t fit with it. You are carrying the ideal of your mother – she does not fit with it. That’s why all marriages are failures.Only very rare marriages are not failures – and I hope God should save you from those marriages which are not failures, because they are psychologically sick. There are people who are sadists, who enjoy torturing others, and there are people who are masochists, who enjoy torturing themselves. If a husband and wife belong to these two categories, that marriage will be a successful marriage. One is a masochist and one is a sadist – it is a perfect marriage, because one enjoys being tortured and one enjoys torturing.But ordinarily it is very difficult to find out in the first place whether you are a masochist or a sadist, and then to look for your other polarity…. If you are wise enough you should go to the psychologist and inquire who you are, a masochist or a sadist? and ask if he can give you some references which can fit with you.Sometimes, just by accident, it happens that a sadist and masochist become married. They are the happiest people in the world; they are fulfilling each other’s needs. But what kind of need is this? – they are both psychopaths, and they are living a life of torture. But otherwise, every marriage is going to fail, for one simple reason: the imprint is the problem.Even in marriage, the basic reason for which you wanted to have the relationship is not fulfilled. You are more alone when you are with your wife than when you are alone. To leave husband and wife in a room by themselves is to make them both utterly miserable.One of my friends was retiring; he was a big industrialist, and he was retiring because of my advice. I said, “You have so much and you don’t have a son; you have two daughters and they are married in rich families. Now why unnecessarily bother about all kinds of worries – of business, and income tax, and this and that? You can close everything; you have enough. Even if you live one thousand years, it will do.”He said, “That’s true. The real problem is not the business, the real problem is I will be left alone with my wife. I can retire right now if you promise me one thing, that you will live with us.I said, “This is strange. Are you retiring or am I retiring?”He said, “That is the condition. Do you think I am interested in all these troubles? It is just to escape from my wife.”The wife was a great social worker. She used to run an orphanage, a house for widows, and a hospital particularly for people who are beggars and cannot pay for their treatment. I also asked her in the evening, “Do you really enjoy all this, from the morning till the evening?”She said, “Enjoy? It is a kind of austerity, a self-imposed torture.”I said, “Why should you impose this torture on yourself?” She said, “Just to avoid your friend. If we are left alone, that is the worst experience in life.”And this is a love marriage, not an arranged marriage. They married each other against the whole family, the whole society, because they belonged to different religions, different castes; but their imprints gave them signals that this is the right woman, this is the right man. And all this happens unconsciously. That’s why you cannot answer why you have fallen in love with a certain woman, or with a certain man. It is not a conscious decision. It has been decided by your unconscious imprint.This whole effort – whether of relationships or remaining busy in a thousand and one things – is just to escape from the idea that you are lonely. And I want it to be emphatically clear to you that this is where the meditator and the ordinary man part.The ordinary man goes on trying to forget his loneliness, and the meditator starts getting more and more acquainted with his aloneness. He has left the world; he has gone to the caves, to the mountains, to the forest, just for the sake of being alone. He wants to know who he is. In the crowd, it is difficult; there are so many disturbances. And those who have known their aloneness have known the greatest blissfulness possible to human beings – because your very being is blissful.After being in tune with your aloneness, you can relate; then your relationship will bring great joys to you, because it is not out of fear. Finding your aloneness you can create, you can be involved in as many things as you want, because this involvement will not anymore be running away from yourself. Now it will be your expression; now it will be the manifestation of all that is your potential.Only such a man – whether he lives alone or lives in the society, whether he marries or lives unmarried makes no difference – is always blissful, peaceful, silent. His life is a dance, is a song, is a flowering, is a fragrance. Whatever he does, he brings his fragrance to it.But the first basic thing is to know your aloneness absolutely.This escape from yourself you have learned from the crowd. Because everybody is escaping, you start escaping. Every child is born in a crowd and starts imitating people; what others are doing, he starts doing. He falls into the same miserable situations as others are in, and he starts thinking that this is what life is all about. And he has missed life completely.So I remind you, don’t misunderstand aloneness as loneliness. Loneliness is certainly sick; aloneness is perfect health.Ginsberg visits Doctor Goldberg. “Ja, you are sick.”“Not good enough. I want another opinion.”“Okay,” said Doctor Goldberg, “you are ugly too.”We are all committing the same kinds of misunderstandings continually.I would like my people to know that your first and most primary step toward finding the meaning and significance of life is to enter into your aloneness. It is your temple; it is where your God lives, and you cannot find this temple anywhere else. You can go on to the moon, to Mars….Once you have entered your innermost core of being, you cannot believe your own eyes: you were carrying so much joy, so many blessings, so much love…and you were escaping from your own treasures.Knowing these treasures and their inexhaustibility, you can move now into relationships, into creativity. You will help people by sharing your love, not by using them. You will give dignity to people by your love; you will not destroy their respect. And you will, without any effort, become a source for them to find their own treasures too. Whatever you make, whatever you do, you will spread your silence, your peace, your blessings into everything possible.But this basic thing is not taught by any family, by any society, by any university. People go on living in misery, and it is taken for granted. Everybody is miserable, so it is nothing much if you are miserable; you cannot be an exception.But I say unto you: You can be an exception. You just have not made the right effort.Osho,The other day, you talked about the third eye as a door for connecting with you and existence. Whenever I feel open, flowing, connecting with you, other people, nature or myself, I mostly feel it in my heart as silence and expanding spaciousness, and sometimes as radiating light. Beloved Osho, is this the same kind of experience you were talking about, or is there a difference between connecting through the third eye or the heart; or are there different stages?What you are experiencing is in itself valuable, but it is not the experience of the third eye. The third eye is a little higher than your experience.The way the mystics in the East have categorized the evolution of consciousness is in seven centers. Your experiences belong to the fourth center, the heart. It is one of the most important centers, because it is exactly in the middle. Three centers are below it and three centers are above it. That’s why love is such a balancing experience.Your description is, “Whenever I feel open, flowing, connecting with you, other people, nature or myself, I mostly feel it in my heart as silence and expanding spaciousness, and sometimes as radiating light. Is this the same kind of experience you were talking about?”I was talking about the third eye, which is above the heart. There are three centers above the heart. One is in your throat, which is the center of creativity; one is between your two eyebrows, exactly in the middle, which is called the third eye. Just as you have two eyes to know the outside world…the third eye is only a metaphor, but the experience is knowing oneself, seeing oneself.The last center is sahasrar, the seventh; that is at the top of your head. As consciousness goes on moving upward, first you know yourself, and in the second step you know the whole universe; you know the whole and yourself as part of it.In the old language, the seventh is “knowing God,” the sixth is “knowing yourself,” the fifth is “being creative,” and the fourth is “being loving, sharing and knowing others.” With the fourth, your journey becomes certain; it can be guaranteed that you will reach the seventh. Before the fourth, there is a possibility you may go astray.The first center is the sex center, which is for reproduction – so that life continues. Just above it…the sex energy can be moved upward, and it is a great experience; for the first time you find yourself self-sufficient.Sex always needs the other. The second center is the center of contentment, self-sufficiency: you are enough unto yourself. At the third center you start exploring – who are you? who is this self-sufficient being? These centers are all significant….The moment you find who you are, the fourth center opens and you find you are love.Before the fourth the journey has started, but there is a possibility you may not be able to complete it. You can go astray. For example, finding yourself self-sufficient, contented, you can remain there; there is no need to do anything anymore. You may not even ask the question, “Who am I?” The sufficiency is so much that all questions disappear.A master is needed in these moments, so that you don’t settle somewhere in the middle without reaching the goal. And there are beautiful spots to settle…feeling contented, what is the need to go on? But the master goes on nagging you and wants you to know who you are; you may be contented, but at least know who you are. The moment you know who you are, a new door opens, because you become aware of life, of love, of joy. You can stay there; it is so much, there is no need to move any more. But the master goads you on, “Move to the fourth! Unless you find the purest energy of love, you will not know the splendor of existence.”After the fourth, you cannot go astray. Once you have known the splendor of existence, creativity arises on its own. You have known beauty; you would like to create it also. You want to be a creator. A tremendous longing for creativity arises. Whenever you feel love, you always feel creativity just as a shadow coming with it. The man of creativity cannot simply go on looking outside. There is much beauty outside…but he becomes aware that just as there is an infinite sky outside, to balance it there must be the same infinity inside.If a master is available, it is good; if he is not available, these experiences will lead you onward.Once your third eye is opened, and you see yourself, the whole expanse of your consciousness, you have come very close to the temple of God; you are just standing on the steps. You can see the door and you cannot resist the temptation to go inside the temple and see what is there. There you find universal consciousness, there you find enlightenment, there you find ultimate liberation. There you find your eternity.So these are the seven centers – just arbitrarily created divisions, so the seeker can move from one to another in a systematic way; otherwise, there is every possibility, if you are working by yourself, to get muddled. Particularly before the fourth center there are dangers, and even after the fourth center….There have been many poets who have lived at the fifth center of creativity and never gone ahead – many painters, many dancers, many singers who created great art, but never moved to the third eye. And there have been mystics who have remained with the third eye, knowing their own inner beauty; it is so fulfilling that they thought they had arrived. Somebody is needed to tell you that there is still something more ahead; otherwise, in your ignorance, what you will do is almost unpredictable.Mike had decided to join the police force and went along for the entrance examination. The examining sergeant, realizing that the prospective recruit was an Irishman, decided to ask him a simple question. “Who killed Jesus Christ?” he asked.Mike looked worried and said nothing, so the sergeant told him not to worry and that he could have some time to think about it. Mike was on his way home when he met Paddy.“Well,” said Paddy, “are you a policeman yet?”“Not only that,” says Mike, “but I am on my first case.”Man is such that he needs someone who has known the path and knows the pitfalls, knows the beautiful spots where one can remain stuck, and has compassion enough to go on pushing you – even against you – until you have reached to the final stage of your potentiality.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When you spoke about Nietzsche's concept of will, it was so much the opposite pole to the concept of will that the Nazis developed from the same source, and that is still so prevalent in the west. Could you speak about the difference?Prem Pankaja, it is the destiny of the genius to be misunderstood. If a genius is not misunderstood, he is not a genius at all. If the common masses can understand, that means the person is speaking at the same level where ordinary intelligence is.Friedrich Nietzsche is misunderstood, and out of this misunderstanding there has been tremendous disaster. But perhaps it was unavoidable. To understand a man like Nietzsche you have to have at least the same standard of consciousness, if not higher.Adolf Hitler is so retarded that it is impossible to think that he can understand the meaning of Nietzsche; but he became the prophet of Nietzsche’s philosophy. And according to his retarded mind he interpreted – not only interpreted, but acted according to those interpretations – and the second world war was the result.When Nietzsche is talking about “will to power,” it has nothing to do with will to dominate. But that is the meaning the Nazis had given to it.“The will to power” is diametrically opposite to the will to dominate. The will to dominate comes out of an inferiority complex. One wants to dominate others, just to prove to himself that he is not inferior – he is superior. But he needs to prove it. Without any proof he knows he is inferior; he has to cover it up by many, many proofs.The really superior man needs no proof, he simply is superior. Does a roseflower argue about its beauty? Does the full moon bother about proving its gloriousness? The superior man simply knows it, there is no need for any proof; hence he has no will to dominate. He certainly has a “will to power,” but then you have to make a very fine distinction. His will to power means: he wants to grow to his fullest expression.It has nothing to do with anybody else, its whole concern is the individual himself. He wants to blossom, to bring all the flowers that are hidden in his potential, to rise as high as possible in the sky. It is not even comparative, it is not trying to rise higher than others – it is simply trying to rise to its fullest potential.“Will to power” is absolutely individual. It wants to dance to the highest in the sky, it wants to have a dialogue with the stars, but it is not concerned with proving anybody inferior. It is not competitive, it is not comparative.Adolf Hitler and his followers, the Nazis have done so much harm to the world because they prevented the world from understanding Friedrich Nietzsche and his true meaning. And it was not only one thing; about every other concept too, they have the same kind of misunderstanding.It is such a sad fate, one which has never befallen any great mystic or any great poet before Nietzsche. The crucifixion of Jesus or poisoning of Socrates are not as bad a fate, as that which has befallen Friedrich Nietzsche – to be misunderstood on such a grand scale that Adolf Hitler managed to kill more than eight million people in the name of Friedrich Nietzsche and his philosophy. It will take a little time…. When Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and the second world war are forgotten, Nietzsche will come back to his true light. He is coming back.Just the other day, sannyasins from Japan informed me that my books are selling in their language at the highest rate and next to them are Friedrich Nietzsche’s – his books are also selling. And just a few days earlier the same information came from Korea. Perhaps people may be finding something similar in them.But Friedrich Nietzsche has to be interpreted again, so that all the nonsense that has been put, by the Nazis, over his beautiful philosophy can be thrown away. He has to be purified, he needs a baptism.Little Sammy tells his grandfather about the great scientist, Albert Einstein, and his theory of relativity.“Ah yes,” says the grandfather, “and what does the theory have to say?”“Our teacher says that only a few people in the whole world can understand it,” the boy explains, “but then she told us what it means. Relativity is like this: if a man sits for an hour with a pretty girl, it feels like a minute; but if he sits on a hot stove for a minute, it feels like an hour – and that’s the theory of relativity.”Grandpa is silent and slowly shakes his head, “Sammy,” he says softly, “from this your Einstein makes a living?”People understand according to their own level of consciousness.It was just a coincidence that Nietzsche fell into the hands of the Nazis. They needed a philosophy for war, and Nietzsche appreciates the beauty of the warrior. They wanted some idea for which to fight, and Nietzsche gave them a good excuse – for the superman.Of course, they immediately got hold of the idea of superman. The Nordic German Aryans were going to be Nietzsche’s new race of man, the superman. They wanted to dominate the world, and Nietzsche was very helpful, because he was saying that man’s deepest longing is “will to power.” They changed it into will to dominate.Now they had the whole philosophy: the Nordic German Aryans are the superior race because they are going to give birth to the superman. They have the will to power and they will dominate the whole world. That is their destiny – to dominate the inferior human beings. Obviously, the arithmetic is simple: the superior should dominate the inferior.These beautiful concepts…Nietzsche could not ever have imagined they, would become so dangerous and such a nightmare to the whole of humanity. But you cannot avoid being misunderstood, you cannot do anything about it.A drunk who smelt of whiskey, cigars, and a cheap perfume, staggered up the steps into the bus, reeled down the aisle, then plopped himself down on a seat next to a Catholic priest.The drunk took a long look at his offended seat partner and said, “Hey father, I have got a question for you. What causes arthritis?”The priest’s reply was cold and curt, “Amoral living,” he said, “too much liquor, smoking and consorting with loose women.”“Well, I’ll be damned!” said the drunk.They rode in silence for a moment. The priest began to feel guilty, that he had reacted so strongly to a man who obviously needed Christian compassion. He turned to the drunk and said, “I am sorry, my son. I did not mean to be harsh. How long have you suffered from this terrible affliction of arthritis?”“My affliction?” the drunk said, “I don’t have arthritis. I was just reading in the paper that the pope had it.”Now, what can you do? Once you have said something, then it all depends on the other person, what he is going to make of it.But Nietzsche is so immensely important that he has to be cleaned of all the garbage that the Nazis have put on his ideas. And the strangest thing is that not only the Nazis but other philosophers around the world have also misunderstood him. Perhaps he was such a great genius that your so-called great men also were not able to understand him.He was bringing so many new insights into the world of thinking, that even just a single insight would have made him one of the great philosophers of the world – and he has dozens of insights which are absolutely original, which man has never thought about. If rightly understood, Nietzsche certainly could create the atmosphere and the right soil for the superman to be born. He can help humanity to be transformed.I have tremendous respect for the man, and also a great sadness that he was misunderstood – not only misunderstood, but forced into a madhouse. The doctors declared that he was mad. His insights were so far away from the ordinary mind that the ordinary mind felt very happy in declaring him mad: “If he is not mad, then we are too ordinary.” He has to be mad, he has to be forced into a madhouse.My own feeling is, he was never mad. He was just too much ahead of his time, and he was too sincere and too truthful. He said exactly what he experienced without bothering about politicians, priests and other pygmies. But these pygmies are so many and this man was so alone, that they would not hear that he was not mad. And the proof that he was not mad is his last book, which he wrote in the madhouse.But I am the first man who is saying that he was not mad. It seems that this whole world is so cunning, so politically minded, that people say only things that bring reputation to them, which bring applause from the crowd. Even your great thinkers are not very great.The book that he wrote in the madhouse is his greatest work, and is an absolute proof because a mad man could not write it. His last book is The Will To Power. He did not see it printed, because who is going to print a madman’s book? He knocked on many publishers’ doors, but was refused – and now everybody agrees that that is his greatest work. After his death, his sister sold the house and other things to publish the book, because that was his last desire, but he did not see it in print.Was he mad? or are we living in a mad world? If a madman can write a book like, The Will To Power, then it is better to be mad than to be sane like Ronald Reagan, who is piling up nuclear weapons – there are thousands of people employed in creating nuclear weapons twenty-four hours a day. You call this man sane, and you call Friedrich Nietzsche mad?An old Indian was sitting in a bar, when a long-haired, bearded, dirty hippie stormed into the bar and ordered a drink. The hippie’s raunchy insults drove everyone else out of the bar, but the old Indian sat calmly watching. Finally the old hippie turned to him and said, “Hey, red man, why the hell are you staring at me? Are you crazy, or something?”“No,” the Indian replied, “twenty years ago I was arrested for making love to a buffalo. I thought you might be my son.”Osho,When you talked about the superman, you said that the camel has to become a lion. I feel very attracted to that lion, but I am still afraid to get in contact with it. I have the feeling the lion in me has something to do with my power. How can I use my power without losing my love? How can I use my power and still stay with an open heart? To me, love and power seem to be contradictory. Is this so? Can you say something about this, please?The question that you are asking is exactly the same as the question that Pankaja asked. You also have the same misunderstanding, although it is not related to Friedrich Nietzsche.You are basically asking, “How can I use my power without losing my love? How can I use my power and still stay with an open heart? To me, love and power seem to be contradictory.”That’s your misunderstanding.Love and power are not contradictory.Love is the greatest power in the world.But you have to understand again: by power I don’t mean power over others. Power over others is not love; power over others is pure hate, it is poison, it is destructive.But to me, and to anyone who knows, love itself is power – and the greatest power, because there is nothing more creative than love. There is nothing more fulfilling than love, there is nothing more nourishing than love. When you are in love, all fears disappear, and when you become love yourself, even death becomes irrelevant.Jesus is not very far away from the truth when he says, “God is love.” Certainly God is power, the greatest power. I want to improve upon Jesus: I don’t say God is love, I say love is God. To me God is only a symbol and love is a reality.God is only a myth – love is the experience of millions of people.God is only a word, but love can become a dance in your heart.Your misunderstanding is that you think power means power over others. And it is not only your misunderstanding, Dhyan Agni, it is the misunderstanding of millions of people. And because of this misunderstanding they destroy the whole beauty of love. Instead of creating a paradise out of it, they create a hell for each other, because everybody is trying to dominate everybody else in the name of love – but deep down is the desire to dominate.Love in itself is unconditional. It knows only giving, sharing; it does not know any desire for getting something in return. It does not ask for any response. Its joy and its reward is in sharing. And its power is in its sharing. It is so powerful that it can go on sharing with millions of people, and still the heart remains overflowing with love – it is inexhaustible. That is its power.You are asking, “How can I use my power without losing my love?” If you want to dominate, then certainly you will have to lose your love. But if you want to love, you can love as powerfully as you want.There is no contradiction between power and love. If there is a contradiction between power and love, then love will become powerless, it will become impotent, uncreative, weak; power will become dangerous, destructive – it will start to enjoy torturing people.Love and power separate are the misery of the world. Love and power together, as one energy, can become a great transformation. Life can become a blissfulness. And it is only a question of dropping a misunderstanding.It is just as if you were thinking two plus two is equal to five, and then somebody points out to you that you are calculating wrongly: two plus two is not five, two plus two is four. Do you think many austerities will be needed to change your misconception? Will you have to stand on your head for hours to change your idea that two and two are four, or five? Or you will have to go on a fast unto death to change your misconception? Or you will have to renounce the world and all its pleasures because your calculation is wrong and you have to purify your soul first; otherwise how can you calculate rightly?These are simple calculations, and a man of understanding can change them within a second. It is just a question of seeing where you have gone astray. Bring yourself back.“I had the strangest dream last night,” a man was telling his psychiatrist. “I saw my mother, but when she turned around to look at me, I noticed she had your face. As you can imagine, I found this very disturbing; and in fact I woke up immediately and could not get back to sleep. I just lay there in bed waiting for the morning to come and then I got up, drank a coke and came right over here for my appointment. I thought you could help me explain the meaning of this strange dream.”The psychiatrist was silent for a few moments before responding, “A coke? You call that breakfast?”The poor fellow has come to understand the dream, why his mother’s face has turned into his psychiatrist’s face; but that is not the problem to the psychiatrist. To him the problem is: “A coke? You call that breakfast?”But just watch people talking, and you will be amazed – everywhere there is misunderstanding. You are saying something, something else is understood; somebody else is saying something, you understand something else.The world would be a more silent and peaceful place if people were saying only five percent of what they are saying now – although that five percent will cover absolutely everything that is essential. And I am not taking a very minimum point, that is the maximum. You can try it: speak only the essential, as if you are giving a telegram, so you have to go on choosing just ten words. And have you watched? Your telegram means more than your long letter, condensed. Be telegraphic and you will be surprised that in the whole day there are very few times when you have to speak.One retired mathematician used to live in my neighborhood in a city. His whole life he had been a teacher, and it was very difficult for him to suffer retirement. His wife had not been on talking terms with him for years; “Because” she said, “He is such a bore! It is better not to talk with him. He immediately goes into mathematics.”No other neighbor was welcoming to him; one of my neighbors was worried about me because he used to come to me for hours. He was worried that that old fellow must be torturing me. He came to give me a suggestion.He said, “I give you a suggestion how to get rid of this old man. Whenever you see him coming, just take your umbrella, stand on the door as if you are going somewhere, and he will ask, ‘Where are you going?’ and you can say that you are going somewhere.”I said, “You don’t know that man! If I say I am going somewhere, he will say, ‘I’m coming along,’ and that will be more torturous. It is better here. And it is not a torture, I enjoy it, because I have nothing to say, I simply sit silently. He alone does everything. He talks and he goes on and on, and finally he thanks me and says, ‘You are such a good conversationalist.’ and I say, ‘I am nothing compared to you, but I am learning just a little bit from you.’“People don’t want you to speak, they want you to listen. And if you learn a simple art of listening to people, so much misunderstanding in the world will be avoided.The very elderly couple were listening to a religious revival on the radio. The preacher ended his stirring speech by saying, “God wants to heal you all. Just stand up, put one hand on the radio, then place the other on the part of the body that is sick.”The old woman tottered to her feet, put one hand on the radio and the other on her arthritic leg. The old man put one hand on the radio and one hand on his genitals.The old woman snapped at him, “Fred! This preacher said God would heal the sick, not raise the dead!”But you cannot avoid being misunderstood.I don’t know who has given you the idea that love and power are contradictory. Change it, because changing it will change you and your whole life.Love is power, the purest power and the greatest power: Love is God. Nothing can be higher than that. But this power is not a desire to enslave others, this power is not a destructive force.This power is the very source of creation.This power is creativity.And this power will transform you totally into a new being. It has no concern with anybody. Its whole concern is to bring your seeds to their ultimate flowering.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In my meditations, as I try to look more and more inside, I often feel that there is nobody. It is like falling into an endless black gap. And I feel a lot of tension, and wanting to run away. If there is no me inside, then whom should I love? Please help me find that love for myself, and that totality that you have talked about so many times.Shivam Annette, the question you have asked is one of the most important questions as far as the people who are meditating are concerned. Before I go into your question, a few necessary distinctions have to be understood.When I say, “Go inward,” that does not mean that you will find someone there waiting for you. On the contrary, the more you go inward, the less and less you are an ego. You are, but the feeling of I-ness starts disappearing – for the simple reason that the I can exist only in reference to Thou. If the Thou is not present, the I starts melting.Outside you are confronted with many Thous, they keep your I alive. But inside, there is no Thou; hence, there can be no I. That does not mean that you are not. It simply means you are in your purity – not in reference to somebody else, but just yourself, without any reference, in your absolute aloneness. Because our whole life we live as an ego, as an I, this disappearance of the I naturally creates fear and an effort to run away. Although it is natural, it is not right.You have to go through this fear, darkness, anxiety, tension, because your I is dying. Up to now, you have remained identified with the I, so it seems as if you are dying. But just look at a single point: you are watching fear, you are watching the disappearance of I, you are watching tension, you are watching blackness, darkness, you are watching a feeling of nobodiness. This watcher is you.Going inward is to find the witness in its absolute purity, unpolluted by anything – just a pure mirror, not reflecting anything. If mirrors were thinkers – fortunately they are not – and if they were brought up always with somebody looking in them, that would have given them an idea of who they are. And for many years, always reflecting somebody, they would have created a certain image of themselves – that they are the reflectors.Just visualize that one day suddenly nobody reflects in the mirror. The mirror will feel fear. The mirror will feel as if he is falling into a deep abyss, dark, dismal, into non-existence – who is he? His identity is lost just because nobody is looking in the mirror. The mirror has not changed, in fact the mirror is pure. But with this purity he has never been acquainted; nobody has introduced him to this purity.Meditation takes you to your purity.Your purity is witnessing, watching, awareness.You have not asked, “Who is the watcher?” You are asking, “I find there is nobody.”Who finds it? – that’s you! You will find nothingness, you will find nothing reflected in you; you will find emptiness. You have to change your focus from the object to your subjectivity. One thing is certain: the witness is present, and the inward journey is to find the witness – is to find the pure mirror of your being.You say, “In my meditations, as I try to look more and more inside, I often feel that there is nobody.” But you are not conscious at all that you are finding that there is nobody. But you are! Do you think you are going to meet yourself as somebody? Do you think you are going to meet somebody who will say, “Hello, Shivam Annette, how do you do?” That will really freak you out – “My God, I’m not one, I’m two!”This feeling that there is nobody is absolutely right. You are on the right track. Just go on being alert that you are still there, watching. All these are objects – the nobody, the darkness, the fear, the tension…. “It is like falling into an endless black gap. And I feel a lot of tension and wanting to run away.”Watch all these things. They are just your old habits. You have never been into your own depths; hence the fear of the unacquainted, of the unknown. You have always been going around and around – but outside – and you have even forgotten the path to your inner home. In the beginning it will look like an endless black gap. Allow it. Blackness has a beauty of its own. Blackness is deep, is silent – enjoy it! There is no need to run away from it.“If there is no me inside, then whom should I love?”There is certainly no me inside anyone. But there is something else far more important: there is something which can only be called your am-ness, your is-ness – just your pure existence.You call it me, because outside you need to refer to yourself.Have you watched small babies? In the beginning they often refer to themselves by their name, “Johnny is hungry.” They are far more accurate. But in a society they will be thought to be insane. “Johnny is hungry?” Why don’t you say, “I’m hungry” “Johnny” gives the idea that somebody else is hungry. Johnny is your name to be used by others. You cannot use it when you are referring to yourself. Then you have to refer to yourself as ‘I’, ‘me’, but not your name.”It happened in Thomas Alva Edison’s life…he was one of the greatest scientists. As far as numbers of inventions are concerned he is unparallelled – he invented one thousand things. It is almost impossible to find a thing which is not invented by Thomas Alva Edison. He was so much respected that nobody mentioned his name, just out of respect. His colleagues called him Professor, his students called him Sir, and obviously he didn’t use his own name.Then came the first world war, and for the first time rationing was introduced, and he went to the rationing shop. There was a queue; he was standing in the queue and when the man in front of him had left, the clerk shouted loudly, “Who is Thomas Alva Edison?” And Thomas Alva Edison looked here and there, where is Thomas Alva Edison? The clerk was also a little puzzled, because this man ought to be Thomas Alva Edison; it was his number. And the whole queue was also puzzled. They were looking at each other, what is the matter?Finally one man from the back of the queue said to him, “Sir, as far as I remember, I have seen you. You are Thomas Alva Edison.”And Edison said, “If you say so, perhaps I am.”The clerk said, “Are you insane or what?”He said, “Not insane, but I have not heard this name for almost thirty years. I have forgotten it. Nobody calls me by the name. My father died when I was very young, my mother died. Now it is a far, faraway memory. I can remember that something like Thomas Alva Edison used to be my name, but for thirty years nobody has mentioned it. It is good that that man recognized me; otherwise I don’t think that on my own I would have been able to recognize it myself.”It is a rare case, but thirty years is a long time, particularly for a man like Edison whose life is so full of creativity. His thirty years are almost three hundred years in your life.It is simply a social invention that you refer to others by their name, and you refer to yourself by I, me. But inside there is no other, and with the other gone, the me, the I, is gone.But there is no need to worry. You will not find your I, but you will find something greater: you will find your is-ness, your existence, your being.When I say “Love yourself,” this is for those who have never gone inside, because they can always…they are bound to understand only a language of duality. Love yourself – that means you are dividing yourself into two, the lover and the loved. You may not have thought about it, but if you go inside you will not love yourself, you will be love.You will be simply the energy called love.You will be loving; you will radiate love. Love will be your fragrance.Goldstein, who looked Jewish, was walking down a street in Berlin just before the war, when he accidentally collided with a stout Nazi officer.“Schwein,” bellowed the Nazi.“Goldstein,” replied the Jew with a courteous bow.Sometimes you may need your name also; life gives strange situations. Goldstein did well. Rather than being offended, he introduced himself, just as the Nazi had introduced himself. But all these names can be used only on the outside.Inside you are nameless, you are egoless. Inside you are just a pure existence – and out of that pure existence arises the aroma of love.Osho,Being with you, seeing your beauty, hearing your cozy voice, feeling your presence – this all uncovered again the deep longing in me for that which Zarathustra called ‘the great noontide'. Is that enough? Does that lead me to the ultimate?This is not enough. This will not bring you to what Zarathustra calls, “the great noontide”, but it is a good beginning.You are saying, “Being with You, seeing Your beauty, hearing Your cozy voice, feeling Your presence – this all uncovered again the deep longing in me for that which Zarathustra called ‘the great noontide’. Is that enough? Does that lead me to the ultimate?”It is not enough, and it will not lead you on its own to the ultimate. You will have to understand something deeper on each point that you mention. “Being with You” is not enough; you have to be with yourself. Being with me may give you a taste, but that is not going to be enough nourishment. You have to learn, from that – being with yourself.“Seeing your beauty”…these are good indications, but when are you going to see your beauty? I can only be an arrow. But the arrow is always pointing toward your center. The arrow may be beautiful, you may appreciate it, that was not the purpose of the arrow. The purpose of the arrow was for you to move to where it was pointing.You have to see your beauty.You have not only to hear my voice; you have to hear the still, small voice of your own being.It is a good beginning to experience my presence, but one should not stop at it. You have to experience your presence. That will bring in you what Zarathustra calls ‘the great noontide’.The master is just a milestone, on every milestone there is an arrow showing you – move on, you are coming closer to the goal. And when you come to the milestone where there is no arrow but zero, you have come home. That is the great noontide.This is not going to happen just by itself; you will have to move a little, make a little effort. And the effort has to be very relaxed – that is the secret. We know efforts, but they become tensions, anxieties, worries.You have to learn a different kind of effort – what Lao Tzu calls effortless effort – utterly relaxed, because you are not going anywhere. You are simply relaxing within yourself. You are not going to find some goal, some achievement far away which creates worries – whether you are on the right path or on the wrong path, whether you are moving in the right direction, whether the goal really exists or it is just a fiction that you have heard from others. With me one thing is clear – that you are not a fiction.God may be a fiction and paradise may be a fiction.You are a reality.Relaxing within yourself simply means not going outward, withdrawing all your energy which generally goes on moving outward. Don’t go anywhere – just be now and here. There is no question of tension, there is no question of any worry.Silently you will slip into your own being and you will feel a great presence and you will hear a soundless sound – what the Zen people call “the sound of one hand clapping.” You will see the most beautiful space which you cannot imagine, which you cannot even dream of. And it is so close by – just at the very center of you.The journey is small, but it has to be done, and done in such a strange way that there is no doer – almost the way you fall asleep. You cannot be a doer, you cannot make any effort to bring sleep – that will be a disturbance. This entering into your own being and presence is almost like allowing it to happen.That is the great effort which is effortless, which will bring the noontide and the ultimate experience. In a single word: meditation is equivalent to total relaxation. Just doing nothing, sitting silently, and the grass grows by itself.Osho,One line from Dostoevsky's work has impressed me much in my childhood. He says, “In suffering look for happiness.” I used to think that nothing of value could be attained without sacrifice and hard work. After meeting you and drinking your message of love, life, enjoyment and celebration, I realize that my previous idea was quite masochistic and suicidal. I love Dostoevsky and all his works have been of immense value to me. But now I feel there is a depth of sadness in him, which he seems to stop – as if something of the opposite is missing. Could you please shed some light on this?Fyodor Dostoevsky is a very special case – he was a genius. If one has to decide on ten great novels in all the languages of the world, he will have to choose at least three novels of Dostoevsky in the ten.His insight into human beings and their problems is greater than your so-called psychoanalysts, and there are moments where he reaches the heights of great mystics. But he is a sick soul; he himself is a psychological case.He needs all the compassion, because he lived in suffering, utter suffering. He never knew a moment of joy; he was pure anguish, angst. But still he managed to write novels which perhaps are the best in the whole literature of the world. Brothers Karamazov is so great in its insights that no Bible or Koran or Gita can be a competitor to it.And this is the strange fact about him: that he was writing such great insights as if he was possessed, but he himself was living in hell. He created it himself. He never loved anybody, he was never loved by anybody. He never knew that there is something like laughter; he was sickly serious. I don’t see that he ever felt even a single moment of blissfulness. There is nobody else in the whole history of man who was so sick, and yet had such clarity about things. He was a madman with a method.You are saying, “One line from Dostoevsky has impressed me much in my childhood. He says, ‘In suffering look for happiness.’“That statement will appeal to many people because many are suffering, and one can tolerate suffering only if one goes on looking for happiness; if not today then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Suffering can be tolerated only through hope. Then one can suffer his whole life, just looking for happiness.Your being impressed by the statement is dangerous. One should not look for happiness; one should look for the causes of suffering, because that is the way to come out of suffering. And the moment you are out of suffering there is happiness. Happiness is not something that you have to wait for. You can wait for infinity and happiness will not come to you, unless you destroy the causes of suffering.I will not agree with the statement. I will say, “In suffering look for the causes of suffering.” Don’t waste your time about happiness; it is none of your business. You are suffering; suffering is your state. Look what is causing it – jealousy, anger, inferiority complex – what is causing it?And the miracle is: if you can go into your suffering as a meditation, watching, to the deepest roots of it, just through watching, it disappears. You don’t have to do anything more than watching. If you have found the authentic cause by your watching, the suffering will disappear; and if it is not disappearing, that means you are not watching deep enough.So it is a very simple process and with a criterion: if your watching is deep enough…just the way you pull out a plant to look at its roots, it dies, because the roots outside the earth cannot survive. In the light is their death.Suffering can exist only if its roots remain in the unconscious of your being. If you go deep down searching and looking for the roots, the moment you become conscious of the roots of suffering, suffering disappears. The disappearance of suffering is what you call happiness.Happiness has not to be found somewhere else; it was always with you, but the cloud of suffering was covering it. Happiness is our nature.To say it in other words: for suffering you have to make much effort, for happiness you don’t have to make any effort. Just stop making the effort to create suffering.“I used to think that nothing of value could be attained without sacrifice and hard work.” That is the disease Christianity has been spreading all over the world. In fact, everything of authentic value is achieved by relaxation, by silence, by joy. The idea of sacrifice and hard work will create more suffering for you. But once the idea gets settled in your mind, your mind will go on telling you that you are suffering because you are not working hard enough, that your sacrifice is not total.Hard work is needed to create things. Sacrifice is needed when you have something of value, truth, love, enlightenment. And when there is an attack by the mob on your experience, one is ready to sacrifice, but not to compromise.Sacrifice is not in finding the truth; sacrifice is when you have found it – then you will be in trouble. Sacrifice is not in finding love, but when you have found it you will be in trouble. Then either compromise or sacrifice. The cowards compromise. The people who have guts sacrifice – but sacrifice is not a means to attain anything.“After meeting you and drinking your message of love, life, enjoyment and celebration, I realized that my previous idea was quite masochistic and suicidal.”It is good that you understood something very significant. All your saints who have been sacrificing and working hard and torturing themselves, are just masochistic and suicidal. And because they are worshipped, they go on continuing more and more masochistic torture to themselves.And the people who are worshipping them also have the same desire, but not the courage; they also want to be saints, perhaps in a future life. At least in this life they can worship the saints.The whole past of humanity has been dominated by masochistic, sadistic, and suicidal people. That’s why there is so much misery. To be blissful in this world looks as if you are committing a crime; to dance with joy among so many dead people all around…you cannot be forgiven.I have always thought that Christianity became the greatest religion of the world because Jesus was on the cross. Just think, if he was with his girlfriend on the beach there would not have been any Christianity, although he would have enjoyed….And why did it become the greatest religion? Almost half of humanity is Christian. Because he represents your deepest desire. You also want to be crucified, and in different ways you are crucifying yourself; in the name of duty, in the name of nations, in the name of the religion….Jesus says, “Everybody has to carry his cross on his shoulders.” But why? this will look very awkward – wherever you go you will be carrying your cross. But nobody has objected to it. Nobody has said, “Why?” And if I say that everybody has to carry his guitar they all condemn me! The whole world is against a single man who is not saying anything sick.This is a sick idea, carrying your cross. Can’t you carry anything else? Just a flowerpot? If you are determined to carry…then there are more beautiful things in the world. A cross is not something…just a bamboo flute will do, light in weight. And you can do something with it. You can play on it – a beautiful tune, a song; you can dance. What are you going to do with the cross? – except crucify yourself. So why carry it. Why not crucify it here and now? Unnecessarily carrying such weight….Jesus was only thirty-three years of age, and he fell three times while he was carrying the cross – the cross was so heavy. And naturally, if it becomes the fashion that everybody has to carry his cross, you will see that people will be carrying heavier and heavier crosses, heavier than everybody else! You will feel embarrassed if you are carrying a small cross – are you childish or what? A heavy cross is needed so that you fall on the road many times and have many fractures….But Christianity is masochistic. It does not know anything about enjoying life. It knows only about sacrificing life – sacrificing for some stupid fiction. It knows nothing of singing and dancing and celebration.You say, “I love Dostoevsky and all his works have been of immense value to me. But now I feel there is a depth of sadness in him, which he seems to stop – as if something of the opposite is missing.”There is not only sadness in him, there is absolutely suicidal instinct; he is tired and bored with life itself. In his best book, Brothers Karamazov, one of the characters, Ivan Karamazov, makes a very significant statement. Perhaps Dostoevsky himself is speaking through him.Ivan Karamazov says, “If there is a God and I meet him, I am going to return his ticket and ask him, ‘Why did you send me life without asking me? What right do you have? I want to return the ticket to you.’“ This is a suicidal instinct.He lived very miserably and has always written that existence has no meaning, that it has no significance, that it is accidental, that there is nothing to find – no truth, no love, no joy. All his conclusions are wrong. But the man was tremendously capable, a great genius. Even if he writes things which are wrong, he writes with such art and such beauty that millions of people have been influenced by him – just like you, Jivan Mada.The danger is: the words can be beautiful and the message can be poison, pure poison. His insights are deep – but they are always deep – to find more suffering in life, more misery in life. He is determined in all his works to prove that life is an exercise of utter futility. He influenced the contemporary philosophical movement of existentialism – he became a pioneer.I also love him, but I also feel sad and sorry for him. He was a man who could have danced, who could have loved, who could have lived with tremendous totality and intensity. But he served death rather than life. Read him – there is nothing better to read – but remember you are reading a psychopath, a man who is deeply sick, incurably sick.His whole work is just a dark night which knows no dawn.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Nietzsche's maxim: “One is punished most for one's virtues” I see the truth of most clearly in you. But even a man who is virtuous by society's standards is subtly punished too, isn't he? – punished by jealousy and criticism. It is as if one is only meant to strive toward; to attain is an altogether different matter. Is this so?Maneesha, Friedrich Nietzsche’s maxim: “One is punished most for one’s virtues” has a very deep and different meaning from what you have seen in it.The man of virtue is not in any way a hypocrite; he is sincere, truthful. Society consists of hypocrites; they want virtue also to be a hypocrisy, and they have created false virtues which have no relation at all to any authentic virtuousness.The people who conform to the society’s idea of virtues are never punished; they are rewarded, they are respected. They are not stoned to death, they are not crucified. They are crowned as saints, as sages, as wise people; every kind of honor is given to them. But the basic condition is that they should conform to the idea of the society. They should not bother whether it is really virtuous; they should not even inquire.Absolute surrender is needed by the society, a total enslavement. Only then the society gives respectability – only to the slaves, only to those who have committed spiritual suicide. They are not really virtuous people. Just look around in different societies so that you can have a sense of how real virtue and the so-called virtue of the societies are diametrically opposite.In India you will find Hindu monks all getting fat and ugly because it is thought by the Hindus that to eat milk products is a virtue, because the cow is a holy animal. So the Hindu monk goes on eating milk products, goes on gathering fat – bigger the belly, bigger the saint. If you want to measure the height of the saint you have to measure his belly.The Jaina monks eat only one time a day – and that too, standing. To make everything as uncomfortable as possible is a virtue. Now I cannot conceive what sin there is in sitting comfortably and eating. And because they have to eat only one time a day, they eat as much as possible – to compensate, because then they have to wait twenty-four hours again. So their bodies become thin and their bellies become big – but it is respected.One of the sects of the Jainas believes that a saint is perfect only when he starts living naked. But what is the virtue in being naked? All the animals are naked. First these monks torture their bodies in every way. They cannot use anything except their own hands; for eating they will have to make a cup of their hands, they cannot use a plate. That is thought to be renunciation, great renouncing of the world and worldly things.Then it goes to the extreme of stupidity. They cannot use razor blades, so they have to pull out their hairs with their own hands. It is such an ugly scene. Thousands of people, men, women, children, gather to see – this is a very special occasion, a very holy occasion – when a Jaina monk pulls out his hairs, beard, mustache. Tears are coming from his eyes. He is standing naked, surrounded by people; his whole body is a skeleton except the belly, and all these people are looking at the scene with such respect. They will take those hairs and make lockets of them – they are holy hairs. They will kiss the ground on which the saint was standing – it is holy ground.But I don’t see that there is any virtue in it. Certainly the man who is doing this act, performing this stupidity, is a masochist – and the people who have gathered there to see him do it are certainly sadists. They love to see people being tortured, and when somebody is torturing himself, that is a delicacy. Both are sick. But the masochist becomes a great saint and the sadists become followers.Authentic virtue is a totally different thing. It needs a deep exploration of your own being, living according to your own insight, even if it goes – and most often it will – against the social norms, the ideals, and the conditioning.Friedrich Nietzsche is saying, “One is punished most for one’s virtues.” But the virtues have to be your own, they have to be your own discoveries. And you have to be courageous and rebellious enough to live them, whatever the cost.Socrates was asked by the judges, “We can forgive you if you stop speaking completely. What you think is truth is not accepted by the people among whom you have to live. They are offended by your truth. If you promise – and we can trust you, we know you are a man of your word – if you promise not to speak again, to just be silent, you can save your life.”The answer that Socrates gave is to be remembered forever by all those who, in some way, are interested in truth. He said, “I’m living only to speak the truth. Life was given to me by existence to experience truth, and now I’m repaying life by spreading the truth to those who are groping in the dark. If I cannot speak then I don’t see any point – why should I live? My life and my message of truth are synonymous. Please don’t try to seduce me. If I am alive I will speak.”The judges were at a loss. One of the judges said, “You are too stubborn, Socrates.”Socrates said, “It is not I who is stubborn; it is truth, it is virtue which is stubborn. Truth knows no compromise. It is better to die than to be condemned forever because I compromised for a small life. I’m already old; death will come anyway. And it is far more beautiful to accept death, because then death also becomes meaningful. I’m accepting it on the grounds that even death cannot stop me from speaking.”Society has virtues. There are hundreds of societies in the world, so naturally there are hundreds of different kinds of virtues. Something is virtuous in one society and the same thing is unvirtuous in another society.For example, the whole world economy depends on the system of charging interest. A society becomes richer if the money moves faster and does not remain stuck in one hand, but the money can move faster only if there is some incentive. Why should I give my money to somebody else unless I can earn something out of it? Interest is nothing but a strategy to make the money move from one hand to another hand. And the faster the money moves, the richer the society becomes.Mohammedans are poor because interest is condemned by their religion as a sin. To take interest or to give interest is a great sin. Now Mohammedans can never be rich; or if they become rich, they have to be condemned by the society. They cannot take loans from the banks because interest will have to be paid. Mohammedanism is the world’s second largest religion after Christianity, and they have remained poor for a single reason: that interest is thought to be a sin.No other society thinks interest is a sin. What is the sin in it? You take somebody’s money, you have to pay something; otherwise why should he give his money to you? Interest is just a kind of rent. But the Mohammedan considers interest to be so unvirtuous that anybody who commits the sin loses all respect in the society. The same person will gain respect in any other society because he will become richer – and richness is respected.The vegetarians are not willing to see a simple fact, that not a single vegetarian has received, up to now, a Nobel prize. Forty percent of Nobel prizes go to the Jews, which is simply out of proportion to their numbers; sixty percent go to the rest of the world and forty percent to the Jews alone. And why have vegetarians not been able to find a single Nobel prize? The reason is in their food, because it lacks a few vitamins which are absolutely necessary for intelligence to grow. It is virtuous, in a vegetarian society, not to eat meat – but you are losing your intelligence.Substitutes could have been found and I have been for thirty years continually telling vegetarians, “You should start eating unfertilized eggs. They are absolutely vegetable because there is no life in them. And they contain all the vitamins that intelligence absolutely needs; otherwise you will remain retarded.”Vegetarians stopped asking me to speak at their conferences; they became my enemies, and I was simply suggesting to them something that is purely scientific and in their favor. But they would rather listen to their tradition; they will not see the facts.The virtues that society’s concepts create are just manufactured by man’s mind. If you agree with them you will be rewarded greatly. But what Nietzsche is saying is not about those virtues which are acceptable to any society, but about those virtues which an individual finds in the clarity of his own intelligence, in the silences of his own heart, in the understanding of his own being – and follows them. He will be crucified, he will be stoned to death, because he will not be acceptable to the crowd.You are saying, “Nietzsche’s maxim: ‘One is punished most for one’s virtues’ I see the truth of most clearly in You. But even a man who is virtuous by society’s standards is subtly punished too, isn’t he? – punished by jealousy and criticism.”No, Maneesha, he is not punished by jealousy or criticism. He is certainly punished by his own virtue – that is another thing – because he will have to do something stupid, he will have to torture himself, he will have to go against his own intelligence. Only then can he fulfill the demands of the society that he should be virtuous.But these saints and virtuous people are not punished by jealousy and criticism. Criticism is for those who are not following the virtuous; jealousy is for those who are enjoying life and are not being ascetics. The virtuous people are punished, they are punished by their own virtue, but their egos are so immensely satisfied that they are ready to do anything – they can even commit suicide.Jainism is the only religion in the world where even suicide is considered a virtue. Of course it has to be done in a certain methodological way: one has to fast unto death. It is a very torturous, long awaiting, because a healthy person can live without food for ninety days. And those ninety days, continuous hunger and waiting for death…and people around him are singing religious songs and worshipping him. His pictures are printed in the newspapers with great respect, as though he is doing something very spiritual; he is leaving the condemned body. And even today, people do it.So they are punished, but by their own virtue, not by others. Do you think anybody will feel jealous that somebody is committing suicide? Do you think somebody will criticize him? His worshipers will kill whoever criticizes him.“It is as if one is only meant to strive toward; to attain is an altogether different matter.”That’s true. Society talks about, scriptures talk about, great virtues of truth, of love, of silence, of peace, of brotherhood. But they are only to be talked about; you are not supposed to practice them. Yes, in the name of love you can kill as many people as you want. Millions of people have been killed in the name of Christian love; millions of others have been killed in the name of peace, by the Mohammedans.These beautiful words are just decorative. They give you a good feeling that you have such a beautiful philosophy to live by, such beautiful, distant stars to reach – but don’t try to reach to those stars, because a man of truth will not be acceptable in society!The society lives by lies, so many lies that the man of truth is going to expose it – he is a danger. The man of love cannot be acceptable because the society lives by hate: one nation hates another, one religion hates another, one color hates another. There are so many groups, sects, cults and they are all hating each other and are ready to destroy each other. Just talk about love, write about love, but don’t practice – because a man of love is dangerous. That means he will be against you whenever he sees any hatred, any anger.For a man of love, nationality is nothing but a beautiful name for hatred. Religious organizations are nothing but sophisticated ways of hating others who don’t belong to your organization, to your herd, to your crowd.Friedrich Nietzsche is right; his whole life’s experience is condensed in that small statement. He suffered for his virtues.The Italian priest was preaching about sex and morality to his congregation. “Sex is-a dirty”, he shouted. “I wanna see only good-a girls today. I wanna every virgin in-a church to-a stand up.”Not a soul moved. Then after a long pause a sexy looking blond holding an infant in her arms got to her feet. “Virgins is-a what I want,” said the outraged priest.“Hey father,” she asked, “you expect a two month old baby to stand by herself?”I was in Greece and one of my sannyasins, Amrito, who was my hostess, told me that virginity is the most important quality preached by the Greek Orthodox church. I said, “But are there virgins in Greece?”She said, “That is a different matter. I have not come across any virgins.”As a doctrine it is beautiful, but in reality virginity should not be a virtue; it is going against nature. In fact, a man who has any intelligence should not marry a girl who is a virgin; you should expect some experience.When you employ a servant you ask, “What are your qualifications? Bring all your certificates.” You are going to marry a woman for your whole life; you should at least think that if she has remained a virgin that means no man was attracted to her up to now, so why are you being stupid? First ask how many people she has been in love with. The more experienced she is the better companion she will prove to be, because experience is always valuable. Experience is a virtue in every field!Osho,Whilst you were speaking on Kahlil Gibran and Zarathustra, your words seemed to penetrate without my interpretation directly to the center of my being. I experienced an attunement, a communion happening as nectar that was filling my being. Sometimes, without sobbing, tears simply poured from my eyes, and after almost every discourse I felt for a long while in touch with something far beyond what I know of as myself. With questions and answers this does not happen. I still feel that special whatever-it-is that comes when sitting with you, but not with the depth of intensity I have just described. What is the difference?The question you have asked raises many other questions too. I would like to cover all the implications in short, because it is important not only to you but for everyone else here.The first thing: as far as I am concerned, the question-answer sessions are more significant because they relate to you, they relate to your growth. Certainly you are groping in darkness, trying to find a way. You cannot ask questions of the heights of Zarathustra, of Kahlil Gibran – and I have to answer your reality.Listening to Zarathustra and Kahlil Gibran is a good and great entertainment: you may sob and you may have tears and you may feel great, but it is all hot air! You remain the same – nothing changes in you. I speak sometimes on Buddha, on Chuang Tzu, on Zarathustra, just to give you an insight into the heights people have reached, just to make you aware of those distant stars. They are not so distant as they look – people like us have reached there. It is within your grasp.That is the reason why, on Zarathustra and Buddha and Bodhidharma and a thousand others, I have spoken: to create a longing in you. But just the longing is not enough. Then I have to give you the path; then I have to sort out the mess that you are, and put your fragments, which are spread all over the space…to find out where your legs are and where your head is and put them all together, and somehow push you on the path.The question-answer sessions are concerned with you, your growth, your progress – the place where you are. And the discourses on Zarathustra or Kahlil Gibran are concerned with the places where you should be – but you are not yet there.So I disagree with you. I can understand that you enjoy the dream that is created when one is hearing about Buddha…. You have nothing to do; you are just listening to great poetry, listening to a great song, listening to great music, seeing a great dance. But you are not singing, you are not becoming the poetry, you are not becoming the dance. And I want you to become the dance; I want you to reach to the greatest heights that anybody has ever reached.So I have to keep a balance, talking about the dreamlands and then talking about the dark caves where you are hiding, very reluctant to come out in the light. You want to hear about light and you enjoy, but you remain hiding in your dark cave. You want to hear about strange lands, beautiful stories and parables, but it is mere entertainment.You should be more concerned when I am answering the questions, because they can change your reality. I have to do both jobs: create the longing, give a glimpse of the goal, and then clean the path and grease your parts – because you have never moved in many many lives, you are sitting in a junkyard – to put you back on the wheels and rolling.The second job is difficult, and not very juicy either. But it is absolutely necessary. Secondly, I have to remind you of one thing. When I was speaking on Zarathustra…it is a very complicated affair, because I was not speaking directly on Zarathustra; I was speaking on a Zarathustra who is an invention of Friedrich Nietzsche. All the great insights are given by Nietzsche to Zarathustra.Zarathustra…many times his original books have been brought to me, and they are so ordinary that I have never spoken on them. Nietzsche has used Zarathustra only as a symbolic figure, just as Kahlil Gibran was using Almustafa, which was a completely fictitious name. Nietzsche has used a historical name, but in a very fictitious way. He is putting his insights into the mouth of Zarathustra.So first you should remember it is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; it has nothing much to do with the original Zarathustra. And secondly, when I am speaking on it, I don’t care what Nietzsche means, and I don’t even have any way to know what he means; the way he used Zarathustra, I am using him! So it is a very complicated story. It is my Nietzsche, and via Nietzsche it is my Zarathustra. So whatever heights you are flying in have nothing to do with Zarathustra.I have been speaking on hundreds of mystics, but it is always that I am speaking. And I know perfectly well that if by chance, somewhere, I meet these people, they are going to be very angry. They are going to be really enraged and say, “I never meant that.” But my problem is, “How can I know what you had meant?” I can only mean what I mean. So whether it is Zarathustra or Buddha or Jesus or Chuang Tzu, once they pass through me they have my signature on them. You are always listening to me.When I am answering your questions I am more concerned with your growth, with your actual problems; they are more earthly. So don’t be deceived; many people have been deceived. I have been reminding you, but people’s memories are not great.I was speaking on Gautam Buddha in Varanasi and one Buddhist, a very renowned scholar in Buddhism, said to me, “I have been reading the same scriptures. But you have revealed such great depths and heights that I was never aware of; you have confirmed my faith in Gautam Buddha.”I said, “If you don’t get angry with me…you should confirm your faith in me.”He said, “What?”I said, “Yes, because whatever you were reading was perhaps exactly what Buddha meant, and the depths and heights I am talking about are my experiences.”But what to do? There are idiots all over the world. If you want Buddhist idiots to listen to you, you just have to say the name “Buddha” and that’s enough; then you can say anything you want. If you want Hindus to listen to you, you have to talk about Krishna.I am always talking about myself; I cannot talk about anybody else – how can I? Five thousand years ago, what was Krishna thinking, what was in his mind?…but when they listen to me they think, “My God, we were not aware that Krishna had such depths, such heights.” Krishna had nothing. Those heights and those depths are my experiences that I am hanging on anybody; these people function like hooks, I simply hang my idea on them.And even great scholars…this man was Bhikkshu Jagdish Kashyap; he was dean of the faculty of Buddhism in the University of Varanasi, a very learned man. But when I said this to him, he became a permanent enemy. I said, “What happened to the heights and to the depths?”People are much more concerned with names. If I say to you that “Zarathustra said this,” you listen with great attention. The very name Zarathustra looks so ancient, so prophetic, that he must have said something…and trust me, I know him, he is a poor guy. But don’t tell this to anybody! This is just a private conversation with you.Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He was getting tired of lying on his back, so he rolled over and saw an old woman praying, down in the chapel. He leaned over the edge of the scaffold and shouted, “I’m Jesus Christ! I’m Jesus Christ! Listen to me and I will perform miracles!”The Italian lady looked up and clasping her rosary answered back, “Shut up-a your mouth. I’m talking to your mother!”Michelangelo must have been thinking that he was joking with the old woman, but he was at a loss when he heard this. Of course, a mother is a mother, and you should not interfere between two old women talking…just go on and play outside!So don’t be disturbed. If you want I can go on talking about any historical, mythological, fictitious figure; I can create my own fictions. Do you think all the stories that I have told you have happened? They should have happened! – they are so significant. But if I tell you that I am just making up this story, you will not be very interested; you will not be flying high.Once in a while I want you to fly high, but it is just an imaginary flight. Really, I want you to be one day actually on those heights but for that, practical work is needed, pragmatic work is needed.Just for you to fly a little high….Goldstein, a string merchant from New York, was trying desperately to sell some of his goods in Alabama, but wherever he went he kept encountering anti-Semitism. In one department store the manager taunted him: “All right, Goldstein. I will buy some of your string – as much as reaches from the top of your nose to the tip of your Jewish prick.”Two weeks later, the manager was startled to receive a shipment containing eight hundred cartons of grade-A string. Attached was a note: “Many thanks for your generous order. Invoice to follow. Signed: Jacob Goldstein, residing in New York, circumcised in Kiev.”

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You once told me to open all my windows so I could have the sunrise in the east, and the sunset in the west. I feel so many possibilities inside me that I often don't take enough time to explore them in depth; rather, I feel that by simply touching on them I know them already so well that I feel the urge to move onto the next one. It seems life is too short, and so much still needs to be discovered and developed. Am I superficial and too much in a hurry? The only continuity in my life is you, and I feel I will never be able to touch your depth. Please, beloved master, give some guidance to me.Everybody has to go according to his own heart feeling; if you feel at ease to move from one thing to another, it is perfectly right for you. The whole question is that whatever you do should be a deep pleasure, without any tension. If you force yourself to explore any possibility more deeply, you may create tension in yourself. If it feels enough, that touching a certain possibility has given you enough juice to move on, then move on. Perhaps that is natural; to you that is your natural pace.One should never go against one’s nature. That is the only sin, according to me, to go against one’s nature; and the only virtue is to go with your nature in total harmony. And never compare yourself with others; everybody is different, and everybody’s liking is different. Once you start comparing, thinking that, “Somebody is going deeper into things, moving more slowly, and I am moving faster,” then tension will arise in you: “Perhaps I am hurrying too much.” All these tensions arise out of comparison.Remember one thing: You have to be in tune with your own nature, not in tune with anybody else. So always feel within yourself. If it is pleasant, do it. If it feels tense, forced, then it is not for you. Don’t do it.Always go with the river of life. Never try to go against the current, and never try to go faster than the river. Just move in absolute relaxation, so that each moment you are at home, at ease, at peace with existence.The second thing you have to remember is that life is not short; life is eternal, so there is no question of any hurry. By hurrying you can only miss. In existence do you see any hurry? Seasons come in their time, flowers come in their time, trees are not running to grow fast because life is short. It seems as if the whole existence is aware of the eternity of life.We have been here always, and we will be here always – of course not in the same forms, and not in the same bodies. Life goes on evolving, reaching to higher stages. But there is no end anywhere, and there has been no beginning anywhere either. You exist between a beginningless life and an endless life. You are always in the middle of two eternities on both sides.Your conditioning has given you the idea of one life. The Christian idea, the Jewish idea, the Mohammedan idea – which are all rooted in the Jewish conception that there is only one life – has given the West a tremendous madness for speed. Everything has to be done in such a hurry that you cannot enjoy doing it, and you cannot do it in its entire perfection. You somehow manage to do it and rush to another thing.The Western man has been living under a very wrong conception: It has created so much tension in people’s minds that they can never be at ease anywhere; they are always on the go, and they are always worried that one never knows when the end is coming. Before the end they want to do everything. But the result is just the opposite; they cannot even manage to do a few things gracefully, beautifully, perfectly.Their life is so much overshadowed by death that they cannot live joyously. Everything that brings joy seems to be a wastage of time. They cannot just sit silently for an hour, because their mind is saying to them, “Why are you wasting the hour? You could have done this, you could have done that.”It is because of this conception of one life that the idea of meditation never arose in the West. Meditation needs a very relaxed mind, with no hurry, with no worry, with nowhere to go…just enjoying moment to moment, whatever comes.In the East, meditation was bound to be discovered, just because of the idea of life’s eternity – you can relax. You can relax without any fear, you can enjoy and play your flute, you can dance and sing your song, you can enjoy the sunrise and the sunset. You can enjoy your whole life. Not only that, you can enjoy even dying, because death too is a great experience, perhaps the greatest experience in life. It is a crescendo.In the Western concept, death is the end of life. In the Eastern concept, death is only a beautiful incident in the long procession of life; there will be many, many deaths. Each death is a climax of your life, before another life begins – another form, another label, another consciousness. You are not ending, you are simply changing the house.I am reminded of Mulla Nasruddin. A thief entered into his house; Mulla was sleeping, not really, just with closed eyes, in between opening them and seeing what the thief is doing. But he did not believe in interfering in people’s work. The thief was not interfering with his sleep, why should he interfere with his profession? Let him do it.The thief was a little concerned that this man seemed to be strange. As he was carrying everything out of the house, sometimes something fell from his hands and there was noise, but Mulla remained completely asleep. A suspicion arose in the thief’s mind that this type of sleep is possible only if a man is awake: “What a strange man that he does not say anything; I’m just emptying his whole house!.” All the furniture went out, all the pillows went out, everything that was in the house went out.And when the thief was collecting everything, binding them to carry home, he suddenly felt, “Somebody is following me.” He looked back, it was the same man who was asleep. He said, “Why are you following me?”Mulla said, “No, I’m not following you; we are changing the house. You have taken everything. Now what am I going to do in this house? So I am also coming.”This at-easeness is the Eastern way; even with death the East has followed the idea…just changing the house.The thief was worried; he said, “Forgive me, take your things.”Mulla said, “No, there is no need. I was thinking myself to change the house; it is almost in ruins. You can’t have a worse house than this, and anyway I am a very lazy man. I need somebody to take care of me, and when you have taken everything, why leave me alone?”The thief became afraid that…he had been stealing his whole life. He had never come across such a man. He said, “You can take your things.”Mulla said, “No, there is not going to be any change. You will have to carry the things, otherwise I am going to the police station. I am behaving like a gentleman, I am not calling you a thief, but just a man who is helping me to change the house.”There is no hurry, so your idea of a short life is a dangerous idea. That’s why even though the East is very poor, there is no despair, there is no anguish. The West is rich, but the richness has not brought anything to its spirituality, or its growth; on the contrary, the West is very tense. It should be more relaxed, it has all the comforts of life.But the basic problem is that deep down the West knows that life is such a short thing; we are standing in a queue, and every moment we are coming closer to death. Since we were born, we started the journey toward the graveyard. Every moment life is being cut – becoming shorter and shorter. This creates a tension, an anguish, an anxiety. All the comforts, all the luxuries, all the riches become meaningless, because you cannot take them away with you. You will have to go into death alone.The East is relaxed. First, it does not give death any importance; it is just a change of form. Second, because it is so relaxed, you become aware of your inner riches, which will be going with you – even beyond life. Death cannot take them away.Death can take everything that is outside you and, if you have not grown your inner being, naturally there will be fear that you cannot save anything from death; it will take everything that you have. But if you have grown your inner being, if you have found peace, blissfulness, silence, joy, which are not dependent on anything outside, if you have found your garden of being and seen the flowers of your own consciousness, the question of fearing death does not arise at all.Again I say to you, remember only one thing: You are an immortal being. Right now, it is not your experience; right now, if you love me, if you have any trust in me, you can accept it as a hypothesis – not as a belief, but a hypothesis to experiment with.I never want anybody to accept anything from me as a belief, but only as a hypothesis. Because I know the truth of it, I need not enforce belief and faith on you. Knowing the truth I can say to you, “It is just for experiment, a temporary hypothesis,” because I am absolutely certain that if you experiment, your hypothesis will change into your own knowing – not in a belief, not in a faith, but in a certainty. And only certainties can save you. Beliefs are boats made of paper.One should not think that one can cross the ocean of existence on a boat made of paper. You need a certainty…not a belief, but a truth that is experienced by yourself. Not somebody else’s truth, but your own. Then it is a joy to go into the unknown, uncharted ocean; it is a tremendous excitement and ecstasy.But always keep in tune with your own nature.Some trees grow slowly, some trees grow fast; there is nothing special in growing fast or in growing slowly. One thing is similar to both trees – they are both following their natures. It is only man who looks all around, starts comparing, and gets into unnecessary anxieties.Whenever you feel a problem, look within your heart. If you are at ease, you are on the right path. Your heart is the criterion. If it is disturbed, that means you have to change the path; something has gone wrong, you have gone astray.The heart is your guide. When it is completely in harmony with nature, there is a beautiful dance and a music in your heart. When you go away from nature the music becomes just noise, the dance becomes disturbed. These are the signs and the language of the heart to make you aware whether you are going right or wrong.You don’t need any guidance from anybody. Your guide is within yourself.Osho,Yes, you have disturbed my slumber; now, waking to a morning sun, birds sing and leaves dance in the breeze. Sitting in your garden is so sweet. Sitting with you, there is more and more joy each day. Is this juice in your presence increasing so much these days, or am I just now noticing what's been here all along?What you are experiencing now has always been here, but you were not here. For the first time you are also here – that’s why you are noticing.You may have come here many times, but it was only a coming of your physical body. Your mind was wandering somewhere else, your being was not here. Now you have known the knack to be here and now, and the juice that you are feeling will go on growing, because your presence will go on becoming more and more crystallized.The juice has always been here, the flowers have always been blossoming here, the cool breeze was always blowing here, the trees and the sun rays…but you were blind.For the first time you have opened your eyes, for the first time your senses have become alive. The more alive they become, the more profound are the experiences waiting for you. It all depends on your sensitivity, your awareness, your being silently just here and now.It is possible that there may be somebody else who is not feeling any juice, who is not feeling anything at all, and he will go with the idea that there is nothing. This is how your mind befools you; it never allows you to be aware of your blindness, your unawareness, your unattentiveness. On the contrary, if somebody says to such a person, “You have missed something,” he will retort, “You are hypnotized! I am a rational man; you have allowed yourself to be hypnotized and you have forgotten all rationality.”People protect their blindness, protect their unconsciousness, they protect their misery; anything that is theirs – it may be hell – they will protect it.But to be really with me, you have to put all your defenses away, you have to be vulnerable – because we are not here to fight with each other. We are here to have a deep rapport, a deep accord, a harmony in which all differences dissolve…and there are not so many people, but a single silence, a single peace that passeth understanding.Those who cannot put their defenses away need all the compassion. They may think that they are rational beings, but they are really unconscious beings. Eyes don’t need reason, because eyes can see light without any reason; only blind men think about light, reason about light – for or against, believe in light, disbelieve in light – but the man who has eyes neither believes nor disbelieves, he is neither for nor against. He simply knows: light is there. It has to be enjoyed, not argued about.You are in a state in which I want everybody to be. But people are so strange!I have heard…A great astronomer was concluding his lecture at the synagogue: “…And some of my colleagues believe that our own sun will probably die within four or five billion years.”“How many years did you say?” asked Mrs. Siegel, from the back of the room.“Four or five billion,” replied the scientist.“Phew,” said Mrs. Siegel. “I thought you said million.”People are very strange…as if she has understood! It does not matter in existence – four billion or four million – but perhaps million is the biggest number she knows. If it is four billion, no problem.If you are listening with your mind there will come many such moments; if you are not listening with the mind but with the heart, there will not come any such moment. And listening with the heart is the only true listening.Ronald Reagan came home and found his wife Nancy in bed with his very best friend, Edwin Meese.“Hey, what do you think you are doing?”“See,” Nancy said to Meese, “I told you he was stupid. Now he can see everything and he is asking, ‘What is going on?’“Your experiences are fresh. This is the beauty of the inner experiences, that they always remain fresh. You cannot make them mechanical. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, whenever you will be here…the same perfume, the same presence, the same juice – but with a new taste, with a deeper understanding, with a greater sensitivity.In the spiritual life nothing becomes old, it always remains fresh. And its freshness keeps you, even to the last breath of your life, young.The mystic always dies young. His age may be a hundred years or a hundred and twenty years, it does not matter. He always dies young because his sources of life are continuously being refreshed; a fresh breeze is passing through him, fresh rays of the sun are passing through him, fresh moonlight and fresh stars are always arising in him.You are blessed. Don’t lose track. You have come to the right point. Become more and more centered on that point.Osho,I have managed to tie up my camel. The lion roars in distant, unknown jungles, the child is not yet conceived, and the stubborn mule goes nowhere. Can you comment?Zarathustra has no idea about a stubborn mule; you seem to belong to a totally different category. You are neither a camel, nor a lion, nor a child – you are a mule. And with the mule there are many difficulties.Have you ever thought that the mule cannot conceive a child? Mules don’t give birth to children; they are cross-breeds between donkeys and horses. They have all that is the worst in donkeys and all that is worst in horses. But one thing is good about them: they don’t leave a new generation, they simply die.I would like you to consider again. Look into a mirror…because Zarathustra has absolutely categorized, and there is no place for the mule. You will find a camel in the mirror.And you say, “I have managed to tie up my camel.” If you have managed to tie up your camel, then the only criterion to prove it will be the lion’s roar. But you are saying, “The lion roars in distant unknown jungles.” The camel has to become the lion…the camel has the capacity to become the lion.These are metaphors that Zarathustra has used. The moment the camel rebels against slavery, he becomes a lion, and suddenly there is the roar! One of the most beautiful experiences is to hear the lion roar. And the process is such that if the mule becomes the lion…the lion is only a passage, a bridge. The child is always there. It is not a question of conceiving a child; everybody is pregnant, born pregnant with the child, just the right opportunity….In the camel the right opportunity is not there; in the lion is the right opportunity for the child to be born. But rather than going the simple way, you are stuck with some mule, a stubborn mule. Do you know any other kind? All mules are stubborn, that is their great quality.But recognize exactly where you are. No man is a mule, because man is not a cross-breed. You have to begin with the camel. And you are not supposed to hear the lion roar faraway, “in distant unknown jungles.” That lion’s roar will not help. The roar has to come from your deepest heart. And in that very roar you will become, for the first time, aware that the child is coming.The child is our destiny.One has to become, finally, as innocent as a child, full of wonder and surprise, full of trust and love, absolutely in tune with existence. That’s what is meant by the child. These are metaphors. But I can understand what you mean by, “the stubborn mule goes nowhere.”The pope stood before a hushed crowd of attentive Italian villagers. “My flock, you must-a not use-a the pill,” he warned.Just then a beautiful young Signorina stepped forward and said, “Look – you no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules!”A simple thing: You don’t play the game – you don’t have the right to make the rules. This is the quality of the mule; he does not like to move even an inch, wherever he is. In that sense our minds can be compared to mules.You can watch your mind; it does not want to change anything. Every change means difficulty, readjustment, rearrangement – but no change signifies death. I would like you to remember that the mind is a dead machine, it is simply a biocomputer. It resists all change, it is against evolution, and all the evolution that has happened in the world has happened through the people who were courageous enough to put the mind aside.Putting the mind aside is what I mean by meditation. Mind is a mule; meditation is an eagle, flying to the farthest horizon across the sun, always ready to go into the unknown.If the mule goes nowhere, get down from the mule. What is the need to go on sitting on the mule and looking stupid? Get down from the mule! It is better to walk on your own feet – at least you can move, you can evolve to a better state of consciousness.The whole religion can be condensed in one single word, and that is meditation. And meditation is a simple way to get down from the mule, to get down from the mind. Let the mind remain where it is; you start moving without it. And once you are not thinking through the mind, you will be able to understand Zarathustra’s categories. You will find yourself first a slave in thousands of ways – a slave of your tradition, a slave of your education, a slave of your religion, a slave of all kinds of superstitions. You will find so many slaveries. Just a little courage, and let the camel revolt against any enslavement.All the great teachers of the world have been insisting for a revolution against the slavery that keeps your spirit in a status quo. And once the slavery is thrown away, the camel goes through the metamorphosis, becomes a lion. He had always been a lion; he became a camel because of the slavery.And the moment he becomes a lion – courageous and brave, ready to go into the unknown, ready to be alone – the child is not faraway. The second metamorphosis will happen; you will find the lion turning into a child. And the child is the ultimate state of liberation.The innocence of the child is his wisdom; the simplicity of the child is his egolessness. The freshness of the child is the freshness of your consciousness, which never becomes old, which always remains young. It has passed through thousands of bodies: they became young, they became old, they died. But the consciousness continues, a young river, fresh, dancing toward the ocean. The wondering eyes of the child is the opening of your being to all the great mysteries of existence.The scientist also tries to discover the mysteries and their secrets, but his method is violent; it is more a rape than a love. He dissects, he attacks. The behavior of the scientist with nature is not human; it is very inhuman.The child and the sage also come to know the mysteries of existence, but in a way that can be called only playfulness, that can be called only loving radiation. And existence itself is eager to open its heart to the loving child, to open its secrets to the wondering eyes of the child.Lao Tzu says, “The moment you drop knowledge, you become wise.”The moment you stop inquiring into the mysteries of existence, existence itself opens up all its doors, invites you. And to enter the mysteries of existence as a guest is dignified. To attack nature, to force nature is barbarous. Science is still barbarous, and science will remain barbarous unless it learns to be meditative too. Only meditation can change the barbarousness of science and can make it an innocent love affair with existence.That will be a golden future: when science becomes a love affair with existence – not a struggle, not a conflict, but a deep harmony, a friendship.Up to now, even the greatest thinkers like Bertrand Russell talk in terms which are barbarous; he has written about “the conquest of nature.” The very idea of conquering nature is ugly. We are part of nature; how can the part conquer the whole? Can you conceive that my left hand can conquer me? And we are such a small part of existence that the very idea of conquering it is quixotic.But a different science is certainly needed; this science has failed. The old religion has failed. It has not delivered salvation to humanity, it has not brought what it has promised – blissfulness, benediction, godliness. All its promises have proved lies.And now I want to say, science has also failed. In conquering nature, it has only created destructive weapons, atomic energy, nuclear missiles. Rather than conquering nature, it has succeeded in preparing a graveyard of the whole planet. Science has failed. It has not been able to serve life for the simple reason that the very idea of conquering is barbarous and violent.We have to find a new religiousness and a new scientific approach, and they cannot be two different things. They can be two sides of one coin: Applied to the inner consciousness, it becomes religiousness; applied to the objective world, it becomes science.But the basic reality is innocent, wondering, and loving eyes…a friendship, a harmony, a love affair.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I have heard you say that Gautam Buddha's work came to an end when he became enlightened, and you started your work after your enlightenment. Could you say something about this?One of the most important things to be remembered by all is the way you have started your question. The question is, “I have heard you say.” Usually, people drop the first part. They simply say, “You have said this.” And there is such a great difference between the two, such an immense difference that it is unbridgeable, and needs a great understanding.Whatever you hear is not necessarily the thing said; what is said is not necessarily what you hear. The obvious reason is that I am speaking from a different space of being, and you are hearing from a totally different space. In the transmission, many things change.It is always a sign of understanding to remember that whatever I have said may be totally different than what you have heard. Your question should be about what you have heard, because how can you ask a question about something which you have not heard?Gautam Buddha, in his whole life, never allowed people to write down what he was saying. His reason was that if you are writing it down, your attention becomes divided. You are no longer total. You have to hear and you have to write, and what he is saying is so subtle that unless you are total, you are going to miss it. So rather than writing it down, try with your totality and intensity to approach your heart, to let it sink within you.He spoke for forty-two years continuously. After his death, the first question was to write down whatever the disciples remembered; otherwise it would have been lost to humanity. They did a great service, and also a great disservice. They wrote down…but they came to see a strange phenomenon – that everybody had heard something different. Their memory, their remembrance, was not the same.Thirty-two schools sprang up, proclaiming, “This is what Buddha has said.” Only one man – a man to be remembered forever, his closest disciple, Ananda – who was not even enlightened before Buddha died…. Just out of his humbleness, knowing, “I was unenlightened, how can I hear exactly what comes from an enlightened consciousness? I am going to interpret it, I am going to mix it with my own thoughts, I am going to give it my own color, my own nuance. It cannot carry within me the same meaning it has brought, because I don’t have yet those eyes that can see and those ears that can hear.” Out of this humbleness, the memories that he remembered and wrote down became the basic scriptures of Buddhism. They all start with “I have heard Gautam Buddha say.”And all the thirty-two philosophical schools – they were great scholars, far greater than Maitreya, than Ananda, far more capable to interpret, to bring meanings to things, to make systems out of words – those thirty-two schools slowly, slowly became rejected. And the reason for their rejection was that they had missed a single beginning: “I have heard….” They were saying, “Gautam Buddha said” – the emphasis was on Gautam Buddha.Ananda’s version is the universally accepted version. Strange…there were enlightened people, but they remained silent because what they had heard was not possible to be expressed. And there were unenlightened philosophical geniuses who were very articulate, and they wrote great treatises – but they were not accepted. And the man who was not enlightened, not a great philosopher, but just a humble caretaker of Gautam Buddha, his words have been accepted. The reason is these beginnings – “I have heard….” I don’t know whether he was saying it or not. I cannot impose myself on him. All that I can say is what echoed in me; I can talk about my mind – not the mindless silence of Gautam Buddha.”Buddhist scriptures, in this way, are the only scriptures in the world which have this quality of the great difference between the master and the disciple, between one who has arrived and one who is trying to arrive.You are asking, “I have heard you say that Gautam Buddha’s work came to an end when he became enlightened, and you started Your work after your enlightenment.”It is one of those strange incidents of history, where the obvious is completely ignored. I have talked, discussed, with a few very great scholarly Buddhist monks. One was Bhikkshu Sangharakshita. He was an Englishman, but while he was young, searching, he found that Christianity had nothing to give and became a Buddhist. When I met him, he had become very old. He used to live in the Himalayas, in Kalimpong. He has written great books on Buddhism with such love and such insight that one feels full of awe.I have been discussing many times with Bhikkshu Ananda Kausalyayan, who is the most prominent Buddhist scripture scholar and who has written much with depth and profundity. And the third man was Doctor Bhikkshu Jagdish Kashyap. He was the head of the great Institute of Buddhist Studies.None of these three people have noticed the difference – that Ananda’s version is humble and truer because he is saying what is reflected in his being, and he can authoritatively say only that. When I pointed it out to them, they were all surprised – “We have been studying our whole life, but we never thought that this has any significance. We always thought that it is just the way Ananda writes.”And when I said to them, “No Buddhist, except a few Zen masters, are going to agree with me….” The whole of Asia is Buddhist. In different countries it has taken different shapes, different rituals. But one thing is similar everywhere – that Buddha worked for six years, hard enough to attain enlightenment. He attained enlightenment after six years of hard work – this is just accepted.But when I came to see the life of Gautam Buddha, I was simply amazed, because in a way it can be said that he attained his enlightenment after six years of hard work, but that is not the whole truth. It is not even a small fragment of the truth. The truth is, he attained enlightenment only when he dropped all desire for it, all work for it, all hope for it.This gap between the hard work and relaxing and dropping the idea that anything like truth exists…. He had done everything that was told to him, and yet no silence had descended on him. He had not been able to enter into his innermost being. He had knocked on all the doors, but no door was opened. His work was so total and intense that he could not conceive that there was anything more to be done.I have been to the small river Niranjana, by the side of which he had become enlightened one full-moon night. That day, the most important experience happened – which is not even talked about by the Buddhists, by the followers. It does not look important, they are not to be blamed. He had tortured his body, he had been fasting for months, and he had become so weak…and Niranjana is a very small river. He had got into the river for his morning bath, but even the smallest river and its current was too much; he started going down with the river. He could not manage to get out of it. He hung to the root of a tree.That moment was momentous. Hanging to the root of the tree in the river, a thought arose in him, “What kind of stupid life have I been living? All this asceticism, all this arduous effort, has led me nowhere to truth, but only to weakness. It has not given me an abundance of life; it has brought me closer to death. How is this kind of discipline, which is being taught by all the schools, going to help me cross the ocean of life and reach the further shore?”A question mark about his whole lifestyle, and in a clear moment, in a transparent moment on that morning – the sun was rising – something changed in his whole being. He had renounced his kingdom; in that moment he renounced his renunciation too. He had renounced this world; in that moment he renounced that world too. He had renounced ambition, power, prestige – and now he saw that in a subtle way even the effort to achieve enlightenment is nothing but ambition, that it is also a desire. A desire for a more eternal life, desire for truth, but anyway it is also a desire.As he struggled to get out of the river, that desire was also dropped. He rested under a bodhi tree. For the first time in his whole life he was utterly relaxed. There was nowhere to go, nothing to find, no effort to be made. And amazingly, the silence that he was seeking started descending on him like rain.By the evening he was a totally changed man – calm and cool, at home, at ease. The center that he was searching for – he laughed about it, because the seeker himself was the sought. He had been doing something absurd. The center of his being was not something separate from himself. Unless all desires disappear, all ambitions disappear – unless you have nothing to do, nothing left to be done; you are just sitting, peacefully….He found the center.He was the center.There was no object anywhere else.One of the most important Danish philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard, has said that “Subjectivity is all.” You can call it religion, you can call it truth, you can call it nirvana. But your own subjectivity, your own being….And by the evening, a beautiful incident happened. It was a full-moon night – it has just passed here, one or two days ago; it was the same full-moon night – a woman in the nearby village…. In India people worship trees, they worship animals, they worship stones, they worship mountains, they worship the sun, the moon. On the surface it looks very childish, but deep down the question is not what you worship; the question is that you worship. Whether it is the sun or the moon or a tree or a river, these are only excuses; the real thing is worship. That woman was a worshiper of the tree under which Gautam Buddha was sitting.The moon had risen…this is the strongest moon in the whole year, the most beautiful. And Gautam Buddha was looking almost like a god under the tree in the silence of the forest, by the side of the river – particularly to that woman. She had asked the tree something and her desire had been fulfilled, and so she had promised that she would come with delicious food to offer to the god of the tree. She thought perhaps the god of the tree had come out of the tree and was sitting and waiting.And Buddha was hungry; he had not eaten for many days, so when she offered – her name was Sujata – he accepted. He slept for the first time in these six years of torturous search, without any tension, without any dreams. Just a silence was the only experience that was becoming deeper and deeper; his sleep was becoming samadhi. When there are no thoughts, no desires, and the mind is quiet, sleep becomes samadhi; it becomes enlightenment.And in the morning, when he opened his eyes…just visualize…nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. And as he saw the last star disappearing in the sky, he saw himself also disappearing in the sky. This he called nirvana, disappearing. He became absent, just a pure silence, a nothing…a joyful silence, a silence that has a song in it, a silence which is an invisible dance.This was the day of his enlightenment. Buddhist scholars for twenty-five centuries have thought that he achieved this state because of those six years of arduous effort. I differ from them absolutely. And they have not been able to prove to me…and they think that I am crazy because they think that if it were true, then in twenty-five centuries people would have seen it. But I say that he attained enlightenment because he dropped the desire to attain it.I said Gautam Buddha’s work came to an end when he became enlightened. He worked too hard. I have never worked for enlightenment; I have never followed any discipline, any scripture, any religion, any ascetic path. Where Buddha reached after six years of arduous effort, I found myself there from the very beginning – sitting under a tree, relaxed. People used to think – my teachers, my friends – that I must be mad. Even sometimes I used to think, “Perhaps they are right, because everybody has ambition; I don’t have any. Everybody wants to become this and that, and I want simply to sit silently and not to do anything, and just be myself.”Enlightenment to Buddha was the culmination of his whole work. My work started after my enlightenment. I have never searched for it. It is one of those mysteries which have no explanation. It knocked on my door, and I said to it, “Come in, it is open.” I have not even taken the trouble to open the door. I have left it open always.The day I became enlightened, then my work began. My work is you; Gautam Buddha’s work was himself.I have lived for you.I have no other reason to be alive, because all that life could give to me, it has given to me without asking. It has been very generous to me. But after my own enlightenment, I felt the first urge in my being – that this is so simple, so natural, that it should happen to everybody. And unless it happens to everybody, the world is going to remain in misery and in suffering. Gautam Buddha was enlightening himself; I have been enlightening others. So where his work was completed, my work starts.Osho,Whenever I try to write what I would like to tell you before going back to the West, I find myself as speechless as Lancelot. It is more than gratitude, more than love, more than you and me. And yet, some longing to convey this feeling is there, strong, and doesn't go; there is a quiet sadness and a burning fire. Beloved master, how can I express the immensity that has filled me so many times when sitting in your presence and living in your buddhafield?The moment it happens it is always more than love, it is always more than joy, it is always more than gratitude, because life is more than you and more than me. It is so multi-dimensional, it is so vast…. Only if you are not aware of it, are you capable to express your feelings. But the moment awareness enters in your life, explanations start disappearing, expressions become impossible, because whatever you can say falls very short.There have been many people on the earth who have achieved the ultimate, but we don’t even know their names for the simple reason that the moment they achieved, they became dumb – the silence was so deep, they could not find a way to convey what had happened to them.There are many mystics in the world, but very few masters. Every mystic is not a master. It is a rare combination of articulateness, of using words in such a way that they carry wordlessness in them, to say things in such a way as if nothing has been said, to be in such a way as if you are not. And the more you are absent, the more you are a pure presence.You are asking me, “Whenever I try to write what I would like to tell You before going back to the West, I find myself as speechless as Lancelot.”You are fortunate. It is part of blissfulness to be so silent; you know something has to be said, but there is no way to say it. You know there is a great blissfulness overflowing you, a gratitude in your heart, and it does not look right not to express them. But all words are so earthly, and all these experiences are so unearthly, that there is no way of translating them. Even the great masters who tried to convey something of the inexpressible had to find strange ways.Just the other day, I received the news of a man in the part of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan. He is one hundred and twenty-five years old, and he has joked about death three times. This was the third time.He dies; doctors declare that he is dead and there is great mourning – friends and relatives, and preparations – and at the final moment when they are taking him to the graveyard, he opens his eyes and he starts laughing! The first time he did it people thought, “It may have been just a coma, and we were misled.” The second time they were more alert not to be deceived by the old fellow; in every way they made certain that he was dead. But still, the same thing happened: at the last moment, just when they were putting him into the grave, he said, “Wait!” He said, “Can’t you see the joke?”And he has performed it now again at the age of one hundred and twenty-five. This is his way, a strange way of saying to you that life is eternal and death is just a joke. He is saying it by his own life. And this time he has said, “Now I am very old, and I cannot go on doing this strategy for long, so perhaps this is the last time. Remember – the fourth time I may be really dead.”But they said, “We can’t believe you. Every time you say, ‘Next time I may be really dead.’“He is showing the eternity of life and consciousness. He is a master. Without words, he is saying what the upanishads have said: Amritasya putrah – “You are sons and daughters of eternity.” But his way of saying it is far more significant, because words can be used in a very poetic way and still they may not be true, they may not be the experience of the poet. But this man knows how to go deep – so deep into himself that there is no medical way to find out that he is still alive.Speechlessness is bound to happen with anything that you can experience but you cannot bring to words. You see a beautiful sunset – what can you say? You see a bird on the wing in the sky – so beautiful, just the expression of freedom – but what can you say? And whatever you say will always fall short of the target.Only mundane things can be said.The sacred makes you speechless.Because “it is more than gratitude….” You say “gratitude” and you certainly feel you have not said it; the word is so small and the experience is so big – and yet there is a great longing to convey the feeling.These are the mysteries of life: when you cannot say, the urge becomes more and more powerful to say it. The musician says in his own way, the poet says in his own way, the painter says in his own way, but nobody succeeds – something remains beyond all expression.That something beyond expression is God, is truth, is enlightenment, is liberation. But these words also don’t say it; they only indicate – just fingers pointing to the moon.You are right, “There is a quiet sadness and a burning fire…how can I express the immensity that has filled me so many times when sitting in Your presence and living in Your buddhafield?”You will have to go through an alchemical change. That sadness is beautiful; it is not misery, it is just the sadness of experiencing the beyond and the inability to express it. And the burning desire to express it turns into creativity – you can paint, you can sing, you can dance; you can find your own way somehow to indicate the beyond, and the burning fire will not be a torture to you. It will become a great joy of creativity.So don’t make it sadness, and don’t make it a suffering. Feel blessed! Change it into a great laughter. It is only a question of getting out of the bed from the right side.The Mother Superior of the convent awoke in a happy mood, dressed and set off to visit her flock. “Good morning, Sister Augusta. God bless you. Are you happy at your work?”“Yes, Reverend Mother, but I am sorry to see you got out of bed on the wrong side this morning.”The Mother Superior ignored the remark, and passed on to another nun. “Good morning, Sister Georgina. You look pleased with yourself.”“I am, Reverend Mother, but it is a pity you got out of bed on the wrong side today.”The Mother Superior, greatly puzzled, moved on to a young novice, “Tell me, little sister, do you also feel I got out of bed on the wrong side?”“I am afraid so.”“But why? Am I not as happy as a songbird? and pleasant to you all?”“Yes, Mother, but you are wearing Father Vincenzo’s slippers.”

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,These days, looking inside, I do not find a personality with certain characteristics, but rather an ever-changing flux, totally unpredictable. It makes life in this body feel very fragile, vulnerable and momentary – a feeling which extends itself to everything around me, shaking me to the roots.Man is not one, man is many: man is a multitude, a crowd. The feeling of being a personality is a mirage. It arises because you never go in, and you never face the crowd. Perhaps to avoid the crowd, you never go in.You are living outside your own home and the home is being occupied by your neighbors, many of whom are dead. And when I say many, I mean many! – centuries, queues of old and dead people are living within you; hence, when for the first time one enters on the path of meditation, the first encounter shakes one to the very roots. One sees many faces and many people – except one face, except the one individual that he is.Most people, out of fear, simply run out again and get engaged in things so that they can forget what is happening within themselves. To find oneself alone needs such courage because the moment you find yourself alone you have to face a multitude, a crowd. Each in the crowd pretends to be your real self, and there is no way for you to find out who is your real individual. Millions of people live their lives without meditation for the simple reason that they cannot cope with this encounter.The method is very easy. Bodhidharma used to say to his disciples, “When you enter into yourself you will find many pretenders who look almost like you. Some of them are even better than you, because they have been practicing your act, your part, for years – or perhaps for lives. You have to behave the way the elephant behaves when a crowd of dogs starts barking: the elephant goes on without even bothering, as if there is nobody…You have to be an elephant and treat the crowd within you as if they are barking dogs.”In India it is now becoming a rare scene, but in my childhood it was an everyday scene because all the Maharajas, and there were many, and all the great religious leaders, and they were many, all had many elephants. In fact, a religious leader’s religiousness was measured by how many elephants he had, because to keep an elephant is not easy; it is very costly.It was an everyday scene – the elephants passing on the road and the dogs barking. A strange feeling arises when you see a dog bark at the elephant; the elephant pays not even the smallest attention – as if there is nobody, nothing is happening. And if you look at the face of the dog, you can understand the meaning of the word despair…”This fellow is strange: we are barking, so many dogs, and he is going his way as if nothing is happening.”Soon those dogs start disappearing – “What is the point? The elephant seems to be an idiot, or maybe he is deaf, but not our equal. Perhaps he does not understand our language, but whatever the reason, the task is hopeless.”Bodhidharma is right; the meditator has to behave like an elephant. And he will be surprised: all those who are surrounding his inside – many facades, many voices – start becoming distant. Soon a moment comes when they are so far away that it seems you have only seen them, heard them, in a dream. And as they go, receding…a great silence, a tremendous tranquillity settles in your being.Your question is, “These days, looking inside, I do not find a personality with certain characteristics, but rather an ever-changing flux, totally unpredictable. It makes life in this body feel very fragile, vulnerable and momentary – a feeling which extends itself to everything around me, shaking me to the roots.”It appears as if it is a curse – it is not.The roots that can be shaken are not your roots, and that which is fragile, that which is momentary, does not belong to you. Only one thing belongs to you in this whole experience: that is the watcher, the witness. Who is witnessing the fragileness, the ever-changing flux of personalities? Who is watching the shaking of the roots? Certainly he is beyond all of it.That beyondness is yours.That beyondness is you.That is your individuality, that is your being.Settle in that witnessing, and all that you are feeling disturbed by will disappear. It is just the first encounter of entering into oneself. Don’t go back; go deeper into it.Ginsberg sits down in a Moscow cafe and orders a glass of tea and a copy of Pravda.“I will bring the tea,” the waiter tells him, “but I can’t bring a copy of Pravda. The Soviet regime has been overthrown and Pravda is not published anymore.”“All right,” says Ginsberg, “just bring the tea.”The next day, Ginsberg comes to the same cafe and asks for tea and a copy of Pravda. The waiter gives him the same answer.On the third day, Ginsberg orders the same and this time the waiter says to him, “Look, sir, you seem to be an intelligent man. For the past three days you have ordered a copy of Pravda and three times now I have had to tell you that the Soviet regime has been overthrown and Pravda is not published anymore.”“I know, I know,” says Ginsberg, “but I just like to hear you say it!”It is good news that you don’t exist as a personality. You should rejoice – rejoice in the fact that you are only the witness, the watcher, because that is the only thing which is eternal and immortal. It is the only thing which cannot be transcended by any more beautiful experience, any deeper ecstasy, any greater enlightenment.Just let this personality, this fragileness, this momentariness, this fear, this trembling of the roots, not be identified with yourself. Remain aloof, a watcher on the hills, and soon the whole scene changes.The pope lay dying. His doctor called the cardinals together and announced, “We can only save his life with a heart transplant.”“We must tell the people,” said one of the cardinals, “perhaps a donor will volunteer to give his heart for the pontiff.”An announcement was made and thousands gathered beneath the pope’s balcony shouting, “Take-a my heart, take-a my heart!”The cardinals now had to decide on the person who would donate his heart to the holy father. “We will drop a feather from his holiness’ head,” said the head cardinal. “Whosoever it lands upon will be the lucky person.”As the feather floated down from the balcony, from the multitudes below came, “Take-a my heart – phew! Take-a my heart – phew!”It is one thing to say, “Take-a my heart,” but when it comes so close, “Phew!” Everybody wants to know his inner reality, but you will have to lose something; you will have to pay for it.There is nothing in existence available without payment. If you want to know yourself, you will have to drop all false identities. They are your investments, they are your power, they are your prestige, they are your religion, they are your qualifications. It is difficult to drop them; it feels like death.Certainly meditation is a death, a death of all that is false in you. And only then, that which is not false is experienced. That experience is resurrection – a new life, the birth of a new man.Osho,I am most aware of a big fear or guilt in me when I sit with you, and I am longing so much to be totally open to you. Recently I could feel the serpent rolled up in the bottom of me, sleeping, and the door, the third chakra still closed. My heart wants to fly with you. Is there anything I can do?What is fear? There are fears and fears; I am not talking about them. I am talking about the most fundamental fear – all other fears are faraway echoes of the basic fear – and that fear is of death. Life is surrounded by death. You see every day somebody dying – something dying; something that was alive a moment before is dead.Each death reminds you of your own death.It is impossible to forget your own death; every moment there is a reminder. So the first thing to be understood is that the only possibility of getting rid of fear is to get rid of death. And you can get rid of death, because death is only an idea, not a reality.You have only seen other people dying; have you ever seen yourself dying? And when you see somebody else dying, you are an outsider, not a participant in the experience. The experience is happening inside the person. All that you know is that he is no longer breathing, that his body has become cold, that his heart is no longer beating. But do you think all these things put together are equivalent to life? Is life only breathing? Is life only the heartbeat, the blood circulating and keeping the body warm? If this is life, it is not worth the game. If only my breathing is my life, what is the point of going on breathing?Life must be something more. To be of any value life must have something of eternity in it; it must be something beyond death. And you can know it, because it exists within you. Life exists within you – death is only an experience of others, outside observers.It is simply like love. Can you understand love by seeing a person being loving to someone? What will you see? They are hugging each other, but is hugging love? You may see they are holding hands together, but is holding hands love? From the outside, what else can you discover about love? Anything that you discover will be absolutely futile. These are expressions of love, but not love itself. Love is something one knows only when one is in it.One of the greatest poet’s of India, Rabindranath Tagore, was very much embarrassed by an old man who was his grandfather’s friend. The old man often used to come because he lived in the neighborhood, and he would never leave the house without creating trouble for Rabindranath. He would certainly knock on his doors, and ask, “How is your poetry going? Do you really know God? Do you really know love? Tell me, do you know all these things that you talk about in your poetry? Or are you just articulate with words? Any idiot can talk about love, about God, about the soul, but I don’t see in your eyes that you have experienced anything.”And Rabindranath could not answer him. In fact he was right. The old man would meet him in the marketplace and hold him and ask him, “What about your God, have you found him? Or are you still writing poetry about him? Remember, talking about God, is not knowing God.”He was a very embarrassing person. In poets’ gatherings, where Rabindranath was very much respected – he was a Nobel prize winner – that old man was bound to reach. On the stage, before all the poets and worshipers of Rabindranath, he would hold him by his collar and would say, “Still it has not happened. Why are you deceiving these idiots? They are smaller idiots, you are a bigger idiot; they are not known outside the land, you are known all over the world – but that does not mean that you know God.”Rabindranath has written in his diary: “I was so much harassed by him, and he had such penetrating eyes that it was impossible to tell a lie to him. His very presence was such that either you had to say the truth, or you had to remain silent.”But one day it happened…Rabindranath had gone for a morning walk. In the night it had rained; it was very early morning and the sun was rising. In the ocean it was all gold, and by the side of the streets water had gathered in small pools. In those small pools also the sun was rising with the same glory, with the same color, with the same joy…. And just this experience – that in existence there is nothing superior and nothing inferior, that all is one whole – suddenly triggered something in him. For the first time in his life he went to the old man’s house, knocked on the door, looked into the eyes of the old man and said, “Now, what do you say?”He said, “Now there is nothing to say. It has happened. I bless you.”The experience of your immortality, of your eternity, of your wholeness, of your oneness with existence is always possible. It only needs some triggering experience.The whole function of the master is to create a situation in which the experience can be triggered; and suddenly the cloud of death disappears and there is all sunshine – tremendous life, abundant life, life full of song and full of dance.So the first thing, Amrita, is to get rid of death. All fears will disappear. You don’t have to work on each single fear; otherwise it will take lives and still you will not be able to get rid of them.You say, “I am most aware of a big fear….”Everybody is more or less aware of the big fear, but the fear is absolutely rootless, baseless. And you say “…or guilt in me, when I sit with You.”The fear is natural, because death is known by everybody around. Guilt is not natural; it is created by religions. They have made every man guilty – guilty of a thousand and one things, so burdened with guilt that they cannot sing, they cannot dance, they cannot enjoy anything. The guilt poisons everything.Sitting with me it becomes more clear to you, because I am a stranger among you; I don’t have any guilt. Guilt is an absolutely non-existential thing. It is the conditioning of religions.Sitting with me, everything inside you starts becoming clear by contrast: Here is a man who has no guilt, a man who has no fear, a man who is absolutely alone in this whole world – a single man against the whole world. All your guilt that ordinarily remains unconscious, because you are living with the same kind of people, with the same kind of conditioning….Being with me is being with a mirror.And to see yourself and the mess that you are carrying within you, is certainly saddening. But it is also important, because if you become aware of it, it can be dropped. Guilt is an idea accepted by you. You can reject it, and it can be rejected because it is not part of existence. It is part of some stupid theology, of some old primitive religion.You are saying, “and I am longing so much to be totally open to You.” And you become afraid because the closer you become, the more open you become, the more you feel yourself full of guilt, sadness, misery, condemnation. You have been humiliated so much. All the religions have conspired against innocent human beings to make them guilty, because without making them guilty they cannot be made into slaves. And slaves are needed. For a few people’s lust for power, millions of people are needed to be enslaved. For a few people to become Alexander the Great, millions have to be reduced to a sub-human status.But all these are simply conditionings in the mind, which you can erase as easily as writing in the sands on a beach. Just don’t be afraid, because those writings you have accepted as holy, you have accepted as coming from very respectable sources, from great founders of religions. It does not matter. Only one thing matters: that your mind should be completely cleaned, utterly empty and silent.There is no need of Moses or Jesus or Buddha to reside inside you. You need a totally silent, clean space. And only that space can bring you not only to me, but to yourself, to existence itself.“Recently I could feel the serpent rolled up in the bottom of me, sleeping, and the door, the third chakra, still closed. My heart wants to fly with you. Is there anything I can do?”There are things which have to be done, and there are things which have not to be done. Things that can be done are ordinary, mundane, mediocre, of the objective world. Things which happen, and cannot be done, belong to a superior, higher order of existence.If you are feeling that you would like your love to grow, to blossom, then wait with deep longing – as a seed. The longing has to be the seed. And the waiting, the patient waiting for the time when the spring comes and seeds start changing from dormant beings into alive, active blossomings….The longing is there.Just waiting is needed.And the waiting should not be impatient, because impatient waiting means you don’t trust existence. And your impatience cannot bring the spring a single moment earlier. On the contrary, your impatience may block the door for the spring to come to you.Just remain available, with a deep longing, just like a thirst in every cell of your body, a passion.And spring has always come.Your spring will also come.You need not do anything else.Just long as lovingly, as intensely, and wait as patiently, as possible.The religions of the world have given so many diseases to man that they are uncountable. One of the diseases is that they have made every man ambitious for reward – if not in this world then in the other world. They have made man so greedy, and at the same time they are all talking against greed. But their whole religion is based on greed.Don’t let your longing be a greed.Your longing should be a love affair.Your longing should not be a sad state but a joyful state, just as a pregnant mother. Your longing makes you pregnant. You can feel the child inside you which is growing every day, and each moment becomes a reward – not that your reward will be delivered in heaven.Religions have done such harm that they cannot be forgiven. They have taken away all dignity of man – his joy of longing, of love, his pleasure in waiting, his trust that the spring will come. They have taken everything away from you. You will be rewarded only if you do certain rituals which have no relationship, no relevance. Now, going around a statue seven times – what relevance can there be that you have earned virtue?There are people who are continuously counting beads. I have seen people who are tending their shop and their hand is holding the beads so others should not see. It looks strange that you are haggling about the price of a certain thing with a customer and at the same time moving the beads, so they keep their hands and their beads in a bag so you cannot see. But anybody can see – why should one have one’s hand in a bag?So the religion is going on inside the bag; outside they are haggling for the price and everything, and trying to cheat and exploit – lying. And inside, how many times they have moved the beads – means they have earned that much virtue. Virtue is the coin in heaven – how much virtue have you in your bank account?In Tibet they have done even better than counting beads. They have made small prayer wheels; each spoke represents one bead. So they go on doing all kinds of work, their prayer wheel by their side, and just once in a while they move it. And it goes on moving; when it slows down, they again give a push….When I first came to know a lama with his prayer wheel I said, “You are stupid. Just plug it into the electricity. It will go on eternally, irrespective of whether you are alive or dead!”But the lama could not understand that I was making a laughingstock of him. He said, “Your idea is great, because then we are completely free; otherwise this is a hindrance and everything – you cannot do anything wholeheartedly.” Even making love, they are moving their prayer wheel – both the wife and the husband, they both have their prayer wheels. Now, it is very difficult: in the first place, the exercise of love is difficult – such primitive gymnastics – and on top of it you have to go on moving those prayer wheels.A simple and innocent religion would have changed the whole earth. But the cunning priests would not allow a pure and innocent and childlike religion, with wondering eyes, with joy, not bothering about stupid ideas about heaven and hell but living each moment with great love.And waiting for more – not desiring, but by waiting, deserving, creating more and more space, silence, so that the spring comes. And not only a few flowers, but so many flowers….One of the Sufi mystics has a small poem about it: “I had waited long for the spring – it came. And it came so abundantly, with so many flowers, that there was not a place left where I could make a nest for myself.”Life gives abundantly; you just have to be a recipient. But never wait for any reward.Three men die on the same day and go to heaven. One by one they are interviewed by Saint Peter, who asked the first man how many times he had made love: “Never! I am a virgin,” is the first guy’s answer. Saint Peter gives him a Mercedes Benz to get around in, and poses the same question to the second man. “Only once,” he says, “on my wedding night.”Giving him the keys to a Toyota, Saint Peter turns and asks the third man how often he has made love in his life. “I have gotten laid so many times I have lost count,” the fellow confesses. And Saint Peter gives him a bicycle.Not too much later, the first man is driving around in his Mercedes Benz when he sees something so extraordinary that he turns his head to look. He crashes headlong into a tree, and when he comes to, in Heaven Hospital, the angel doctors and police are standing by his bedside, waiting to find out what caused the accident.“It was shocking, simply shocking!” whispers the poor man, “I saw Pope John Paul on roller skates.”All your old religions are based on reward and punishment, on more and less. Even on the last night when Jesus is departing from his disciples they ask only one question – “Certainly in heaven you will be standing at the right hand of God, but what about us? Who will be standing next to you? And what are going to be our positions?” It is shocking to think that the man they had loved, lived with, is going to be crucified tomorrow – it is almost certain – but their whole concern is about their position. This is the corruption that religions have put into man’s mind.I want you to be absolutely innocent of all religious corruption and pollution. Have a silent, loving mind, waiting for more to happen. Life is so much that we go on exploring it – but we cannot exhaust it. The mystery is timeless.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I feel a strong connection between death and meditation, a fascination and a fear. When I sit with you, it is somehow safe to close my eyes and meditate; when I am alone, it is frightening. Please comment.There is not only a strong connection between meditation and death, but they are almost the same thing – just two ways of looking at the same experience.Death separates you from your body, from your mind, from all that is not you. But it separates you against your will. You are resisting, you don’t want to be separated; you are not willing, you are not in a state of let-go.Meditation also separates all that is not you from your being and reality – but the resistance is not there; that is the only difference. Instead of resistance, there is a tremendous willingness, a longing, a passionate welcome. You want it; you desire it from the very depth of your heart.The experience is the same – the separation between the false and the real – but because of your resistance in death, you become unconscious, you fall into a coma. You cling too much in death; you don’t allow it to happen, you close all the doors, all the windows. Your lust for life is at the optimum. The very idea of dying frightens you from the very roots.But death is a natural phenomenon and absolutely necessary too – it has to happen. If the leaves don’t become yellow and don’t fall, the new leaves, the fresh and young will not come. If one goes on living in the old body, he will not be moving into a better house, fresher, newer, with more possibilities of a new beginning. Perhaps he may not take the same route as he has taken in his past life, getting in a desert. He may move into a new sky of consciousness.Each death is an end and a beginning.Don’t pay too much attention to the end. It is an end to an old, rotten, miserable life style, and it is a great opportunity to begin a new life, not to commit the old mistakes. It is a beginning of an adventure. But because you cling to life and you don’t want to leave it – and it has to happen by the very nature of things – you fall unconscious.Almost everyone, except those few people who have become enlightened, dies unconsciously; hence they don’t know what death is, they don’t know its new beginning, the new dawn.Meditation is your own exploration.You are searching to know exactly what constitutes you: what is false in you and what is real in you. It is a tremendous journey from the false to the real, from the mortal to the immortal, from darkness to light. But when you come to the point of seeing the separation from the mind and the body, and yourself just as a witness, the experience of death is the same. You are not dying…a man who has meditated will die joyfully because he knows there is no death; the death was in his clinging with life.You say, Sagar, “I feel a strong connection between death and meditation.” There is. In the ancient scriptures of this land, even the master is defined as death because his whole function, his whole work is to teach you meditation. In other words, he is teaching you to die without dying – to pass through the experience of death, surprised that you are still alive; death was like a cloud that has passed; it has not even scratched you. Hence the fascination, and the fear. The fascination is to know the mysterious experience everybody has to pass through, has passed through many times, but became unconscious. And the fear – that perhaps death is only the end and not another beginning.It happened, just in the beginning of this century, that the King of Varanasi was to be operated on; the operation was major. But the King was very stubborn and he wouldn’t take any kind of anesthesia. He said, “You can do the operation, but I want to see it happen; I don’t want to be unconscious.”The doctors were puzzled. It was against medical practice…such a major operation was going to be too painful; the man might die because of the pain. Surgery needs you to be unconscious.Perhaps the science of surgery has learned the art of anesthesia from the experience of death, because death is the greatest surgery. It separates you from your body, from your heart, and you have remained identified with all this for seventy years, eighty years. They have become almost your real self. The separation is going to be very painful, and there is a limit to pain.Have you ever noticed? – there is no unbearable pain. The words unbearable pain exist only in language – all pain is bearable. The moment it becomes unbearable, you fall unconscious. Your unconsciousness is a way to bear it.If he had been an ordinary man, the doctors would not have listened to him – but he was a king, and a very well-known king, known all over the country as a great wise man. He persuaded the surgeons, “Don’t be worried, nothing is going to happen to me. Just give me five minutes before you start your operation so that I can arrange myself into a meditative state. Once I’m in meditation, I am already far away from the body. Then you can cut my whole body into pieces – I will be only a witness, and a faraway witness, as if it is happening to somebody else.”The moment was very critical; the operation had to be done immediately. If it was not done immediately, it might cause death. There were only two alternatives: either to operate and allow the patient to remain conscious, or not to operate, but follow the old routine of science. But in that case, death was certain. In the first case, there was a chance that perhaps this man could manage, and he was so insistent…finding no way to persuade him, they had to operate.That was the first operation done without anesthesia, in a state of meditation. The king simply closed his eyes, became silent. Even the surgeons felt something changing around the king – the vibe, the presence; his face became relaxed like a small baby, just born, and after five minutes they started the operation. The operation took two hours, and they were trembling with fear; in fact, they were not sure that the king would survive – the shock might be too much. But when the operation was over, the king asked them, “Can I open my eyes now?”It was discussed in the medical field all over the world as a very strange case. The surgeons asked him what he did. He said, “I have not done anything. To meditate is my very life. Moment to moment I am living in silence. I asked for those five minutes because you were going to do such a dangerous operation that I had to become absolutely settled in my being, with no wavering. Then you could do anything…because you were not doing it to me. I am consciousness – and you cannot operate on consciousness, you can operate only on the body.”You say, “When I sit with you, it is somehow safe.” There is really no difference whether you sit with me or you sit alone – it is just a mind security, the idea that the master is present so there is no harm to take the jump. If something goes wrong, somebody is there to take care of it.In meditation, nothing goes wrong – ever.Without meditation, everything is going wrong.Nothing goes right without meditation; your whole life is going wrong. You live only in hope, but your hopes are never fulfilled. Your life is a long, long tragedy. And the reason is your unawareness, your unmeditativeness.Meditation looks like death, and the experience is exactly the same. But the attitude and the approach is different, and the difference is so vast that it can be said that meditation is life and death is just a dream.But this is the function of a mystery school, where many people are meditating, where a master is present. You feel safe, you are not alone. If something goes wrong, help will be available immediately. But nothing goes wrong.So meditate while you are sitting with me, and meditate in your aloneness. Meditation is the only thing with an absolute guarantee that nothing goes wrong with it. It only reveals your existence to yourself – how can anything go wrong? And you are not doing anything; you are really stopping doing everything. You are stopping thinking, feeling, doing – a full stop to all your actions. Only consciousness remains, because that is not your action, it is you.Once you have tasted your being, all fear disappears, and life becomes a totally new dimension – no longer mundane, no longer ordinary. For the first time you see the sacredness and the divineness not only of yourself, but of all that exists. Everything becomes mysterious, and to live in this mystery is the only way to live blissfully; to live in this mystery is to live under blessings showering on you like rain. Each moment brings more and more, deeper and more profound blessings to you. Not that you deserve them, but because life gives them out of its abundance – it is burdened, it shares with whomsoever is receptive to it.But don’t get the idea that meditation is death-like, because death has no good associations in your mind. That will prevent you experiencing consciousness – “It is death-like.” In fact, it is a real death. The ordinary death is not a real death, because you will be again joined with another structure, another body. The meditator dies in a great way; he never again becomes imprisoned in a body.An Italian missed a day at work and the foreman wanted an explanation.“Where have you been?” he asked.“It was-a my wife. She give-a birth to a wheelbarrow.”“If you can’t do any better than that,” said the foreman, “I’m gonna have to fire you.”“I think-a I got it wrong,” said the Italian. “My wife, she’s in-a bed having a push chair.”“That’s it, wise guy,” shouted the foreman, “You are fired!”The Italian went home and asked his wife, “Hey, what was wrong with you yesterday?”“I told-a you, I had-a miscarriage.”“I knew it was-a something with-a wheels-a on it.”There are misunderstandings piled upon misunderstandings in you. Some misunderstandings can be tremendously harmful. Getting the association of meditation and death identified in your mind is one of the greatest harms that you can do to yourself. Although you are not wrong, your associations with the meaning of death are such that they will prevent you from getting into meditation.That is one of the reasons I want to make death more and more associated with celebration rather than with mourning, more and more associated with a change, a new beginning, rather than just a full stop, an end. I want to change the association. That will clear the way for meditativeness.And if you are feeling, here with me, silent and meditative – still alive, more alive than ever – then there is no need to be afraid. Try it in different situations, and you will always find it a source of great healing, a source of great well-being, a source of great wisdom…a source of great insight into life and its mysteries.Osho,When someone like Nietzsche or Gertrude Stein dies – a genius who would probably have become enlightened if they had met a master – what sort of consciousness do they carry into the next life, and what was it that in their previous lives allowed them to experience such a huge potential, such a great flowering, and such a great knack? Was it the idea of wanting to go their own way without a master?There are many things in your question. First, you ask, “When someone like Nietzsche or Gertrude Stein dies – a genius who would probably have become enlightened if they had met a master – what sort of consciousness do they carry into the next life?The first thing to be understood is that consciousness has nothing to do with genius. Everybody can be a Gautam Buddha. Everybody cannot be a Michelangelo, everybody cannot be a Friedrich Nietzsche.But everybody can be a Zarathustra, because the spiritual realization is everybody’s birthright. It is not a talent like painting, or music, or poetry, or dancing; it is not a genius either. A genius has tremendous intelligence, but it is still of the mind.Enlightenment is not of the mind, it is not intellect; it is intelligence of a totally different order. So, the first thing to remember is that it is not only people, like Friedrich Nietzsche who have missed the journey toward their own selves; they were great intellectuals, geniuses unparalleled – but all that belongs to the mind. And to be a Gautam Buddha, a Lao Tzu, or a Zarathustra is to get out of the mind, to be in a state of mindlessness. It does not matter whether you had a big mind or a small mind, a mediocre mind, or a genius; the point is that you should be out of the mind. The moment you are out of the mind, you are in yourself.So the strange thing is that the more a person is intellectual, the farther he goes away from himself. His intellect takes him to faraway stars. He is a genius, he may create great poetry, he may create great sculpture. But as far as you are concerned, you are not to be created, you are already there.The genius creates, the meditator discovers.So, don’t make a category of Nietzsche and Stein and Schweitzer separate from others. In the world of mind, they are far richer than you, but in the world of no-mind, they are as poor as you are. And that is the space which matters.Secondly, you ask, “What sort of consciousness do they carry into the next life?” They don’t have any consciousness to carry into another life. They have a certain genius, a certain talent, a certain intelligence; they will carry that intelligence into another life, but they don’t have consciousness.Consciousness is an altogether different matter. It has nothing to do with creativity, it has nothing to do with inventiveness, it has nothing to do with science or art; it has something to do with tremendous silence, peace, a centering – they don’t have it. So the question of carrying a certain consciousness into the next life does not arise; they don’t have it in the first place. What they have, they will carry into the next life. They will become greater geniuses, they will become better singers, they will become more talented in their field, but it has nothing to do with meditation or consciousness. They will remain as unconscious as you are, as anybody else is.It is as if you all fall asleep here; you will be dreaming. Somebody may have a very beautiful dream, very nice, very juicy, and somebody may have a nightmare. But both are dreams. And when they wake up, they will know that the beautiful dream and the nightmare are not different – they are both dreams. They are non-existential, mind projections.When an ordinary man meditates, he comes to the same space of blissfulness as Nietzsche or Albert Einstein or Bertrand Russell. That space of blissfulness will not be different, will not be richer for Bertrand Russell because he is a great intellectual. Those values don’t matter outside of the mind; outside of the mind, they are irrelevant.This is great and good news because it means a woodcutter or a fisherman can become Gautam Buddha. An uneducated Jesus, an uneducated Kabir, who doesn’t show any indication of genius, can still become enlightened, because enlightenment is not a talent, it is discovering your being. And the being of everyone is absolutely equal. That is the only place where communism exists – not in the Soviet Union, not in China.The only place where communism exists is when somebody becomes a Gautam Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu. Suddenly all distinctions, talents of the mind, disappear. There is only pure sky where you cannot make any distinctions of higher and lower.And you are asking, “What was it that in their previous lives allowed them to experience such a huge potential?”You are growing every moment in whatever you are doing. A warrior will attain a certain quality of warriorness, a sharpness of the sword, and he will carry that quality into the next life. A mathematician will carry his mathematical intelligence to higher peaks in another life. That’s why people are so different, so unequal, because in their past lives everybody has been doing different things, accumulating different experiences, molding the mind in a certain way. Nothing is lost, whatever you are doing will be with you like your shadow. It will follow you, and it will become bigger and bigger.If Nietzsche is a great philosopher, he must have been philosophizing in his past lives – perhaps many, many lives – because such a genius needs a long, long philosophical past.But the same is true about everybody. Everybody has a certain talent, developed or undeveloped; it depends on your decision, on your commitment. Once you are committed, you have accepted a responsibility to grow in a certain direction. Even whole races of people have developed in different directions, not only individuals.For example, the Sikhs in India are not different from Hindus. They are only five hundred years old, following an enlightened man, Nanak. They became a different sect – but they are Hindus. And for these five hundred years, a strange phenomenon has happened, which has not happened anywhere else in the world. You cannot find in a Jewish family that one person is a Christian; you cannot find in a Mohammedan family that one person is a Hindu. But for five hundred years it has been a convention that in Punjab, where Sikhs dominate, the eldest son of the family should become a Sikh. He still remains in the family. His whole family is Hindu – his father is Hindu, his wife may be Hindu; he is a Sikh.And the strangeness is that just by being Sikhs, the whole character of those Hindus has changed. Hindus have become cowards in the name of nonviolence; they are boiling with aggression within but, nonviolence is the ideal. Sikhs don’t believe in nonviolence; neither do they believe in violence – they believe in spontaneity.A certain situation may need violence and a certain situation may need nonviolence; you cannot make it a principle of life. You have to remain open, available, and responsive to the moment. And there is no difference of blood – the differences are such that one can only laugh at them – but they have created a totally new race.Any Hindu can become a Sikh, any Mohammedan can become a Sikh, because the change is very simple. You have to have long hair, you cannot cut your beard or mustache; you have to use a turban, and you have to keep a comb in your turban; you have to wear a steel ring, a bracelet, just to show that you are a Sikh, and you have to carry a sword. You always have to wear underwear.How these things have changed people is a miracle, because the Sikh is totally different from Hindus in his behavior. He is a warrior; he’s not cowardly. He’s more sincere, more simple, more of the heart.It happened…I was going to Manali, the mountainous part, and it had rained, and the driver of my limousine was a Sikh. He started becoming afraid. The road was very small, the limousine was very big. The road was slippery; there were water pools collected on the road. At a certain point it looked very dangerous. A great river was flowing by, thousands of feet down – and just a small road. He stopped the car, went out, and sat there. And he said, “I cannot move anymore, it is simply going into death.”I said, “Don’t be worried, you just sit; I will drive.”He said, “That is even more dangerous! I cannot give you the key.”I said, “This is very strange, because we have been traveling the whole night, twelve hours; now we are in the middle.”I tried to explain to him, “Even going back, you will have to travel twelve miles, twelve hours again on the same dangerous road. Whether you go backward or you go forward, it is the same.”He said, “It is not the same, because the road that we have passed, we have survived – I can manage. But ahead it seems to be simply committing suicide – I cannot go.”At that very moment, the inspector general of Punjab, who was coming to participate in the camp, came in his jeep. Seeing me standing there, and the limousine and driver sitting there, he said, “What is the matter?”I said, “It is good you have come at the right moment; this driver is not ready to move ahead.”The inspector general of Punjab was also a Sikh. He came close to the driver and told him, “You are a Sikh. Have you forgotten this? Just get into the car.”And strangely enough, he immediately got into the car. We moved. I asked him, “What happened? I have been arguing with you….”He said, “It is not a question of argument. I am a Sikh! I am supposed not to be afraid, and I had forgotten it.”Just a slight idea can change not only the individual, it can change the whole race.We have seen how Adolf Hitler created in Germany a race of warriors as nobody has done ever before, just by giving them the idea that “you are the purest Aryans, that you are born to rule all over the world. “And once the idea got into their minds, he almost conquered the world. For five years, he went on conquering. People became so afraid that a few countries simply gave way to him without fighting. What was the point of fighting with those people? They were superhuman. These ideas also are carried from one life to another.In India there are sudras, untouchables. For five thousand years they have been condemned, oppressed, as nobody else in the whole world. I used to go to their functions and they would not let me sit with them. I would tell them, “You are as human as anybody else, and in fact you are doing a service which is far more valuable than any prime minister or any president of any country. The country would be more peaceful without these presidents and prime ministers, but without you, the country cannot live. You are keeping the country clean, you are doing the dirtiest jobs; you should be respected for it.”They would listen to me, but I could see that they were not ready to accept the idea that they are equal to other human beings. For five thousand years they have not revolted against such oppression, such humiliation – just they go on carrying it from one life into another life; it becomes more and more ingrained.You are asking, “Was it the idea of wanting to go their own way without a master?” No, they had no idea of the great experience that happens between a master and a disciple. They have never consciously decided to go on their own way.In fact in the West, masters have not existed. There have been saviors. They are not masters; they don’t help you to become enlightened, they help you to remain unenlightened. Just believe in them and they will save you, you are not to do anything. The West has known prophets, messengers of God, but the West has not known masters. It has known mystics, but the mystics have remained silent in the West seeing that they will not be understood.It is the atmosphere of thousands of years in the East that has made a few people take courage, and say things which cannot be said. It was the long heritage that allowed a few mystics to become masters. The West has missed completely a whole dimension of life.The East has also missed many things – it has missed the scientific mind, it has missed the technological progress. It has remained poor, it has been invaded very easily by anybody, because its whole soul was devoted toward only one thing – everything else was irrelevant: Who rules the country does not matter, what matters is whether you are enlightened or not. Whether you are rich or poor does not matter, what matters is whether you know yourself or not – a single-pointed devotion. And because of this, the East has a climate of its own.As you enter into the Eastern climate, you suddenly feel a difference. The West is more logical; the East is more loving. The West is more of the mind; the East is more of mindlessness, of meditation.No, Pankaja, they have not missed a master; the very idea was non-existent to them. Even today, millions of Western people are unaware of the fact of masters, disciples, meditations. It is only the younger generation – and that too a very small portion of it – which has entered into the Eastern dimension, and has been shocked that the real richness is not of the outside world, the real richness is of the inside.Ginsberg is dying. “Call the priest,” he says to his wife, “and tell him I want to be converted into the catholic religion.”“But Max, you are an orthodox Jew all your life. What are you talking about? You want to be converted?”Ginsberg says, “Better one of them should die than one of us.”People have lived as Jews, as Christians, as Mohammedans, but people have not lived as simply religious.In the East also only, a very few people have lived in pure religiousness. But only those very few people have filled the whole of the East with a fragrance which seems to be eternal.God asked Moses to choose whatever promised land he wished. After weighing several factors, Moses settled on California. But Moses, according to legend, had a speech impediment and he begin to answer, “C…C….”Whereupon God said, “Canaan, that wasteland? Well, okay Mo. If you want it, you got it.”Poor Moses, because of a speech impediment got Canaan, which is now Israel – its old name is Canaan.But from the very beginning in the Western mind, the desire was for California. He could have asked for Kashmir where finally he came and died; he could have asked for the land of Gautam Buddha.But the East has appealed only to those who are called by psychologists “introverts”; and the West has appeal for those who are known as extroverts. Going Eastward means going inward; going Westward means going outward.For thousands of years, authentic seekers have been coming to the East. They have found a certain magnetic pull; where so many people have meditated, they have created a tremendous energy pool. Being in that atmosphere, things become simpler, because the whole atmosphere is supportive, is a nourishment.I have been around the world, and I have seen how the West is absolutely unaware of the Eastern grace. How is it that the Western man is unaware of himself? He’s thinking of the farthest star, but not about himself. The East has remained committed to a single goal – to be oneself, and to know oneself. Unless you know yourself, and you are yourself, your life has gone to waste; it has not blossomed, it has not flowered. You have not fulfilled your destiny.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Once, in Kathmandu, I asked you about the need of the disciple for a master. Then I asked you if the master needs the disciple, and you showered on me some words that I received in tears, like petals of an unknowable flower. Would you please be so kind and speak to us about the need of the master for the disciples. Aren't you the formless form, with whom existence is fulfilling our longing? Aren't we, in some way, your food, your nourishment?Sarjano, I do not remember what I said in response to your question in Kathmandu. I never remember anything I have said. That keeps me responsible. I cannot repeat, because I do not remember. I can only respond to the question, and to the questioner in this very moment.Between Kathmandu and this moment, neither you have remained you, nor I have remained I. And so much water has gone down the Ganges, that any repetition is always out of date. Any repetition is dead, is not alive.That’s how the whole of humanity is only pretending to live, but deep down is dead, because it has forgotten the language of response. It knows only the language of reaction. It reacts according to the memory. It does not respond according to the awareness of the moment, of the need here and now. It is full of the past.There is no present in millions of people around the world. Millions of people live without knowing the taste of the present. And when you are full of the past you are a graveyard. Howsoever beautiful the past may be, it is still dead. And beauty is meaningless if it cannot dance, if it cannot sing, if it cannot even breathe.I am here, you are here, why bring Kathmandu in? I don’t know what Kathmandu means in Nepalese, but in Hindustani we have a phrase which immediately reminds one of Kathmandu. The phrase is kath ke ullu. It means, “You are an owl. And that too not real, but made of wood.” I don’t know what Kathmandu means; Kath certainly means wood….Why bring Kathmandu in? You really want to listen to the same answer again, but it is impossible Sarjano. You will have to forgive me, because I don’t remember a single word. Kathmandu is almost as far away as the farthest star, as if it happened in some other life.While we are alive, why waste your time? You can ask a new question and you can receive a new response. The new will be fresher, and the new will be better. The new will be more mature.But people have lived to live in the past. It has become almost a second nature to them. It is very difficult to drag them out of their graves and tell them, “You are not dead yet. Start breathing, you are still alive.”An elderly Jewish man walks into a jewelry store to buy his wife a present. “How much is this?” he asks the assistant, pointing to a silver crucifix.“That is six hundred dollars, sir,” replies the assistant.“Nice,” says the man, “and how much without the acrobat on it?”People cannot forgive the past, people cannot forget the past. Two thousand years have passed, but Jesus is not yet acceptable to the Jewish mind. Not a single Jew in two thousand years has repented that crucifying Jesus was a criminal act, and that he finds himself also part of the conspiracy. You will be surprised to know that not a single Jewish scripture even mentions the name of Jesus. It is so unworthy. Such is our approach to life….I will take your question as fresh, because we are not in Kathmandu. And I will answer you in this moment, responding to your question and to you. I am not in the habit of quoting myself.You are asking, what is the need of the disciple for a master, and vice versa – what is the need of a master for a disciple? Condensed to its essentialness, the question is, “Does love exist in the lover or in the beloved? Or does love exist in the harmony of both?”Only in those rare moments, when there is no “I” and no “thou,” love blossoms. It does not exist in the lover, it does not exist in the beloved, it exists in the disappearance of their separation.That’s why all lovers are disappointed, because they cannot remain organically one for more than a few seconds. Just a small thing and the separation returns; it was just waiting. If in twenty-four hours you can find twenty-four seconds of organic unity and harmony, you should think yourself immensely blessed, tremendously rich.The same is the situation between the disciple and the master. Something higher than love, something deeper than love and togetherness exists in those moments of silence, those moments of communion, when the disciple forgets that he is separate from the master, when the disciple melts and merges into the master.The master is already merged into existence. Merging into the master you are really merging with existence itself. The master functions only as a door, and a door is an emptiness; you pass through it.The master is the door to the beyond.And the beyond exists in the organic unity, in the communion, in the merger, in the melting of the master and the disciple. It is the highest form of love. It is the greatest prayer, the deepest gratitude, and the most ecstatic experience available to human consciousness.The master is missing something when he is alone; he is like an ocean into which no rivers melt. A disciple is certainly just a nobody without a master. With a master, he becomes the whole existence. Both are fulfilled in a togetherness. And because this togetherness is not of the body, not of the mind, but of that which is beyond the mind in you, it is possible to attain and never lose it.Love is always up and down, one moment joyful, another moment sad. But the love that we are talking about – love between two spirits, between two beings – only begins, it never ends.The masters ordinarily will not accept what I am saying, but if they don’t accept it they are insincere. And if they are insincere, what kind of masters are they?The masters have been pretending that they don’t need anything – they don’t need you, they don’t need your eyes, they don’t need your heartbeat, they don’t need your love, they don’t need your merger and meeting. That is an egoistic attitude. And anybody who pretends that he needs nothing is only a teacher, not a master. He himself needs to be a disciple. He has heard many beautiful truths, but he has not known anything on his own.A true master, out of his sincerity, out of his humbleness, will accept the simple fact that he is not beyond any need. Of course, his needs are of a very spiritual kind.He cannot live unless he can share. Even to exist is impossible for him – he loses all meaning – unless he can wake up people who are fast asleep, unless he can make people who are miserable become transformed into dancing roses. In their fulfillment he becomes again and again enlightened.His enlightenment is not an incident: the authentic master is becoming continuously enlightened each moment. His enlightenment is a progress, an eternal progress; otherwise, the world would have been far more poor. It is already poor.If Gautam Buddha needed nothing, then for forty-two years walking the whole land, talking to people, knowing perfectly well that they cannot understand, is an arduous task. Why is he doing it? He is helpless, he has to do it. It comes as an intrinsic part of his own enlightenment.Before, it was a longing to become enlightened. Now it is a longing to make the whole world enlightened.Osho,I love the way you speak so intimately to sannyasins who have been with you for a long time, remembering Veena with photographic clarity and whether someone else's hands were cold or warm, and where he used to stand to greet you. The intimacy of you acknowledging us is such an incredibly beautiful gift it makes me weep. Could you say something about acknowledgment?One of the most important secrets of life is that the something can be of immense spiritual value, and the same thing can be a great hindrance for your growth.Such is acknowledgment. It can arise out of your ego – to be acknowledged – then it is dangerous. Then it is going to strengthen that which is false in you and block the doors for the real to open up.But if it arises out of a simple, innocent heart – not as a nourishment to the ego but just as a blissful recognition that you are also there, that you are also in existence, that you are accepted as you are, that you are respected as you are – then acknowledgment can become a tremendous experience and transformation.It all depends on you, what you make of it.There are people whom I feel afraid to recognize – not that it is going to do any harm to me, but because it is going to do harm to them. I can see in their eyes, in their faces, a deep desire, a greed to be recognized. I ignore it. But there are people who are simply here – just enjoying. It is more than enough that they are breathing the same air, that they are sitting under the same roof, that they are surrounded by the same trees.I am reminded of a strange story about Ananda, one of Gautam Buddha’s most intimate disciples.And he was not only a disciple, he was also his elder cousin-brother. Just the fact that he was more deeply related with Gautam Buddha, the fact that blood is thicker than water, the fact that, “Not only I am related, he is younger in age to me,” became a hindrance.Forty-two years he remained with Buddha, but could not attain enlightenment. And many, many others came and became enlightened. It was the day when he was taking initiation that he had asked Gautam Buddha, “I have come to be initiated. After initiation I will be your disciple. Right now I am your elder brother.” And in India, even cousin-brothers, if they are elder, have to be respected just like your real brothers.Ananda said, “I want you to remember three conditions, and give me a promise that you will not go against your word, because after initiation your order will be my life, your word will be my law – then I cannot say anything. So just before initiation I want three promises. As your elder brother you have to respect my desires.”Sariputra, one of Gautam Buddha’s earliest disciple’s, said to Ananda, “Don’t be stupid, these promises will become hindrances for your growth. These conditions will prohibit all for which you are taking the initiation. You are saying, ‘I am going to become your disciple,’ but deep down you will never be a disciple. You will always know that you are the elder brother, and those three conditions will always make you certain about it.”Initiation has to be taken unconditionally, but Ananda was not going to listen to an ordinary sannyasin. Sariputra was one of the wisest disciples of Gautam Buddha, but in the eyes of Ananda he was nobody. Ananda was a king, had his own kingdom; Sariputra was just a commoner. Ananda said to him, “You keep quiet. It is a question between two brothers, you need not interfere.”After forty-two years Ananda wept when Gautam Buddha was dying. And he said, “I did not listen to Sariputra. I was ignorant, I insisted. Those conditions were nothing but an enhancement of my ego.”The first condition was, “I will always remain with you. You cannot send me anywhere else to spread the word.” Second, “I can ask any question. You cannot say to me, ‘Wait, and when the time is right you will receive the answer.’ No, you will have to give me the answer immediately.” And third, “If I bring a friend – even if it is in the middle of the night, and I wake you up – you will have to receive him and answer his questions.”Gautam Buddha laughed. There are very few occasions when he laughed – in his whole life maybe three or four occasions. He laughed, laughed at the stupidity of human ignorance. What he was asking was just meaningless, and what he was losing he was not aware of.Buddha said, “You are my elder brother. I have to obey you, respect you. Your conditions are accepted. You will never find a fault. I give my promise – but I am giving it with a very heavy heart, because you don’t know what you are missing. You are thinking you are becoming special, and this is the place where you have to become humble.”But a blind man is a blind man. He took initiation only after those conditions were accepted. And he wept tears of blood, because he remained always with a subtle ego: “I have a certain speciality among ten thousand disciples.Nobody has any promise from Gautam Buddha except me.”But the people who had no promise, their promises were fulfilled. Those who had come without asking anything and surrendered themselves, they attained. He remained lagging behind. He could not believe it: “What is the matter? Very junior people have attained to liberation, and I am one of the most senior persons. And I am the closest.”But closest only physically. He slept in the same room in which Gautam Buddha slept. He moved just behind him like a shadow, and he felt greatly proud of his specialness. He was acknowledged by Gautam Buddha and by everybody else; but his acknowledgment became his fault, his failure.Never desire acknowledgment. Enjoy when it comes, relish it, dance…but when it comes on its own, not asked for. The master always recognizes – but only those who will be helped by it. And he ignores those who will be helped by his ignoring them. Perhaps they will come to an understanding of why they are being ignored: because they want to be special, because they want to be acknowledged.Drop that! If you cannot drop, even with a master, then what kind of discipleship is it? What kind of initiation have you taken? Now leave it to him. If he feels that you need being ignored, he will ignore you – and you have to be thankful for it. And if he feels you need acknowledgment he will acknowledge you, and you have to be thankful for that too. But it should not be a demand on your part.The moment you demand you miss the intimacy, the deep spiritual connection. You fall far away, because the desire is not of your being, it is of your ego, of your personality – which is not you, which is your enemy. This enemy has to be crucified.Without ego, without any sense of “I”, you will know the innocence of a child. Then the whole starry sky and its freedom is yours.A smart New York career girl married Stefano, a handsome young Italian farmer. She was not too happy with his social manners, and started trying to improve him immediately. Throughout the wedding reception she continuously corrected his mistakes, telling him what to say, which knife to use at the table, and how to pass the butter.Finally, the celebrations were over, and they were in bed at last. Stefano fidgeted between the sheets, unsure of himself, but finally he turned toward his new wife and stuttered, “Could you pass the pussy please?”It is better to recognize whatever you are: ignorant, uneducated, knowledgeable, moralistic, puritan, egoist – it is better to recognize whatever you are.There is no need to hide yourself from the master.The function of the master is not to improve upon you, but to transform you – and these are two different processes.To reform you means to decorate you, to polish you; to transform means to help you die as an ego and be born as an innocent child, who knows no idea of “I-ness”.Only the childlike consciousness is capable of understanding all that is beautiful in life, all that is great in existence. And the whole existence is full of greatness, full of glories. This is the only existence there is; its beauty, its truth, is the only beauty and the only truth. But they are available only to the innocent people.Blessed are the innocent, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,It feels so hopeless. I feel ashamed to have been a sannyasin for ten years and still be in this state. I hesitate to ask for your help, because even your words become mechanical in me after a few repetitions. Would you please comment?Prem Indivar, it is not yet hopeless enough. Just make it a little more hopeless. There comes a point in hopelessness where you stop hoping.Hopelessness is still deep down nothing but hope. Let the hope fail completely and totally, and a dramatic experience arises out of that space when you don’t have any hope – because hope is another name of desire, another name of expectation, another name of ambition. And before you can realize yourself, all desires, all expectations, all ambitions must have failed you, must have left you alone. Hoping nothing, desiring nothing, expecting nothing – where will you be? There is no way to go out.Hope is a way of going out, desire is a way of going away, ambition is a way to avoid going in. On the path, to be utterly hopeless, so hopeless that you stop hoping…suddenly you are in – without taking a single step.Hope is a kind of opium; it keeps you intoxicated. To tolerate the miserable present, your eyes remain fixed on a faraway star: your hope. Millions of people live without finding themselves – not because of any sin that Adam and Eve committed, or that they committed in some of their past lives. The sin is that people go on looking in the future and the present goes on passing by. And the present is the only reality; the future is a dream, and howsoever sweet, dreams never come true.Self-realization is not a dream. It is a realization in the present moment of your own being. So don’t be worried; you are on the right path, Prem Indivar – becoming hopeless. Go on more and more, exhaust hopelessness. Come to the optimum hopelessness. Then hope disappears automatically.And when there is no hope, you are.When there is no hope, the present is.An old spinster died, and her two old friends went to a stone mason to have a gravestone made. “And what message would you like to have on the stone?” asked the mason. “Well,” said one of the old maids, “It’s quite simple really. We would like ‘She came a virgin, she lived a virgin, and she died a virgin.’“The mason replied, “You know, you ladies could save a lot of money by just saying, ‘Returned unopened.’“Most of the people return unopened, and nobody is responsible except themselves.You are asking, “It feels so hopeless….” Not yet; otherwise even this question would not have arisen. There is still hope. You say, “I feel ashamed to have been a sannyasin for ten years, and still be in this state.” That is your ego feeling hurt; otherwise you would feel humble, not ashamed. What is there to be ashamed of?Life is not a small thing. It is so vast, and we are so small. The ocean is so big, and we have to swim in it just with our own small hands. Only those people who never start swimming and go on standing on the bank looking at others, should feel ashamed. One who has started swimming…ten years is nothing much, even ten lives are short.One should be so patient. It is your impatience that is feeling ashamed; it is your ego that is feeling ashamed. You should feel humble – humble before the vastness of existence, humble before the mysteries of life…just humble, a nobody. And in that humbleness, the ocean becomes small and your hands become bigger.You say, “I hesitate to ask for your help….”You go on saying things which you don’t mean. If you really hesitate, then why are you asking? In fact, hesitation is your question. You should ask a little more so that you can open up, so that you can become more exposed. Don’t go on hiding yourself. What is the hesitation in asking? And you go on rationalizing everything within yourself; you have rationalized your hesitation.Everybody hesitates to ask, and the reason and the rationalization are two different things. The reason for feeling hesitation is that one does not want to show one’s ignorance, and every question shows your ignorance. One hopes that some other stupid person is going to ask the question, just wait…because the human reality is one, and human problems are one, and the search for oneself is one. So some day somebody is going to ask the question that you cannot gather courage to ask yourself.But I want you to remember that even in asking there is something valuable. In asking, you are exposing your ignorance; in asking, you are accepting that you don’t know; in asking, you are dropping your so-called knowledgeability.To ask a question is more important than the question itself. The question may be anything – xyz – but the very asking is significant. It brings you closer to me, and it brings you closer to all other sannyasins, the fellow travelers. You don’t remain closed, afraid that somebody may know that you know not. Exposing yourself – that you are ignorant – all fear disappears. You become more human, and you become more intimate with everyone who is a fellow traveler, because the same is his situation. That is the reason why one hesitates.But rationalizations are a totally different thing. You rationalize that, “I hesitate to ask for your help because even your words become mechanical in me after a few repetitions.”What is the need of repeating them? One repeats a thing because one wants to make it mechanical. In your mind, there is a robot part; if you repeat a certain thing, the robot part takes it over. Then you don’t have to think about it; the robot part goes on doing it. You are unburdened of thinking, you are unburdened of responsibility. And the robot part is very efficient; it is mechanical. It has its use, and it has its misuse.When you are working in the ordinary world, the day to day world, if you have to remember every day where your house is, who your wife is…if you have to search every day in the crowd looking into every face – who is your wife? – it will become a little difficult. The robot part takes over. It knows the way home; you need not think on every turn whether to go right or to go left. You go on listening to the radio, and your hands will go on turning the steering wheel exactly to your own porch.If one has to think about everything, life will become too clumsy. Once in a while, it happens with a few people, who don’t have a very strong robot part – and these are the people who are very intelligent – that their whole energy moves into intelligence, and their robot part is left starving.Thomas Alva Edison is one of the cases to be considered. He was leaving and going to an institute to deliver a lecture on some new scientific project he was working on. Saying good-bye to his wife, he kissed her and waved to his maid. His chauffeur could not believe his eyes – because he had kissed the maid, and he was waving to the wife. His robot part was very, very small; his whole life energy was devoted to scientific investigations where a robot part is not needed.One day, he was sitting and working on some calculations, and his wife came with the breakfast. Seeing him so much involved, she left the breakfast by his side, thinking that when he sees it, he will understand why she has not disturbed him. Meanwhile, one of his friends came. Seeing him so much absorbed, he also felt not to disturb him. Having nothing else to do, he ate the breakfast, and left the empty dishes by his side. When Edison looked up and saw his friend, he looked at the empty plate and said, “You came a little late. I have finished my breakfast. We could have shared it.”The friend said, “Don’t be worried.”You say that everything becomes mechanical in you after a few repetitions. But why repeat? The repetition is a method to make a thing mechanical. Always do something fresh, something new, if you do not want to get caught in repetitions. But in ordinary life, repetitions are perfectly good.As you enter into the world of higher consciousness, repetitions are dangerous. There you need always a fresh mind, an innocent mind, which knows nothing and responds to a situation not out of the mechanical, robot part of your mind, but from the very living source of your life.Here we are not concerned about the mundane world. Our concern is to raise the consciousness.Don’t repeat, don’t imitate. Remember one thing: you have to respond always in a fresh way. The situation may be old, but you are not to be old. You have to remain young and fresh. Just try new responses. They will not be as efficient as mechanical responses, but efficiency is not a great value in spiritual life…freshness is.A rabbi and a minister were sitting together on a plane. The stewardess came up to them and asked, “Would you care for a cocktail?”“Sure,” said the rabbi. “Please bring a Manhattan.”“Fine, sir,” said the stewardess. “And you Reverend?”“Young lady,” he said, “before I touch strong drink, I would just as soon commit adultery.”“I’ve missed,” said the rabbi.” “As long as there is a choice, I will have what he’s having.”People are imitative and imitation is bound to be unintelligent. They want to do exactly the things which others are doing. That destroys their freshness. Do things in your own style; live your life according to your own light. And even if the same situation arises, be alert to find a new response.It is only a question of a little alertness, and once you have started enjoying…and it is really a great joy to respond to old situations always in a new way, because that newness keeps you young, keeps you conscious, keeps you non-mechanical, keeps you alive.Don’t be repetitive. But when I am saying don’t be repetitive, I don’t mean in the ordinary life, in the marketplace; there, repetition is the rule. But in the inner world, the freshness of your response is the law.Osho,I have noticed that when you leave the discourse and pass through the door, you often look to your left. Are you simply saying “hello” to the ghost?I have to. That room, Anando’s room, has so many ghosts. I had not told Anando when she came into the room for the first time – but how long can you hide a fact? The ghosts started declaring themselves. In the middle of the night, they would wake her. They would knock – she would jump out of her bed. And she was afraid to tell anybody what was the matter. Finally she gathered courage and asked me, “What is the matter? Suddenly, in the middle of the night, somebody knocks, and if I don’t jump up, he tries to pull my leg.”I said, “Nothing to be worried about. It is a very nice assembly of ghosts.” I keep them in Anando’s room just so they can also listen to the discourse – in fact, it is their room. They are not ghosts, they are the hosts – Anando is the guest. But she was very much afraid I said, “You don’t be afraid. Start introducing yourself to them.”She said, “But what will others think?”I said, “Nobody is there in the middle of the night.”She said, “That’s right.” So she introduced herself: “I’m a nice Australian girl and I don’t want any trouble.” And now she has even started making a bed in the bathroom, in the bathtub, with cozy blankets and many clothes for the ghosts, so they can rest there.I have to pass that room just because of those fellows. Just a “hello” is needed. And now it has become known to a few people. Milarepa is asking, “Why, when you enter the room, do you look to the left and say, ‘Hello’?” Mukta has even approached Anando to say, “I enjoy the company of ghosts. I would like to invite them for tea – just to be friendly with them.”But Anando is very much afraid. She has to talk to them every night. I have asked her whether they answer. She said, “They never answer.”I said, “They will not answer because they don’t exist. You have to create them; it is a very creative dimension.”Nirupa became interested, because everybody wants to know mysterious things. She stayed with Anando, and she also heard the knocks. She said, “My God, they are!” But in fact, all those knocks are made by Milarepa. It is by arrangement with me, just to keep a place in the commune for nice ghosts.You can create ghosts very easily. Anything else is very difficult because it needs some material. Ghosts are absolutely immaterial. It just needs a good imagination, and Anando has a good imagination. And it is a good exercise to talk to the ghosts, because you can be more truthful than you can be with human beings – it is a good meditation. You can tell them secrets which you cannot tell to anybody else, because they are not going to spread rumors. You can trust them; they are your own creation.Slowly, slowly Anando will make it a meditation – it is becoming one by and by. I am giving her as much encouragement as possible. There is nothing to be afraid of, because ghosts don’t exist anywhere – Anando’s room included. But to have a good company of ghosts, and to talk with them, can be transformed into a meditation, as if you are talking to your own different selves.Every man has many selves. He can make each self a ghost, and then it is easy to talk to them. And just one step more – talk from your side and answer from his side. Between this conversation, between you and the non-existential ghost, you will find treasures hidden within yourself, secrets and mysteries of which you were not aware before.So Anando’s room is a special room. When you walk through it, never forget to say hello to the ghosts.Goldstein applies for membership in the Communist Party, and he is requested to answer a few questions.“Who was Karl Marx?”“I don’t know,” replies Goldstein.“Lenin?”“Sorry, I don’t know him either.”“What about Leonid Brezhnev?”“Never heard of him.”“Are you playing games with me?” asked the official. “Not at all,” says Goldstein. “Do you know Herschel Salzberg?”“No,” says the official.“What about Yankl Horovitch?”“Never heard of him.”“Sammy Davidovitch?”“No.”“Well,” says Goldstein, “I guess that’s the way it goes. You have got your friends, I have got mine.”People think Anando lives alone – she has such a beautiful congregation! Right now I am telling her to have some conversations, and soon you will see her addressing the congregation. There will be nobody, but she will enjoy her own revelations. And one thing is good about ghosts: you can say anything to them, in any language; right or wrong, it does not matter.Ghosts are almost like God. People are praying all over the world every morning, every evening, to a god. And it is not that their prayer is absolutely useless – although there is no God. If they are praying with tears in their eyes and love in their hearts, and a feeling of gratitude surrounding them, whether God exists or not is not the point. The prayer changes the person. It gives him a new experience. God was just an excuse.So are the ghosts of Anando’s room an excuse for her to stand up and address the congregation. I think tonight she’s going to do it, and enjoy it, and tell those poor fellows…because they are so old. Somebody may have died thousands of years before. Just visualize a few skeletons sitting around you – it is an exercise in visualization – and then start addressing them, “Brothers and sisters….” And you will not be surprised that they applaud, they laugh, at exactly the right moments.Milarepa has another question. He is afraid that Anando’s ghosts are just underneath his room, and someday they may start moving around the house. You need not be afraid, Milarepa, because I have asked a few ghosts…they are afraid of you! So you remain courageous. Even if you feel some ghost has entered, behave as if nobody has entered. Go on playing on your guitar a little louder. Ghosts don’t particularly like the contemporary music because they are not contemporary – they are very classical people.Two Italians were watching a jet fly overhead.“Hey, that’s-a the pope up-a there,” declared one.“How you know-a that?” asked the other.“That’s-a easy” replies the first. “The airplane-a, said TWA on it. That means Top Wop Aboard.”Milarepa, you can write on your door TWA: Top Wop Aboard. And don’t be afraid of the ghosts. I am always here. If some ghost plays tricks on you, you can just inform me, because I have such an intimacy with everything in life – ghosts and gods, trees and rivers, mountains and clouds – that I will prevent them…Don’t Disturb the Musician!You are allowed to be present in the court of Anando. She is my legal secretary, and if you want to learn about law, she can teach you things. I don’t think that any ghost is interested in things like law – so technical. But they are interested in Anando. She is very juicy!Osho,When I saw you the other morning, you seemed so totally fresh, so new, so radiant – deeper, and higher, and vaster than ever before. What has happened to you in these days of silence?There are many things that have not been told by the mystics to people, just so that they don’t freak out. One of the things is the moment you become aware, conscious, reaches which were unknown to you before become available. Your contact with the body becomes loose, particularly after enlightenment.The general understanding is that you will be more healthy. You are in an inner sense more healthy, but as far as your body is concerned, you become more fragile. So whenever I have a great opportunity of being sick, I use it – just resting under my blankets, being utterly silent. I love to be sick, to tell you the truth, because then I can sleep twenty hours, at least. It is sleep to the outside people; but to me it is a deep meditation.So, because both my arms and their joints are in bad shape, I cannot even participate in your rejoicing and in your music. I have been resting completely. And whatever I do, I do totally. That may have given you the idea that I looked “totally fresh, new, radiant – deeper and higher and vaster than ever before.”I am always the same. But as you become more and more centered inward, even to look outside is a strain on the eyes, even to speak a word is a strain because effort has to be made. Otherwise the silence cannot be translated in any way and conveyed to you.So whenever I get some chance…. For example, when I was in American jails for twelve days, all I did was sleep for twenty hours, waking up twice to take a bath and to eat something, and then go to sleep again. When I came out of the jail, the jailer said, “You are my first experience of someone…from when you entered, till now when you are coming out, I can compare: You are looking so radiant, so fresh.”I said to him, “Jail life suits me!”He said, “What?”I said, “Yes, because there is no disturbance.”Each of your presidents, your prime ministers, your senate members should be given a chance every year, at least for twelve days, to be in jail. They will all feel nourished. They just have to know the art: take it easily. Easy is right.An American from Texas is visiting France, and feeling thirsty, he stops at a house along the road. “Can you give me a drink of water?” asked the Texan.“Of course,” says the Frenchman.“What do you do?” asks the Texan.“I raise a few chickens,” says the Frenchman.“Really,” says the Texan. “I’m also a farmer. How much land do you have?”“Well,” says the Frenchman. “Out front it is fifty meters, as you can see, and in the back we have close to a hundred meters of property. And what about your place?”“Well,” says the Texan proudly. “On my ranch, I have breakfast, and I get into the car, and I drive and drive, and I don’t reach the end of the ranch until dinnertime.”“Really,” replied the Frenchman. “I once had a car like that.”It all depends how you take it.Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterand, and Ronald Reagan were lunching together. Naturally, they talked about their respective heartaches.Margaret Thatcher said, “I have thirteen undercover agents and one of them is a double agent, but I don’t know which.”Mitterand spoke up, “I have thirteen mistresses and one of them is cheating on me, but I don’t know which.”Reagan said, “I have thirteen cabinet ministers, and one of them is intelligent – but I don’t which.”

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Sometimes in discourse, I suddenly come to consciousness and realize that I don't know where I've been, and yet the discourse is coming to a close. Your words were coming through, but I'm not sure if I was awake. If I'm not conscious, am I asleep? Are these the only two possibilities? Is there some stage in-between? How to tell the difference?Mary Catherine, the question you have asked is the question everybody needs the answer for. Man is asleep, but it is no ordinary sleep; he is asleep with open eyes. His sleep is spiritual, not physical.Just as in physical sleep your consciousness is filled with dreams, in spiritual sleep your consciousness is filled with thoughts, desires, feelings – a thousand and one things.It is not that you are unconscious in the sense of being in a coma; you are unconscious in the sense that your consciousness is covered with too much dust. It is exactly like a mirror: if covered with many layers of dust, it will lose the quality of reflecting, will lose the quality of being a mirror. But the mirror is there; all that is needed is to remove the dust. Your consciousness is there – even while you are physically asleep your consciousness is there, but now more covered than when you are awake.You are asking, “If I’m not conscious, am I asleep? Are these the only two possibilities? Is there some stage in between? How to tell the difference?”You are not unconscious in the sense a person falls into a coma; you are not conscious in the sense a Gautam Buddha is conscious. You are in between. A thick layer of thoughts does not allow you to be in the present. That’s why, while you are listening to me, you are listening and yet the listening is very superficial – because deep down there are so many thoughts going on. You are listening but it is not reaching you, and as I stop speaking, suddenly you realize that you have been listening, certainly, but you have not understood it. It has not penetrated you; it has not become part of your being. Something has prevented it, like a China Wall. Those thoughts are transparent, but they are thicker than any China Wall can be.You are neither asleep nor awake, you are in between – awake as far as your day to day mechanical activities are concerned, and asleep as far as a clear consciousness is concerned. A pure consciousness, a deep innocence like an unclouded sky, is absent.The pope was sitting with his cardinals signing papers and proclamations. The phone rang and his secretary answered. “Your holiness,” she said. “It is about the abortion bill. A reporter wants to talk to you.”“Don’t bother me,” the pope interrupted.“But he wants to know what you are going to do about the bill.”“Just pay it,” the pope replied. “Pay it quick!”In what position will you put the pope? Asleep or awake? He is in between; he has heard the word bill, but he has interpreted it in his own way. He has forgotten completely that the bill is about abortion, and certainly he has not been aborted, and he has not to pay any bill.But this is the situation of us all. We hear what we want to hear; we hear only that which adjusts with our preconceived notions, prejudices.You will be surprised to know…the scientific research is almost unbelievable: it says ninety-eight percent of what you hear is prevented from reaching to you – ninety-eight percent! Only two percent reaches you. It has to pass through so many thoughts, conceptions, beliefs, conditionings, and they go on cutting it according to themselves. By the time it reaches you, it is something totally different than was said, than was heard. It is a long process of screening, and we are all screening. If something falls in tune with our mind – that means with our past – we hear it. But if it goes against it, we certainly hear the sound but we miss the meaning.To listen is a great art.People only hear; very few people are able to listen.One man had reached Gautam Buddha. He was a well-known philosopher of the day and he had defeated many philosophers in discussions about the ultimate, the truth, God. He had come to defeat Gautam Buddha too – that would be the crowning victory. He had brought with him five hundred chosen disciples to see Gautam Buddha defeated.But Gautam Buddha asked a very strange question. He asked, “Do you understand the meaning and the difference between hearing and listening?”The man was at a loss. He had come to discuss great things, and this was a small matter. And there was no difference…as far as language is concerned, dictionaries are concerned, hearing is listening. The man said, “There is no difference at all, and I had hoped you would not ask such an ordinary question.”Gautam Buddha said, “There is a great difference. And unless you understand the difference, there is no possibility of any dialogue. I will say something; you will hear something else. So if you really want to have a dialogue with me, sit by my side for two years. Don’t speak a single word, just listen. Whatever I’m telling others, be unconcerned; I’m not telling you. So you need not be worried about whether it is true or untrue, whether you have to accept it or not. You are just a witness; your opinion is not required.“After two years, you can have the dialogue, the discussion you have come for. And I would love to be defeated, so this is not to postpone defeat; it is just to make the dialogue possible.”At that very moment, Mahakashyap – a great disciple of Gautam Buddha; perhaps the greatest – laughed. He was sitting under a tree far away, and the philosopher thought, “That man seems to be mad. Why is he laughing?”Buddha said, “Mahakashyap, this is not mannerly; even for an enlightened man this is not right.”Mahakashyap said, “I don’t care about right and wrong; I’m just feeling sorry for the poor philosopher.”And he turned to the philosopher and said to him, “If you want to have a discussion, have it right now; after two years, there will be just silence and no dialogue. This man is not trustworthy. He deceived me; I also came with the same idea as you, to defeat him, and he cheated me. He said, ‘Sit down for two years by my side, and listen. Learn first the art of listening. And because you are not concerned at all, your mind need not function.’“And two years is a long time; the mind starts forgetting how to think, how to function. The very presence of Gautam Buddha is so peaceful, so silent, that one starts rejoicing in the silence. And to listen to his words…which are not addressed to you, so you are not worried whether they agree with your prejudices, your philosophy, your religion – with you – or not. You are indifferent. You listen to him as if you are listening to the birds singing in the morning when the sun rises.“And two years…the mind disappears. And although those words are not addressed to you, they start reaching to your heart. Because the mind is silent, the passage is open – the door is open, the heart welcomes them. So if you want to ask anything, if you want to challenge this man, challenge now. I don’t want to see another man cheated again.”Gautam Buddha said, “It is up to you; if you want to defeat me now, I declare my defeat. There is no need to talk. Why waste time? You are victorious. But if you really want to have a dialogue with me, then I’m not asking much, just two years to learn the art of listening.”The man remained for two years, and even forgot completely that after two years he had to challenge Gautam Buddha for a debate. He forgot the whole calendar. Days passed, months passed, seasons came and went away, and after two years he was enjoying the silence so much that he had no idea that two years had passed.It has to be remembered that time is a very elastic thing. When you are in suffering, time becomes longer; suddenly all the watches and clocks of the world start moving slowly – a great conspiracy against a poor man who is in suffering. Time moves so slowly that sometimes one feels as if it has stopped.You are sitting by the side of someone you love who is dying, in the middle of the night; it seems time has stopped, that this night is not going to end, that your idea that all nights end was a fallacy…this night is not going to have a dawn, because time is not moving.And when you are joyful – when you meet a friend after many years, when you meet a beloved, a lover for whom you have waited long – suddenly, again the conspiracy. All the clocks, all the watches, start moving faster; hours go like minutes, days go like hours, months go like weeks. Time is elastic: time is relative to your inner condition.The man had enjoyed those two years of silence so deeply that he could not conceive that two years had passed. Suddenly, Buddha himself asked him, “Have you forgotten completely? Two years have passed; this is the day you had come two years ago. Now if you want to challenge me to a debate, I’m ready.”The man fell to the feet of Gautam Buddha.And Mahakashyap laughed again, and said, “I had told you, but nobody listens to me. I have been sitting under this tree for almost twenty years, preventing people from falling into the trap of this man; but nobody listens to me. They fall into the trap, and each person gives me two occasions to laugh.”The man went, after touching Gautam Buddha’s feet, to touch the feet of Mahakashyap too, saying, “I am grateful to you. I have learned the distinction between hearing and listening. Hearing had made me a great knowledgeable man, and listening has made me innocent, silent – a peace that passeth understanding. I don’t have any questions, and I don’t have any answers; I am utterly silent. All questions have disappeared, all answers have disappeared. Can I also sit by your side under the tree?” he asked Mahakashyap.Mahakashyap said, “No, I don’t accept disciples; that is the business of Gautam Buddha – you just go there. Don’t crowd around my tree, because even here there is nothing to listen to, only once in a while a laughter when somebody comes and I see that he’s falling into the trap. You have fallen into the trap; now be initiated, become a sannyasin.”Not only did the man become a sannyasin, his five hundred followers who were also sitting and listening for two years, had also become silent.Mary Catherine, you are well-educated; perhaps too much – well-read; perhaps too much. Your mind is so full of thoughts. Those thoughts are creating a state which is neither consciousness nor unconsciousness. Everything seems to be so full of noise in you that if I shout, perhaps my words may reach you – but what about my whispers? And truth cannot be shouted, it can only be whispered. In fact, it can be said only in silence; even whispering is too much verbiage.Put your educated mind aside. Here you have to be innocent, like small children playing on the beach making castles of sand, running after butterflies, collecting seashells, looking at everything with so much wonder that each and every thing in existence becomes a mystery.Listening to me is only a beginning; then you have to listen to the trees, to the mountains, to the moon, to the faraway stars – they all have messages for you. To the sunrises, to the sunsets…they all have been waiting for so long. Once you start listening, the whole existence starts speaking to you. Right now you only speak to yourself, and nobody listens.Three Soviet citizens – a Pole, a Czech, and a Jew – were accused of spying and sentenced to death. Each was granted a last wish.“I want my ashes scattered over the grave of Karl Marx,” said the Pole.“I want my ashes scattered over the grave of Lenin,” said the Czech.“And I,” said the Jew, “want my ashes scattered over the grave of Comrade Gorbachev.”“But that is impossible!” he was told. “Gorbachev is not dead yet.”“Fine,” said the Jew, “I can wait.”You should not wait.Start from this moment to listen, to be silent, because the next moment is not certain. Gorbachev may die, may not die. Tomorrow it may not be so easy as it is today, because in twenty-four hours you will have gathered more garbage in your head; so the sooner the better, because you cannot sit silently. If you don’t start now, you will be doing something or other….Don’t postpone it. Every postponement is suicidal – particularly of those experiences which belong to the beyond.Osho,In Western society, at least, youth is considered to be everything, and to a certain extent, it seems this is as it should be if we are to continue growing in every dimension of life. But the natural corollary of that is that as one moves away from youth, birthdays are no longer a cause for congratulations, but are an embarrassing and unavoidable fact of life. It becomes impolite to ask someone their age; gray hair is dyed, teeth capped or replaced entirely, demoralized breasts and faces have to be lifted, tummies made taut, and varicose veins supported – but under cover. You certainly don't take it as a compliment if someone tells you that you look your age. But my experience is that as I become older, each year is only better and better; yet nobody told me this would be so, and you never hear people singing the praises of growing older. Would you, for the benefit of your middle-aged sannyasins, speak on the joys of growing older?Maneesha, the question you have asked implies many things. First, the Western mind is conditioned by the idea that you have only one life – seventy years, and youth will never come again. In the West, the spring comes only once; naturally, there is a deep desire to cling as long as possible, to pretend in every possible way that you are still young.In the East, the older person was always valued, respected. He was more experienced, he had seen many, many seasons coming and going; he had lived through all kinds of experiences, good and bad. He had become seasoned; he was no more immature. He had a certain integrity that comes only with age. He was not childish, carrying his teddy bears; he was not young, still fooling around thinking that this was love.He had passed through all these experiences, had seen that beauty fades; he has seen that everything comes to an end, that everything is moving toward the grave. From the very moment he left the cradle, there was only one way – and it is from cradle to the grave. You cannot go anywhere else; you cannot go astray even if you try. You will reach to the grave whatever you do.The old man was respected, loved; he had attained a certain purity of the heart because he had lived through desires, and seen that every desire leads to frustration. Those desires are past memories. He had lived in all kinds of relationships, and had seen that every kind of relationship turns into hell. He had passed through all the dark nights of the soul. He had attained a certain aloofness – the purity of an observer. He was no longer interested in participating in any football game. Just living his life, he had come to a transcendence; hence, he was respected, his wisdom was respected.But in the East, the idea has been that life is not just a small piece of seventy years in which youth comes only once. The idea has been that just as in existence everything moves eternally – the summer comes, the rains come, the winter comes, and the summer again; everything moves like a wheel – life is not an exception.Death is the end of one wheel and the beginning of another. Again you will be a child, and again you will be young, and again you will be old. It has been so since the beginning, and it is going to be so to the very end – until you become so enlightened that you can jump out of the vicious circle and can enter into a totally different law. From individuality, you can jump into the universal. So there was no hurry, and there was no clinging.The West is based on the Judaic tradition which believes only in one life. Christianity is only a branch of the Jews. Jesus was a Jew, born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew; he never knew that he was a Christian. If you meet him somewhere and greet him with, ‘Hello, Jesus Christ’, he will not recognize who you are addressing because he never knew that his name is Jesus and he never knew that he is Christ. His name was Joshua, a Hebrew name, and he was a messiah of God, not a Christ. Jesus Christ is a translation in Greek from Hebrew. Mohammedanism is also a by-product of the same tradition – the Jews.These three religions believe in one life. To believe in one life is very dangerous because it does not give you chances to make mistakes, it does not give you chances to have enough experience of anything; you are always in a hurry.The whole Western mind has become the mind of a tourist who is carrying two, three cameras, and rushing to photograph everything because he only has a three-week visa. And in three weeks, he has to cover the whole country – all the great monuments. There is no time for him to see them directly; he will see them at home, at ease, in his album.Whenever I remember the tourists, I see the old women rushing from one place to another – from Ajanta to Ellora, from Taj Mahal to Kashmir – in a hurry, because life is short.It is only the Western mind which has created the proverb that time is money. In the East, things go slowly; there is no hurry – one has the whole of eternity. We have been here and we will be here again, so what is the hurry? Enjoy everything with intensity and totality.So, one thing: because of the idea of one single life, the West has become too concerned about being young, and then everything is done to remain young as long as possible, to prolong the process. That creates hypocrisy, and that destroys an authentic growth. It does not allow you to become really wise in your old age, because you hate old age; old age reminds you only of death, nothing else. Old age means the full stop is not far away; you have come to the terminus – just one whistle more, and the train will stop.I had an agreement with my grandfather. He loved his feet to be massaged, and I had told him, “Remember, when I say ‘comma,’ that means be alert; the semi-colon is coming close. When I say ‘semi-colon,’ get ready because the full stop is coming close. And once I say ‘full stop,’ I mean it.” So he was so much afraid of “comma” that when I would say, “Comma,” he would say, “It is okay, but let the semi-colon be a little longer. Don’t make it short and quick!”Old age simply reminds you, in the West, that a full stop is coming close – prolong the semi-colon. And who are you trying to deceive? If you have recognized that youth is no longer there, you can go on deceiving the whole world. But you are not young, you are simply being ridiculous.I have heard…two so-called young people got married – so-called because both were pretending to be young; youth had gone down the drain a long, long time ago. They went for a honeymoon with suitcases, with the tags, “Just married.” But both were afraid. There was no joy on their faces, only the fear of exposure.Immediately they entered the hotel room, and closed the doors; the man immediately got into bed, under the blanket, and told the wife, “Put the light off while you are in the bathroom. I will wait in darkness; I like darkness.”The wife said, “Why do you like darkness? I cannot, because you are a stranger to me. We just met on the beach; I don’t know who you are, you don’t know who I am. I want to keep the light on the whole night.”The man said, “I will not be able to sleep.”The woman said, “But at least until I come out of the bathroom, keep the light on.”And that struggle is always the beginning of every honeymoon, the fight…. Because the woman started insisting, “Why you are so stubborn that the light should be put out?”The man said, “You are going to know anyway, so what is the point of fighting?”He threw the blanket away and showed that one of his legs was false.He said, “I did not want you to know it.”The woman said, “But it is good.”She threw off her wig, took out her teeth, and told the man, “My breasts are also false. So now there is no need to be afraid of the light.”He said, “Now there is no need to be afraid of anything. Now just come on, have a headache, and go to sleep; the honeymoon is over.”People are trying to remain young, but they don’t know that the very fear of losing youth does not allow you to live it in its totality.And secondly, the fear of losing youth does not allow you to accept old age with grace. You miss both youth – its joy, its intensity – and you also miss the grace, and the wisdom, and the peace that old age brings. But the whole thing is based on a false conception of life.Unless the West changes the idea that there is only one life, this hypocrisy, this clinging, and this fear cannot be changed.In fact, one life is not all; you have lived many times, and you will live many times more. Hence, live each moment as totally as possible; there is no hurry to jump to another moment. Time is not money, time is inexhaustible; it is available to the poor as much as to the rich. The rich are not richer as far as time is concerned, and the poor are not poorer.Life is an eternal incarnation.What appears on the surface is very deep-rooted in the religions of the West. They are very miserly in giving you only seventy years. If you try to work it out, almost one third of your life will be lost in sleep, one third of your life will have to be wasted in earning food, clothes, housing. Whatever little is left has to be given to education, football matches, movies, stupid quarrels, fights. If you can save, in seventy years’ time, seven minutes for yourself, I will count you a wise man.But it is difficult to save even seven minutes in your whole life; so how can you find yourself? How can you know the mystery of your being, of your life? How can you understand that death is not an end?Because you have missed experiencing life itself, you are going to miss the great experience of death, too; otherwise, there is nothing to be afraid of in death. It is a beautiful sleep, a dreamless sleep, a sleep that is needed for you to move into another body, silently and peacefully. It is a surgical phenomenon; it is almost like anesthesia. Death is a friend, not a foe.Once you understand death as a friend, and start living life without any fear that it is only a very small time span of seventy years – if your perspective opens to the eternity of your life – then everything will slow down; then there is no need to be speedy.In everything, people are simply rushing. I have seen people taking their office bag, pushing things into it, kissing their wife, not seeing whether she is their wife or somebody else; and saying good-bye to their children. This is not the way of living! And where are you reaching with this speed?I have heard about a young couple who had purchased a new car, and they were going full speed.The wife was telling the husband again and again, “Where are we going?” Because women are still old-minded, “Where are we going?”And the man said, “Stop bothering me, just enjoy the speed we are going with. The real question is not where we are going; the real question is with what great speed we are going?”Speed has become more important than the destination, and speed has become more important because life is so short. You have to do so many things that unless you do everything with speed, you cannot manage. You cannot sit silently even for a few minutes – it seems a wastage. In those few minutes you could have earned a few bucks.Just wasting time closing your eyes, and what is there inside you? If you really want to know, you can go to any hospital and see a skeleton. That is what is inside you. Why are you unnecessarily getting into trouble by looking in? Looking in, you will find a skeleton. And once you have seen your skeleton, life will become more difficult; kissing your wife, you know perfectly well what is happening – two skeletons. Somebody just needs to invent x-ray glasses, so people can put on x-ray glasses and see all around skeletons laughing. Most probably, he will not be alive to take his glasses off; so many skeletons laughing is enough to stop anybody’s heartbeat…. “My God, this is the reality! And this is what all these mystics have been telling people, ‘Look inward’ – avoid them!”The West has no tradition of mysticism. It is extrovert: look outward, there is so much to see. But they are not aware that inside there is not only the skeleton; there is something more within the skeleton. That is your consciousness. By closing your eyes you will not come across the skeleton; you will come across your very life source.The West needs a deep acquaintance with its own life source, then there will be no hurry. One will enjoy when life brings youth, one will enjoy when life brings old age and one will enjoy when life brings death. You simply know one thing – how to enjoy everything that you come across, how to transform it into a celebration.I call the authentic religion the art of transforming everything into a celebration, into a song, into a dance.An old man walked into a health clinic and told the doctor, “You have got to do something to lower my sex drive.” The doctor took one look at the feeble old man and said, “Now, now sir, I have got the feeling that your sex drive is all in your head.”“That’s what I mean sonny,” the old man said. “I have got to lower it a little.”Even the old man is wanting to be a playboy. It shows one thing with certainty – that he has not lived his youth with totality. He has missed his youth, and he is still thinking about it. Now he cannot do anything about it, but his whole mind is continuously thinking about the days he had in youth which have not been lived; at that time he was in a hurry.If he had lived his youth, he would be free in his old age of all repressions, sexuality; there would be no need for him to drop his sexual instinct. It disappears, it evaporates in living. One just has to live uninhibited, without any interference from your religions, from your priests and it disappears; otherwise, when you are young you are in church, and when you are old, you are reading the playboy by hiding it in your Holy Bible. Every Holy Bible is used only for one purpose, hiding magazines like playboy, so you are not caught by children – it is embarrassing.I have heard of three men, old men. One is seventy, the other is eighty and the third is ninety. They are all old friends, retired, who used to go for a walk and sit on a bench in the park, and have all kinds of gossips.One day the youngest of the three, the seventy year old man, looked a little sad. The second one, the eighty year old, asked, “What is the matter? You are looking very sad.”He said, “I am feeling very guilty. It will help me to unburden myself if I tell you. It is an incident. A beautiful lady was taking a bath. She was a guest in our house, and I was looking through the keyhole and my mother caught hold of me.”Both the old friends laughed; they said, “You are an idiot. Everybody does such things in childhood.”He said, “It is not a question of childhood; it happened today.”The second man said, “Then it is really serious. But I will tell you something which has been happening to me for three days, and I am keeping it like a stone, a rock on my heart. Continuously for three days my wife has refused to love me.”The first man said, “That is really very bad.”But the third, the oldest laughed and he said, “First you ask him what does he mean by love?”So he asked, and the second old man said, “Nothing much. Don’t make me feel more embarrassed. It is a simple process. I hold my wife’s hand and press it three times, then she goes to sleep and I go to sleep. But for three days, whenever I try to hold her hand, she says, ‘Not today, not today! Feel ashamed; you are old enough – not today!’ so for three days I have not loved.The third old man said, “This is nothing. What has been happening to me I must confess, because you are young and it will help you in your future. Last night, as the night was passing and the morning was coming closer, I started to make preparations to make love to my wife and she said to me, ‘What are you trying to do you idiot?’ I said, ‘What am I trying to do? I am simply trying to make love to you,’ and she said, ‘This is the third time in the night; neither you sleep nor you allow me to sleep. Love, love, love.’ So I think it seems I am losing my memory. Your problems are nothing; I have lost my memory.”If you listen to old people, you will be surprised; they are talking only of things which they should have lived, but the time has passed when it was possible to live them. At that time they were reading the Holy Bible and listening to the priest.Those priests and those holy scriptures have corrupted people, because they have given them ideas against nature and they cannot allow them to live naturally.If we need a new humanity, we will have to erase the whole past and start everything anew. And the first basic principle will be: allow everybody, help everybody, teach everybody to live according to his nature, not according to any ideals, and live totally and intensely without any fear. Then children will enjoy their childhood, the young people will enjoy their youth and the old people will have the grace that comes naturally, out of a whole life lived naturally.Unless your old age is graceful and wise and full of light and joy, contentment, fulfillment, a blissfulness…in your very presence, unless flowers blossom and there is a fragrance of eternity, then it is certain that you have lived. If it is not happening that way, that means somewhere you have gone astray, somewhere you have listened to the priests, who are the corrupters, the criminals, somewhere you have gone against nature; and nature takes revenge. And its revenge is to destroy your old age and make it ugly – ugly to others and ugly in your own eyes. Otherwise old age has a beauty which even youth cannot have.Youth has a maturity, but it is unwise. It has too much foolishness in it; it is amateurish. Old age has given the last touches to the paintings of his own life. And when one has given the last touches, one is ready to die joyously, dancingly. One is ready to welcome death.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,After six years of sannyas and a long, hard struggle with authorities and legal hindrances, I recently succeeded in leaving my home country – the Soviet Union. Sitting in darshan just a few meters from you, and seeing you, and hearing you talk for the first time in my life, I remembered all my sannyasin friends who are not able to travel to you, and my joy was mixed with deep sadness. Do you see the Soviet Union under Gorbachev becoming a more open society, so that your message of love and meditation will spread more easily there?I can understand your sadness for those friends in the Soviet Union who cannot reach me. But the night in Soviet Union seems to be coming to an end. The man, Gorbachev, is, perhaps for the first time in the whole history of the Russian Revolution, a man who has an insight into human values and is trying his best to make the Soviet Union a really communist democracy, an open society.The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a permanent part of Karl Marx’ utopia. It is only for the interim period, while the society is becoming established in the new form and the old form is disappearing. Once the old form is gone, once the capitalist mind is no longer there, the necessity for dictatorship and a closed society automatically has to disappear. It is a long time since the revolution happened and enough time to allow the dictatorship.Gorbachev is a new beginning. Perhaps he is not only bringing an open society in the Soviet Union; he will also be helping the outside world to become really open. It has only been a hypothesis up to now; it is not a reality.If half the world is closed, the other half cannot remain open. It is as if half of you is dead, and the other half is expected to go on living. Life is an organic unity on many layers, in many dimensions. This beautiful planet of ours has a totality. The division between the Soviet and the American blocks is ugly. And more particularly, any division between human beings – either in the name of religion or in the name of nationalities – is primitive and barbarous.Man is one. His problem is one, his misery is one – his ecstasy is also going to be one.In the whole field of politics, Gorbachev seems to be a category in himself. He cannot be categorized with other politicians. It is going to be very difficult for him to make the Soviet Union an open society. But the man seems to be courageous and intelligent, and it is a challenge to him to make his people live in freedom – freedom of thought, freedom of movement, freedom of expression.I have been watching his steps. He is going slowly, but going steadily. The change has to come very slowly, because the whole bureaucracy has enjoyed dictatorial powers for more than half a century; and the Communist party has enjoyed more power than any party in the whole history of man. To relax the lust for power is one of the most difficult things in the world.But life is full of mysteries. In the first place, Karl Marx, the founder of communism, had not even dreamt that communism would happen in the Soviet Union. If he is awakened from his grave and told about the Russian Revolution he will be shocked because it is against all his calculations, against all his arguments. That’s what I mean when I say life is full of mysteries. It never follows the logical, the mathematical way; it goes zigzag, like a river moving in the mountains toward the ocean. Life does not run like railway trains on settled rails – it is not predictable.According to Karl Marx, communism was going to happen in America, and logically he was right. Where one part of humanity has become immensely rich and another part has become immensely poor, where the division between the poor and the rich is so big that it becomes, at a point, intolerable, it has to be changed, the society has to go through a revolution. America should have been the first to go through the revolution. But that is what logic predicts. Life has its own ways. It happened in a very backward country which was not even capitalist.According to Karl Marx, communism can happen only when there is a very developed form of capitalism and a class struggle. Russia was still a pre-capitalist country, still living under feudalism, under the czars. There was no capitalist class, and there was no proletariat. Karl Marx could not have logically conceived that Russia would be the first communist country, the first to have the great revolution. But it happened like that: Russia was the first and China was the next – and Marx could not have thought either of Russia or of China.Perhaps it is going to be again a mysterious phenomenon. People think America is a democracy – which is utterly false. And people think that in America there is freedom of expression, freedom of individuality, that what the constitution of America says is not only written in the constitution but is lived by the country, and that the government exists for the people, by the people, of the people. Nothing can be farther away from truth. America is the most hypocritical society today in the world, and the most dangerous to the human future.Gorbachev’s coming into power is a great hope, because the man does not seem to be a politician. He is a man in politics, but he is not a politician. His vision is for a better humanity – it is not confined to the Soviet Union alone. And he is slowly relaxing the dictatorial bureaucracy that has grown up like a monster in the past sixty years.He is taking one of the most risky steps. If he succeeds…and I hope that he will succeed For sixty years half of humanity has lived under such tremendous slavery that it can be expected that a second revolution will come. And a second revolution will be bigger than the first, greater than the first. The first revolution in the Soviet Union destroyed feudalism; the second revolution will destroy the dictatorship and the slavery of millions of people.Gorbachev to me is almost a reincarnation of Lenin. In the world of politics, he is the only man I have any respect for.It will not be a long time until the Soviet Union becomes an open society, and it will be possible for my sannyasins to come to me. It will be possible for them to be sannyasins openly.I have dedicated my book on human rights to Gorbachev and Sakharov – I have never dedicated any of my books to anybody before – because I can see a ray of light in this man, and a courage to create a second revolution which will be bigger than the first. The sannyasins in the Soviet Union should help this second revolution to the utmost of their capacity. Gorbachev needs every support of all those who believe in freedom, who believe in individuality, and who respect differences in people; who are not of a fascist mind to impose themselves on others, but of a democratic spirit to help everybody to be himself.Gorbachev has a task which not only can make the Soviet Union an open society, but will prove that all condemnation by the American politicians of the Soviet Union is utterly false and baseless. The Soviet Union becoming an open society will take away all the power that America has accumulated by creating fear in the world against it. If that fear disappears, the power of America will disappear with it. America does not want the Soviet Union to become an open society.Now it has to be understood by every Soviet citizen, and every level of humanity, that it is absolutely urgent that the Soviet Union becomes open, available, so that all condemnations fall on their own, and America is proved to be cheating the whole humanity. This will be the real victory of the Soviet Union.The question of a nuclear victory is simply not possible. And Gorbachev is the first man who has seen the fact that with the invention of nuclear weapons, the third world war has become an impossibility – because nobody can win, nobody can be victorious. If a third world war happens, everybody will be destroyed. There will not be somebody left even to write the history of what happened in the third world war.It is again those mysterious things I talk about…. Gautam Buddha could not prevent people from fighting; Jesus could not prevent people from fighting; Leo Tolstoy, Prince Kropotkin, and all the people who have been against war, have not been able to prevent people from going to wars. What has prevented them is the invention of nuclear powers. Now war is simply impossible – unless humanity decides to commit suicide. And humanity is not in a position to decide for suicide. There is a tremendous longing in every heart to live, and to live joyously. A third world war is out of the question.Gorbachev’s greatness is in his insight that now America has to be defeated in a different way.The Soviet Union becoming really democratic – a freedom-loving society – will be the defeat of America. It just has to penetrate into all people who have power in the Soviet Union that history has brought them to a point where they can win over America without any war. Just by bringing freedom to their own people they will take the mask off America – its so-called, pseudo, democracy. And Gorbachev is trying slowly to bring the people….For this new kind of war, who is more free? Who is more independent? Who respects the individual? Who respects individuals’ differences, their freedom of expression, their freedom of creativity? Now this is going to be the real war! And the Soviet Union can be victorious without fighting. Fighting is no longer possible.For the first time a totally new kind of war has come into existence, and Gorbachev must be given the credit of seeing it. And he is not missing the opportunity – every moment he is moving toward an open society.Give the message to my sannyasins in the Soviet Union: “Your day has come.” Just as the first revolution had come unexpectedly to the Soviet Union, even more unexpectedly the second revolution is coming – it has already begun. They should rejoice and make every effort to help Gorbachev in making the Soviet Union the land of freedom, love, friendship, respect to human life. It is going to happen – you can take it from me, almost as a prediction.Just a few days ago, I was seeing one of the most significant books to be published in this century, Millennium. It is a deep research into Nostradamus and his predictions. Eighty thousand copies were published – which is very rare – and they were sold within weeks. Now a second publication, a second edition, is happening in America, another is happening in England, and the book is being translated into many other languages – Dutch, German….Nostradamus was a great mystic with an insight into the future. And you will be surprised to know that in his predictions, I am included. Describing the teacher of the last days of the twentieth century, he gives eight indications. Krishnamurti fulfills five, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi fulfills three, Da Free John fulfills four – and I was amazed that I fulfill all eight.In this book Millennium, they have made a chart of the teacher about whom Nostradamus is predicting – that his people will wear red clothes, that he will come from the East, that he will be arrested, that his commune will be destroyed, that flying birds will be his symbol, that his name will mean moon…. Three hundred years ago that man was seeing something that fits perfectly with me – my name means “the moon.” And in their chart they have declared me the teacher of the last part of the twentieth century.I can see as clearly as Nostradamus:I predict that Gorbachev is going to succeed in bringing the second and greater revolution to Russia, and his revolution in the Soviet Union is going to affect everything in the whole world.I would like my sannyasins to meet him – they have to meet him to present my book that I have dedicated to him. Invite him to come to my people here whenever he needs a little encouragement and hope, whenever he needs a spiritual support, a nourishment. And tell him that his meetings with Ronald Reagan are not going to fulfill anything, but if he dances with my sannyasins he will gather a new spirit, a new joy to accept the great challenge that is his destiny.And it will not be long before sannyasins from the Soviet Union will be allowed to come here, and my sannyasins from other countries will be entering into the Soviet Union.I have gone around the world – except to the Soviet Union. It will be an immense help for Gorbachev to make the Soviet Union an open society if he invites me and my people…. Nobody else can destroy the people who are full of lust for power, and nobody else can revive the spirit of the people which has been repressed for sixty years.If my people just go and sing and dance and move around in the Soviet Union, they will create an atmosphere in which Gorbachev can work more easily for the second great revolution. This is my message for my sannyasins, and for Gorbachev, and for Sakharov.So when you go back, meet Sakharov and tell him from me that he should make arrangements for my sannyasins in the Soviet Union to meet with Gorbachev. He is the right person, in the right place, in the right moment.Osho,I am amazed. It is India, it is a hundred and five degrees in the shade, and you remain so cool, so calm, so quiet. What is it? Do you have something up your sleeve, or maybe under your hat?A new flood is foretold, and nothing can be done to prevent it. In three days the waters will wipe out the world. The leader of Buddhism appears on television and pleads with everybody to become a Buddhist. That way they will at least find salvation in paradise.The pope goes on television with a similar message: “It is still not too late to accept Jesus,” he says.Osho takes a different approach: “Look guys, we have three days to learn how to live under water.”Osho,In my sixty-three years of life you are the first love relationship which has made me independent. How has this happened?Love brings freedom. And a love that does not bring freedom is not love. Love is not domination. How can you dominate someone you love? How can you make him dependent, and still be loving? But that’s what goes on happening in the world in the name of love – something else – a lust to power, to dominate the other. Naturally independence cannot be allowed. Every effort is made that the other should be a carbon copy of you. You are afraid of the freedom of the other, because freedom is not controllable, and freedom is not predictable. So all so-called love tries in every way to destroy freedom – and the moment freedom is destroyed, love dies.Love is very fragile, just like a rose flower. You have to allow it to dance in the rain, in the wind, in the sun.Love is like a bird on the wing, having the whole sky as its freedom. You can catch hold of the bird, you can put it in a beautiful golden cage, and it seems it is the same bird that was flying in freedom and had the whole sky to itself. It only appears to be the same bird. It is not – you have killed it. You have cut its wings, you have taken away its sky. And the birds don’t bother about your gold. However precious may be your cage, it is imprisonment.And that’s what we are doing with our love: we create golden cages. We are afraid because the sky is vast. The fear is that the bird may not return. To keep it under your control it has to be imprisoned. That’s how love becomes marriage.Love is a bird on the wing: marriage is a bird in a golden cage. And certainly the bird can never forgive you. You have destroyed all its beauty, all its joy, all its freedom. You have destroyed its spirit – it is just a dead replica. But you have made one thing certain, that it cannot escape you, that it will be always yours, that tomorrow also it will be yours, and the day after tomorrow….Lovers are always afraid. The fear is because love comes like a breeze. You cannot produce it, it is not something to be manufactured – it comes. But anything that comes on its own, can go also on its own, that is a natural corollary.Love comes, and flowers blossom in you, songs arise in your heart, a desire to dance…but with a hidden fear. What will happen if this breeze that has come to you, cool and fragrant, leaves you tomorrow?…because you are not the limit of existence. And the breeze is only a guest – it will be with you as long as it feels to be, and it will go any moment.This creates fear in people, and they become possessive. They start closing their doors and windows to keep the breeze in. But when your doors and windows are closed, it is not the same breeze. The coolness is lost, the fragrance is lost – soon it is disgusting. It needs freedom, and you have taken away the freedom; it is only a corpse.In the name of love people are carrying each others’ corpses, which they call marriage. And to carry corpses you have to go to a government registrar’s office to make it a legal bond. Love cannot allow marriage. In an authentic world marriage will be impossible.One should love, and love intensely and love totally, and not be worried about tomorrow. If existence has been so blissful today, trust that existence will be more beautiful and more blissful tomorrow. As your trust grows, existence becomes more and more generous toward you. More love will shower on you. More flowers of joy and ecstasy will rain over you.In your sixty-three years’ life whatever you have known in the name of love was not love. It may have been infatuation, it may have been biological attraction, it may have been a conspiracy of hormones against two individuals – but not love. You have known love for the first time…because this is the only criterion: your freedom grows deeper, your independence becomes more solid and integrated and crystallized. This is the only criterion that love has visited you, that love has been a guest in your heart.And who cares about tomorrow? The people who care about tomorrow are the people who don’t have today, who are miserable right now and try to hide it, try to ignore it in the hope, in the desire, in the dream for tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes, this is one of the difficulties. It is always today that comes. And you become accustomed to being miserable today, and hoping, desiring, dreaming for tomorrow. You have missed life. People have become so accustomed to tomorrows that they are not only thinking of tomorrows in this life, they are thinking of life after death.People used to ask me, “What will happen after life? What will happen after death?” And I used to say to them, “Whatever is happening before death, the same will continue. Are you blissful today? – because tomorrow will be born out of today. Today is pregnant with your whole future.”Love intensely, joyously, totally, and you will never think of creating a bondage, a contract. You will never think of making the person dependent. You will never be so cruel – if you love – as to destroy the freedom of the other. You will help, you will make his sky bigger.There is only one criterion of love: It gives freedom, and it gives unconditionally.You have experienced love for the first time, but it is not too late – although you are sixty-three years old. Love transforms old age into youth. If you can go on loving to the very last breath, you will remain young. Love knows no old age. Love knows no death. If you can go on loving, your love will continue beyond death too. Love is the most precious experience in life.People unnecessarily waste their time in empty words like God I was looking at the famous book, Waiting For Godot. In fact he wants to say God but has not the courage – it will offend many people – so he has created a word, Godot, which will remind you, you will understand. But I thought perhaps in some language Godot means God, and that language can only be the German.One of my old sannyasins, Haridas, who is on the way – soon he will be here – I asked him, “What is the German word for God?”He said, “For God? The German word is Gott!”I said, “That is even more dangerous than Godot – Gott!”Nobody has got it. But people are wasting their time….Be more realistic, be more pragmatic. Don’t betray the earth…and then you will see there is nothing more important than love, and love grows only in the atmosphere of freedom. That makes your complete religion.Love, growing in freedom, is all that religion should mean. There is no other religion than love and freedom – and they are one phenomenon.Freedom is empty without love – dry, desert-like.Love is dead without freedom – a corpse.Together they are all. Together they are more than you can imagine life to be. You have Gott it!…I love the word. It seems to be the best – God is far away, Godot is fictitious, but Gott is more earthly.But it is possible only where love blossoms in the sky of freedom. And whenever it happens, at whatever age it happens, it brings youth to you, it brings spring to you. Millions of people are unfortunate – they live and die without knowing what love is, and without knowing the joy of giving freedom. And unless you are capable of giving freedom, you are not worthy of getting it either.What has happened to you is a great blessing. You should pray that it happens to all.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 18 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Please would you say something about the relationship between let-go and witnessing?Let-go is the atmosphere in which witnessing flowers. They are almost two sides of the same experience – they are not different. One cannot allow let-go without witnessing, neither can one be a witness without being in a let-go.Let-go simply means total relaxation: no tension, no thought, no desire – mind not moving, not going anywhere, just not functioning. Mind in silence allows the greatest experience of life, the arising of a new phenomenon – witnessing.We are all living and we are all a little bit conscious too; otherwise life would be impossible. But our consciousness is very superficial, just skin-deep – or perhaps not even that deep.Witnessing is as deep as you are, as existence is. It is the deepest point of life in existence where one simply watches what remains to watch: a tremendous silence, a great joy, a beautiful existence surrounding you, and a deep ecstasy – a song without words and a dance without movement. Witnessing is the ultimate experience of religion. Only those who arrive at it have really lived; others have been only vegetating.Nancy and Ronald Reagan went out to eat in a high class restaurant, and after seating them at the best table, the waiter gave them the menus. He returned to take their orders, and Nancy gave hers first. “For the aperitif I will have a dry martini, and for the appetizer I will take the Hawaiian lobster salad,” she said. “Then for the fish course I will have rainbow trout, and for the entree I will take the steak.”“And what about the vegetable?” asked the waiter. And with only a few seconds hesitation, she replied, “Oh, he will have the same.”But it is true about most of the people in the world – they are vegetables. They have not known anything that can make them claim to be more than vegetables. The whole effort of raising your consciousness is to make you transcend your vegetable existence. Let-go is to create the right soil, and witnessing, watching, being alert are the seeds. You have only to be the right soil for the right seed, and the lotuses are bound to grow in your being.Osho,What does the phrase “existence takes care” mean?We are part of existence, we are not separate. Even if we want to be separate, we cannot be. Our life is part of being together with existence. And the more you are together with existence, the more alive you are. That’s why I insist continually to live totally, to live intensely, because the deeper your living is, the more you are in contact with existence. You are born of it; every moment you are renewed, rejuvenated, resurrected by each of your breaths, by each of your heartbeats – existence is taking care of you.But we are not aware of our own being, we are not aware of our own breathing. Gautam the Buddha gave to the world a tremendously simple, but immensely valuable, meditation – Vipassana. The word vipassana simply means watching your breath – the coming of the breath in, and the going of the breath out.People used to ask Buddha,” What will happen by this?” He was not a theoretician. He would say to them, “Just do it and see. Experiment and report to me what happens. Don’t ask me.”Just as you start watching your breathing, you start seeing a great phenomenon – that through your breath, you are continuously connected with existence, uninterruptedly – there is no holiday. Whether you are awake or asleep, existence goes on pouring life into you, and taking out all that is dead.Carbon dioxide is dead, and if it accumulates in you, you will be dead. Oxygen is life, and you need continuously that the carbon dioxide be replaced by fresh oxygen. Who is taking care? Certainly you are not taking care! If you were taking care, you would have been dead long ago; you would not have been here to ask the question. You would have forgotten sometimes to breathe, or sometimes the heart would forget to beat, sometimes the blood would forget to circulate inside you – anything could go wrong. There are a thousand and one things in you which could go wrong. But they are all functioning in deep harmony. Is this harmony dependent on you?So when I say, “existence takes care,” I am not talking philosophy. Philosophy is mostly nonsense. I am simply talking an actual fact. And if you become consciously aware of it, this creates a great trust in you. My saying to you, “existence takes care,” is to trigger a consciousness that can bring the beauty of trusting in existence.I don’t ask you to believe in a hypothetical God, and I don’t ask you to have faith in a messiah, in a savior; these are all childish desires to have some father figure who takes care of you. But they are all hypothetical.There has not been any savior in the world.Existence is enough unto itself.I want you to inquire into your relationship with existence, and out of that inquiry, arises trust – not belief, not faith. Trust has a beauty because it is your experience. Trust will help you to relax because the whole existence is taking care – there is no need to be worried and to be concerned. There is no need to have any anxiety, no need of any anguish, no need of what the existentialists call angst.Trust helps you to relax, it helps you to let go, and the let-go prepares the ground for witnessing to come in. They are related phenomena.Three gray-haired mothers, Mrs. Fletcher, Mrs. Cornfield, and Mrs. Baum, were sitting in a Catskill hotel bragging about their children.“My son is a doctor,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “and he’s an internist, a surgeon and a specialist. He makes so much money, he owns an apartment building on Park Avenue in New York.”“That’s nice,” said Mrs. Cornfield. “My son is a lawyer. He handles divorces, accidents, tax cases, insurance. He is so successful, he owns two apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue.”“Ladies,” announced Mrs. Baum, “you should both be proud to have such successful sons. My boy, I have to tell you the truth, is a homosexual.”“That’s a shame,” said Mrs. Cornfield. “And what does he do for a living?”“Nothing,” said Mrs. Baum. “He has two friends: one is a doctor who owns an apartment building on Park Avenue, and the other is a lawyer who owns two apartment buildings.”Existence takes care.Osho,How can a blind and ignorant person be helped by a blind and ignorant therapist and his blind advice? Is it all just to make some firecrackers explode in the dark tunnel, to have a party and excitement together, to make the journey a bit “piff-paff-puff”? Can real help and guidance not just come from a master like you? If you like, please comment.Your question is, How can a blind and ignorant person be helped by a blind and ignorant therapist and his blind advice? Do you mean to say that you cannot be helped by a doctor if you have a cancer and he has not? Are you going to look for a doctor who has a cancer? – only he can help you?In life, you are being helped by many people who don’t have the experience but who have the expertise. The difference is great between experience and expertise – but the expert can also help.A man was purchasing eggs, and he said to the shopkeeper, “These eggs are rotten.”The shopkeeper was very much shocked and angry, and he said, “Are you a hen? Have you ever laid an egg? What do you know about eggs? Neither are you an egg, nor are you a hen.”The man remained silent for a moment; he had never thought of this. He said, “That means to know that an egg is rotten, I have to be a hen – then life will become impossible. I will have to be so many things because life needs so many things.”So the first thing to remember is that a therapist is as blind and ignorant as you are – and perhaps that is a qualification, because he knows what blindness is, what ignorance is. He is as miserable as you are, he knows the taste of misery. The only difference between you and him is that he is also an expert of a certain art: therapy.His knowledge about therapy may not have made him able to help himself, but his knowledge about therapy may be of some help to you. At least he has some expertise that you don’t have. At least he can analyze your problem. He may not be able to give a solution, but there are problems in life which need only analysis – they don’t need any other solution. Once you know why they are there, once you know their analytical basis, they disappear.Do you think Sigmund Freud is psychologically different from you? But he has given the whole science of psychoanalysis which has helped many people, if not to become enlightened, at least to become aware that they are blind, that they are groping in darkness, that they need a master. This is not something small.You are asking,” Is it all just to make some firecrackers explode in the dark tunnel, to have a party and excitement together, to make the journey a bit ‘piff-paff-puff’?”Even if this much can be done by the therapist, it is a great service to have a beautiful party – in the Italian sense – in the dark tunnel, to explode a few firecrackers, and to make the journey a little joyous. You will not be going far, and you will not be going out of the tunnel because you cannot have the right direction – you may be going deeper into the tunnel. But the therapist at least puts you on the move. He greases your wheels.Out of this movement, something is going to happen. He creates in you at least a longing. He may not be able to deliver the goods, but he creates a desire, a dream. And that is not a small thing, because there are millions of people who don’t have dreams, who are so utterly content with their miserable lives that they don’t think anything else is possible – this is all there is.The therapist at least creates in you a new longing that there is something more; and you should be grateful to him. He may be searching himself – he is searching – and he has made you also infectious with the search.You want real help and guidance, not just a longing, a desire. You want the flowers but you don’t want the seeds. The therapist at least can sow the seeds, can prepare the ground. I have been using therapists to move you from your stagnant, dormant state into a pilgrimage for the unknown. Once that desire is awake, then a master can be of help. The therapists can do the spade work.It is true that the real help and guidance can come only from a master. But do you need real help? Do you need real guidance? Do you deserve it? Even if a great master knocks on your doors, are you going to welcome him? Are you prepared for that?To receive a master, even to acknowledge a master, needs a long preparation. The therapist can do that preparation, so that when you come across a real master…the therapist has given you the thirst; now the real master can quench it. Without the thirst, even the greatest master is of no help.I understand that the blind cannot lead the blind, the ignorant cannot help you to move toward light, toward knowing, toward realization; but they can do something else which can be used as a device. Therapy has never been used by any master in the world as a device, but I find it to be immensely helpful: it helps those who participate in therapies to become thirsty for the real. The therapist cannot deliver the real, but he has made you thirsty for the real. You should be grateful for that – it is not a small service that he has done for you.And the therapy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it helps the participant, and on the other hand it helps the therapist. The therapist is also in the same boat. He is also groping, he is also uncertain; he is also not in a state to say with a guarantee, “There is something like truth, or something like bliss, or something like ecstasy.” But seeing so many people becoming thirsty, he also becomes more thirsty than he was ever before. If so many people can easily be made aware of a tremendous challenge for a pilgrimage toward the unknown…he himself also becomes a pilgrim. If he does not become a pilgrim, he has helped you but he has not been able to help himself.He can become a false teacher – that is the danger of being a therapist. You can start thinking that you are a great teacher because you are making so many people thirsty for truth. And perhaps you may start delivering false goods to them too, because they don’t know what is false and what is real; they cannot make any distinction.There are many false therapists; they become false the moment they start becoming masters. They are not masters. They are as much a seeker as others; perhaps more articulate, more knowledgeable. If they remain therapists – knowing perfectly well that they know nothing much, only a certain expertise – they can help you, and they can help themselves, too; otherwise…. Kabir has a statement: “The blind people lead the blind, and they all fall into a well.” There is nowhere else to go – they will find a well somewhere to fall in.An Israeli visiting Paris goes to a brothel and insists on the services of a certain Michelle. He is told that Michelle is unavailable, but when he offers a thousand dollars, she is brought to him and they spend the night together.The next night, the Israeli returns and repeats his generous offer, and again the third night. Finally, on the third night, Michelle asks why she has been singled out for this flattering attention.“Well,” says the man, “You see, I am from Israel.”“Why, so am I,” says Michelle.“Yes, I know,” the Israeli replies. “It turns out that your grandmother lives in the same building as my parents, and when she heard I was going to Paris, she asked me to give you the three thousand dollars you had asked for.”A Jew is a Jew! – he cannot do anything else; a blind man is a blind man.The therapist has to be very humble and very alert, and he has to make the people who come to him aware – “I am as far away from truth as you are, but I have a certain expertise which I can deliver to you. Perhaps that may help you to find the way. I am not the way but perhaps I can give you a candle which may help you.”It is not much, just a candle, but in a dark night of the soul even a candle is much – a treasure; it can help you to find the way.The therapist has to become a bridge between the seeker and the master; he is not to become the master himself.Osho,In the video the other night, for the second time I heard you saying that no master has been betrayed by a woman. I don't understand that. What about Sheela and her gang? Didn't they betray you? So far as I'm concerned, in the moment, I can't imagine betraying you, but I can't say for sure that I would never do it. I don't know what I would do if I was in the position of Sheela. Saying all this, my heart hurts, but my mind keeps on going and doesn't understand. Please comment.A master can be betrayed if he requires your faith. You cannot betray me, because I don’t require your faith. You can be with me; you can choose to go away. Being with me is your free choice. Going away is also your freedom.Nobody can betray me.I don’t give you the chance to betray.I have removed the very basis, the very possibility.Thousands of people have been with me, and walked with me as long as they could manage. And when it was impossible for them – and I am an impossible man, so it is not their fault – then they took off on a road separate from me. But I don’t have any complaint, because I was never expecting them to hang around me forever and forever. In fact, I have to work on so many people that I want a few old people to take their own way, to create space for new people. My caravan is big enough.The old masters were betrayed, but the fault was theirs because they asked for your total surrender. I don’t ask anything from you. It is your choice to walk with me as long as you wish, and it is your choice to say good-bye at any time you want.I am a bit of a strange master – a master who cannot be betrayed – because I am a master who does not ask you for any surrender, any commitment; who does not ask anything from you, but who gives you as much as he can and is grateful that you receive his love, is grateful that you receive his silence.And it is absolutely your individual decision to remain my fellow traveler or to move in some other direction. And who knows, perhaps you may come back to the caravan again, or you may meet me somewhere ahead on some other crossroad; you will be welcome there.I accept you when you are with me, I accept you when you leave me; I accept you if you never come back to me, I accept you if you want to come back to me. From my side, there is no question of any commitment; hence, when I said, “No master has been betrayed by a woman,” you have not to include me in it. I am talking about the old masters; they all wanted absolute faith, total surrender. They wanted you to be almost in a spiritual slavery, and I think this very situation created in a few people’s minds a desire to be free of them.You cannot desire to be free of me; you are free. You cannot contemplate betraying me because that will be absurd. I have never asked your faith, so you cannot take it away. I have not taken anything from you, so you cannot disappoint me.My statement was about the past masters.I don’t belong in their category.I am the beginning of a new line, of a new category, where a master is a friend, where a master gives you freedom, where a master wants you to be on your own – the sooner the better. I would love that day, when all of you have betrayed me and I can sit silently, enjoying myself! I am enjoying myself right now too, but to enjoy in a crowd is one thing and to enjoy yourself in your bathroom is another.So, if you are not sure…you don’t want to betray me, but you are not sure. Who knows? – tomorrow, you may want to. So I want you to remember: even if you want to betray me, you cannot. I have made it impossible.I am just a friend. We have met on the road; we are strangers. You liked me to walk with you, I liked you to walk with me, we enjoyed being together. But any moment you want to say, “Now it is time to depart,” I will help you to depart without tears, joyously, because you are going to be independent – yourself.You are not capable of hurting me. All those old masters were hurt, but they created the situation themselves. I don’t expect anything from you, so how can you disappoint me? Whatever you do, I can bless it without knowing what it is.“Mr. Baumgarten,” said the doctor, “even though you are a very sick man, I think I will be able to pull you through.”“Doctor, if you do that, when I get well I will donate five thousand dollars for your new hospital.”Months later, the MD met his former patient. “How do you feel?” he asked.“Wonderful, doctor, fine, never been better.”“I have been meaning to speak to you,” said the doctor. “What about the money for the new hospital?”“What are you talking about?” said Baumgarten.“You said that if you got well, you would contribute five thousand dollars to the new hospital.”“I said that?” asked the patient. “That just shows how sick I was.”To expect anything from you is just not right; you are in such misery. Out of your misery you may surrender, out of your misery you may have faith, out of your misery you may believe – in any nonsense. I cannot exploit your misery which has been exploited all through the past.I would like to help you to come out of your misery, and that will be my reward – if I can see you smiling and singing and dancing, it is more than enough.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I have just finished reading the book about Jesus and his journey to Kashmir after the crucifixion, and now I have a photographic picture in my mind of the man and his unquenchable thirst for truth. Hearing stories about you, or the Buddha before enlightenment, there was the same unquenchable thirst. But here I am with you feeling like a dry leaf, blowing in the wind – searching for truth, but being distracted by every gust of wind that takes me wherever it wishes to. Will being in your presence more and more help me to intensify my search, and enable me to use these gusts of wind to take me further on the path toward truth?There is a saying of Jesus: “Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened unto you.” These are beautiful words, but only on a very superficial plane. They have poetry in them, and they have a certain truth also; but unfortunately I have to disagree with them.If I were to write them again, I would say, “Ask not, and it shall be given to you,” because asking is desiring, asking is demanding, asking is impatience. Asking is not trust, is not love. Love never asks, but it is given all. It never asks, but it is always understood.“Seek not; otherwise you will miss it,” because every search leads you away from yourself; every path leads you away from yourself. “Seek ye not; just be, and you have found it,” because it is something within you. It is not something far away, it has not to be found; it is the finder himself. It has not to be sought, it is the seeker himself. The moment you are silent, neither asking nor seeking, you have it, you are it.“Knock not, because every knock makes you a beggar,” because all knocking is on the doors of others. And it is not a question of finding it in somebody else’s house; it is there within you. There are no doors for you to knock on. You have just to be utterly centered, and the doors are always open. This is what Lao Tzu would say, and this is what Chuang Tzu would say. I know if Jesus had been born in the East, he would have said the same thing. It is the Western atmosphere, where all search is for the object and nobody cares about the seeker.There are great scientists of tremendous intelligence who discover many things in their lives, but go on missing themselves. The reason is that they are always searching for something; but one’s own being is already there – you have just to be in a relaxed state of consciousness, in a let-go.I am reminded of one of the most important women who has walked on the earth, Rabiya al-Adabiya. She is truly a rebel, and without being a rebel nobody can be religious. Rebellion is the very foundation of being religious. The orthodox can never be religious, the traditional can never be religious.She was going to the market, just to fetch some vegetables, and she saw a great Sufi, well known all over the country, Junnaid. He was sitting outside the mosque praying loudly and looking at the sky, crying, “When are you going to hear me? Why don’t you open the doors? I have been waiting so long, do you hear me or not? I’m tired of knocking on your doors.”Rabiya stood behind him, heard all this and hit his head. He looked back – because it is very sacrilegious to disturb someone who is in prayer – and there stood that strange woman, Rabiya. And she said, “Junnaid, are you going to mature or not? Are you absolutely blind? – because the doors are open. The doors are always open, twenty-four hours, day and night. What kind of nonsense is this, that you go on asking God ‘Open the doors’? Even God cannot do anything – how can he open doors which are always open? Just look silently; the doors are not outside. Close your eyes and see. And remember, the next time I hear you say all this nonsense I’m going to hit you really hard! By your prayer you are avoiding yourself.”It was a sudden enlightening experience. Junnaid closed his eyes, looked within…the doors are open. What you are seeking is hidden within you, and if you go on seeking it you will go on missing it.Don’t make the search for truth a serious phenomenon. Take it easy, and remember “easy is right.” If strong winds take you hither and thither, don’t resist; they appear strong because of your resistance. Relax, go with them. Go with them, with totality.Lao Tzu became enlightened sitting under a tree, seeing an old dead leaf falling from the tree, slowly. Winds were taking it this way and that way, and it had no resistance. It was totally willing to go anywhere – because the truth that you are seeking is everywhere. All that is needed is a relaxed consciousness to see it.Those winds are not against you, they are not distracting you. Your resistance is the problem. You have made your search very serious. Be a little more playful. Dance with the wind; allow the wind to take you to the north, to the south, to the east, to the west, without any resistance.In your resistance exists your ego. “What is ego?” people ask. It is your resistance to existence. “And what is egolessness?” It is your relaxed state of being, a let-go. Wherever the winds take you, go with totality – willingly, joyously, dancing, singing.It is not that you will find the truth where the winds are taking you. You will find the truth in your non-resistance; you will find the truth in your let-go, in your playfulness, in your non-seriousness, in your laughter.Sick people have dominated humanity for too long – psychologically sick, spiritually sick – and they have made everybody serious. My whole approach is that of playfulness, non-seriousness, taking it easy.Relaxation is prayer.Non-resistance is egolessness.And in egolessness all is found.The serious are tense, the serious are worried. The serious are always concerned whether they are on the right path…and there are no milestones.All paths are imaginary.Existence is just like the sky, there are no paths. The birds fly, but they don’t leave any footprints; the sky remains pathless. So is your consciousness a far more clean and far more clear space, where there are no footprints, no paths.You cannot go astray. To go astray you need a path. And finding the truth is not the goal, finding the truth cannot be made an ambition. Finding the truth is finding yourself. And you can find yourself only in a relaxed state. Who can distract you from yourself? The wind may take you to the north, or to the south, but it cannot distract you from yourself; wherever you are you are.If you start being playful in life you have learned the greatest prayer; you have learned the pathless path.Most major cities have a dial-a-prayer number for anyone requiring religious reassurance in the form of a brief, pre-recorded sermon. Now there is talk of establishing a similar number for atheists: when you dial it, no one answers.And I think that will be far closer to reality than a pre-recorded sermon. If you can listen to the silence – no one is answering, you are left alone – it can become a meditation.There is no goal. You are not to go somewhere, and there is not some object to be found. You have just to relax into such a deep state that you can settle within yourself. In that very settling you have come home.Osho,The other day, out of the silence of your namaste came the unexpected gift of your dance. My heart burst open, and suddenly I was like a child, innocent and utterly in awe of the mystery of your presence. Would you please say something about how it is that the slightest gesture made by you affects us so deeply?Love is the greatest alchemy in the world. It transforms small things into great, into precious experiences. Just a bird singing, received in silence and love, is more valuable than God speaking to Moses, because that is a fiction – and not a very nice one, either.When Moses reached the mountain on Sinai to meet God, he saw a miracle; he saw a green bush, lush green, and yet surrounded by flames. As he came closer, a voice from the bush shouted at him, “Moses, take your shoes off! You are on holy ground” – not a very nice beginning to a conversation. Moses must have been a very obedient person; otherwise he would have asked, “Can you tell me where is the land which is not holy? Should I carry my shoes on my head?”The whole existence is holy.But the poor fellow was so amazed by a voice without any person around, and the bush on fire, and yet green, lush green….God gave him ten commandments, ten pieces of stone, and on each piece one commandment was written: “Thou shall not commit adultery”…not a great meeting – in a way insulting and humiliating. And poor Moses carried all those ten stones; they must have been heavy.But, in the whole thing, the only significant part is the green bush in the flames of fire. As far as I am concerned, I take only that part to be important in the whole encounter. Jews have not bothered much about the bush and the fire; they are much more concerned with the ten commandments and God’s declaration of the Holy Land.If you enter into yourself you will find this very experience: flames of life and the green bush with flowers of ecstasy, of blissfulness, existing together. Those flames represent the revolution, and that green bush represents the coolness and the calmness….You may have come across calm and cool people, but they are not revolutionaries; they are dull, unintelligent, almost idiots. You may have come across revolutionaries who are fiery, but they don’t have the calmness and the quietness and the peace which can make their revolution meaningful. Otherwise, the same fire that cooks your food can burn your house too.To me, the meeting of Moses with God is simply a myth. Real religion, authentic religion, is concerned with your love, with your trust, with your joy. And when you see through the eyes of love, a small flower becomes so mysterious, the faraway song of a cuckoo becomes far more holy than any scripture.You love me; that’s why my smallest gesture makes an immense impact on you. It is not the gesture, it is your love. There may be somebody else sitting by your side to whom the gesture means nothing, just a movement of the hand. If his heart is not full of love, then just the movement of the hand is meaningless; if his heart is full of love, the hand, its grace, can be indicative of greater mysteries and secrets of life.This is one of the mysteries of life, that life is how you see it. It depends on your eyes. If you have the eyes of a poet the same trees are greener, livelier; they have a message, they whisper things into the ears of the poet. But if you are not a poet you pass by the same trees without even noticing them. All depends on you.Your whole life experience goes on growing with your growing consciousness. As your consciousness becomes more and more juicy, life becomes more and more divine. Because you love me, my words have a meaning to you which they will not have without your loving heart. Your love contributes ninety percent, at least, to the meaning of my words or my gestures.The day you are capable of contributing one hundred percent, then my gesture becomes your gesture, then my word becomes your word, then my heartbeat becomes your heartbeat. That state I call the state of the devotee: a merger, a melting of two souls into one.But, unfortunately, in the name of love such pseudo things exist in the world that they have contaminated the greatest word we have. People “love” their cars, people “love” their houses. They don’t understand that love is a sacred experience, it is not mundane. The moment you pull it down to the world of mundane reality you are being terribly destructive. You have to raise the mundane reality to the level of love, the sunlit peaks of sacredness.But people are doing just the opposite – and suffering unnecessarily. Life is not meant to be a suffering; it is meant to be a blissfulness. But one has to learn the art.Brickman and Horowitz were relaxing on the beach in Puerto Rico. “You know,” said Brickman, “this Racquel Welch – what does everyone see in her? Take away her hair, her lips, her eyes and her figure, and what have you got?”Horowitz said, “My wife.”These are our love relationships. Rather than adding to things, beautifying existence, we are living in such negativity that we take away. Take away the lips of a beautiful woman, take away her hair, take away her eyes, and what is left? And of course, if this is your approach to looking at things, your life is going to be a hell – worse than hell.Love contributes tremendously, beautifies things. Where it was prose, love makes it a poetry; where it was just an ordinary flower, love makes it extraordinary. Love has the magic of transforming the whole world around you into a sacred existence.I call the man materialistic who does not know the art of love; I don’t call a man materialistic who does not believe in God. And I don’t call a man religious who believes in God. I call a man religious who goes on growing in his love, in his trust, and goes on spreading his ecstasy all around existence.People are so stupid that they are trying to demystify everything. The whole effort of science is to demystify existence, to know everything. So, of course, the way to know Racquel Welch is to dissect her on the table of the scientist. Take her hair apart, her eyes apart…and then see what is left. There is no beauty, there is no soul, there is no life; science has demystified a beautiful woman.Religion mystifies existence. It makes the meaningless songs of birds as meaningful as great poetry, as great music. It makes ordinary trees as significant as great paintings.It is up to you where you want to live, in hell or in heaven, because wherever you want to live you will have to create it. It is not something ready-made, so that you purchase a ticket and catch a train. It is something to be created.Love can create paradise herenow.My whole teaching is love more, to the point when you yourself become just a source of love, and nothing else.“Hey man,” one hippie said to another, “turn on the radio.”“Okay,” the second hippie answered. And then leaning over very close to the radio he whispered, “I love you.” He is turning on the radioWe have destroyed beautiful words so ignorantly, and by destroying them we have destroyed ourselves – because what are we except our attitudes?You could see in my movements a beauty, a grace, a significance because your heart is full of love. I want to remind you that the beauty is not in the gestures, the beauty is in the eyes that see it. I want you to be responsible for the hell or heaven in which you live. And once you understand the responsibility, I don’t think anybody is going to live in hell.Osho,How can I tell the difference between one part of the mind observing another part of the mind, and the watcher? Can the watcher watch itself? One time I thought I had got it and then that same day I heard you say in a discourse, “If you think you've got the watcher, you've missed.” Since then I try watching feelings in the body, thoughts, and emotions. Mostly, I'm just caught in them. But, once in a while, rarely, I feel tremendously relaxed and nothing stays – it just keeps moving. Is there anything to do?Deva Waduda, one has to start watching the body – walking, sitting, going to bed, eating. One should start from the most solid, because it is easier, and then one should move to subtler experiences. One should start watching thoughts, and when one becomes an expert in watching thoughts, then one should start watching feelings. After you feel that you can watch your feelings, then you should start watching your moods, which are even more subtle than your feelings, and more vague.The miracle of watching is that as you are watching the body, your watcher is becoming stronger; as you are watching the thoughts, your watcher is becoming stronger; as you are watching the feelings, the watcher is becoming even more strong. When you are watching your moods the watcher is so strong that it can remain itself – watching itself – just as a candle in the dark night not only lights everything around it, it also lights itself.To find the watcher in its purity is the greatest achievement in spirituality, because the watcher in you is your very soul; the watcher in you is your immortality. But never for a single moment think, “I have got it,” because that is the moment when you miss.Watching is an eternal process; you always go on becoming deeper and deeper, but you never come to the end where you can say “I have got it.” In fact, the deeper you go, the more you become aware that you have entered into a process which is eternal – without any beginning and without any end.But people are watching only others; they never bother to watch themselves. Everybody is watching – that is the most superficial watching – what the other person is doing, what the other person is wearing, how he looks…. Everybody is watching; watching is not something new to be introduced in your life. It has only to be deepened, taken away from others, and arrowed toward your own inner feelings, thoughts, moods – and finally, the watcher itself.A Jew is sitting in a train opposite a priest. “Tell me, your worship,” the Jew asks, “why do you wear your collar back to front?”“Because I am a father,” answers the priest.“I am also a father, and I don’t wear my collar like that,” says the Jew. “Oh,” says the priest, “but I am a father to thousands.”“Then maybe,” replies the Jew, “it is your trousers you should wear back to front.”People are very watchful about everybody else.Two Polacks went out for a walk; suddenly it began to rain. “Quick,” said one man, “open your umbrella.”“It won’t help,” said his friend, “my umbrella is full of holes.”“Then why did you bring it in the first place?”“I did not think it would rain.”You can laugh very easily about the ridiculous acts of other people, but have you ever laughed about yourself? Have you ever caught yourself doing something ridiculous? No, you keep yourself completely unwatched; your whole watching is about others, and that is not of any help.Use this energy of watchfulness for a transformation of your being. It can bring you so much bliss and so much benediction that you cannot even dream about it. A simple process, but once you start using it on yourself it becomes a meditation.One can make meditations out of anything.Anything that leads you to yourself is meditation. And it is immensely significant to find your own meditation, because in the very finding you will find great joy. And because it is your own finding – not some ritual imposed upon you – you will love to go deeper into it. The deeper you go into it, the happier you will feel – peaceful, more silent, more together, more dignified, more graceful.You all know watching, so there is no question of learning it. It is just a question of changing the object of watching. Bring them closer.Watch your body, and you will be surprised. I can move my hand without watching, and I can move my hand with watching. You will not see the difference, but I can feel the difference. When I move it with watchfulness, there is a grace and beauty in it, a peacefulness, and a silence. You can walk, watching each step; it will give you all the benefit that walking can give you as an exercise, plus it will give you the benefit of a great simple meditation.The temple in Bodhgaya where Gautam Buddha became enlightened has been made in memory of two things…one is a Bodhi tree under which he used to sit. Just by the side of the tree there are small stones for a slow walk. He was meditating, sitting, and when he would feel that sitting had been too much – a little exercise was needed for the body – he would walk on those stones. That was his walking meditation.When I was in Bodhgaya, having a meditation camp there, I went to the temple. I saw Buddhist lamas from Tibet, from Japan, from China. They were all paying their respect to the tree, and I saw not a single one paying his respect to those stones on which Buddha had walked miles and miles. I told them, “This is not right. You should not forget those stones. They have been touched by Gautam Buddha’s feet millions of times. But I know why you are not paying any attention to them, because you have forgotten completely that Buddha was emphasizing that you should watch every act of your body: walking, sitting, lying down.”You should not let a single moment go by unconsciously. Watchfulness will sharpen your consciousness. This is the essential religion – all else is simply talk. But Waduda, you ask me, “Is there something more?” No, if you can do only watchfulness, nothing else is needed.My effort here is to make religion as simple as possible. All the religions have done just the opposite: they have made things very complex – so complex that people have never tried them. For example, in the Buddhist scriptures there are thirty-three thousand principles to be followed by a Buddhist monk; even to remember them is impossible. Just the very number thirty-three thousand is enough to freak you out: “I am finished! My whole life will be disturbed and destroyed.”I teach you: just find a single principle that suits you, that feels in tune with you, and that is enough.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,A few months before his death Edgar Cayce, in one of his trance “sleep talks” said, “Through Russia comes the hope of the world. Not in respect to what is sometimes termed communism or bolshevism, no; but freedom, freedom! That each man will live for his fellow man. The principle has been born there. It will take years for it to be crystallized. Yet out of Russia comes again the hope of the world.” Could you please comment?Edgar Cayce was one of the strangest human beings, a category in himself…. There have been utterly conscious people having clear visions of the world – like Nostradamus; but Cayce was not anything special when he was conscious. Only when he was in a sort of unconsciousness, a trance-like sleep, would he start saying things of tremendous importance, many of which have come true.Many of these are bound to happen, sooner or later, for the simple reason that whatever he has seen in his trance state is absolutely transparent, clear, without ifs and buts – it is absolute. And because it was not coming in his conscious state, his ego was not involved. It was coming out of his innocence; and anything that comes out of innocence has a validity, has an authority of its own.There are thousands and thousands of pages of notes collected by his disciples from when he was speaking in his trances; almost a whole library exists containing his predictions. When he used to come to consciousness, out of the trance, he himself was not aware what he had said – as if it was not said by him but by an unknown source, by an unknown energy, as if existence itself had spoken itself through him. He had been only a vehicle, and a very correct vehicle, because his ego was not in the way, his mind was not in the way. He was simply transmitting whatever was coming from the very roots of life. There have not been many people like him. There have been a few people, but none has the height and the depth, and immensity of Edgar Cayce.In one of his trance-sleeps he said, “Through Russia comes the hope of the world.” Once it had already come: the Russian Revolution in 1917 was the end of an old world and the beginning of a new. It proclaimed many truths about man – that property should not be individual, that property is of the commune. The founders of the revolution, particularly Lenin, wanted marriage to be dissolved; because marriage came into existence with private property, it should go out of existence when private property is being dissolved.It is a historical fact that because of private property, man became interested in marriage, in monogamy; otherwise, by nature, he is polygamous. But to protect his property, so that even after his death it should remain in the hands of his own sons, man decided in favor of monogamy – which was not natural to him. Hence, on the one hand marriage came into existence, and on the other hand, prostitution. They both are by-products of private property.Property should belong to all – just as the air belongs to all, and the water belongs to all, and the sun belongs to all. Private property creates immense problems. On one hand, people go on becoming richer; on the other hand, people go on becoming poorer. And the poor man is the producer: he toils in the field, he works in the orchards – and he remains hungry. He weaves the clothes – and he remains naked. He makes the beautiful mansions and palaces – and he has no house, not even a hut to hide his head in.This exploitation was condemned by the Russian Revolution, and against this exploitation a new age of a classless society was declared, where everybody would have the equal opportunity to grow. A great hope had arisen with the Russian Revolution, but it died. The revolution fell into wrong hands. Instead of bringing a new age and a new humanity, it repeated the old game under new names. The only change was of labels: where in the past there were the rich and the poor, now there were the bureaucrats and the people. But the distinction was the same, and the exploitation was the same.For sixty years Russia has lived in a new kind of slavery. Nobody else in the world has known that kind of slavery. The whole country has become a concentration camp. Beautiful words sometimes prove very dangerous: instead of bringing equality to man it has taken away all freedom, even the freedom of expression. It has made the whole society a society of slaves.For a moment in 1917 a great hope arose around the world, particularly in those who were intelligent enough to see the immense possibility that was opening up – but the bud never became a flower. But you cannot keep millions of people in a concentration camp forever. There is a limit to tolerance – and that limit has come. There is great restlessness for a new revolution in the Russian youth. And Gorbachev simply represents the tremendous longing for freedom, for equality, for the dignity of being human beings, for self-respect. He has given another chance to the intelligent people of the world, for a new hope again.Where Lenin left off, Gorbachev has to begin.The sixty years in between have been a long nightmare – but that which is gone is gone, that which is past, is past. And the Soviet youth, with the courage and insight of Gorbachev, is looking, not backward to the sixty ugly years of inhumane dictatorship, but to a new future of an open society, in the authentic sense.Perhaps Edgar Cayce is going to be true again in his prediction: Through Russia comes the hope of the world. Not in respect to what is sometimes termed communism or bolshevism, no; but freedom, freedom! That each man will live for his fellow man. The principle has been born there, it will take years for it to be crystallized. Those years have passed. The principle is now crystallized.Yet out of russia comes again the hope of the world – the second great revolution. Russia seems to be a land of destiny – not only for its own people, but for the whole world. It was the first to revolt against capitalism; it is going to be again the first to revolt against dictatorial communism. The future is of a democratic communism, a communism rooted in the freedom of man.Equality is valuable, but it is not more valuable than freedom. Freedom cannot be sacrificed for it. Freedom cannot be sacrificed for anything else. It is the most precious treasure of your being. There are all signs that the Soviet Union is going to fulfill the great hope, the great dream. Millions of people have been hoping for it, dreaming for it – it has been the utopia for centuries. Gorbachev is in a position to make it a reality. A tremendously great responsibility has fallen on his shoulders. And as I can see, he seems to be strong enough, intelligent enough to fulfill the expectations.Only one thing I would like my Russian sannyasins to convey to Gorbachev from me: if the dimension of meditation also opens for him, he cannot allow the opportunity to be distorted.Joseph Stalin destroyed the whole revolution for a single reason, and the reason was materialism. He believed that man is nothing but matter. According to Karl Marx, consciousness is only a by-product of matter, and as you die matter disperses; nothing is left as consciousness – there is no soul. Because of this wrong idea he could manage to kill at least one million Russians in the name of revolution without any trouble; otherwise even to kill one man would destroy your whole life’s sleep. It would haunt you – you would never be able to forgive yourself. But to kill one million people without any concern was possible under the umbrella of materialism.I would like Gorbachev not only to introduce freedom to the Soviet Union and its people, but also some spiritual dimension so that it is clear that they are not just matter. Matter cannot have any dignity – matter can be used, but cannot be respected. Matter can be destroyed, but you need not feel that you have committed a crime, or a sin.Unless the Soviet Union and its people not only desire freedom, but also desire a search for the soul…because what will you do with freedom? Freedom for what? There are two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom for. Freedom from is not much of a freedom. The real freedom is the second freedom – freedom for spiritual growth, freedom for inner search, freedom for knowing the secrets and the mysteries of life.If Gorbachev can introduce the Soviet Union to Gautam Buddha, to Mahavira, to Zarathustra, to Lao Tzu…why be so confined to Karl Marx? Why be so poor? Why not make the whole sky yours? – all the stars and the whole beauty of the night, yours. Why remain confined? If he can open the doors for the spiritual search, then, certainly, he can fulfill the prophecy of Edgar Cayce that Russia is the hope for all of mankind.And I think him a man intelligent enough to understand that materialism is as confining as Christianity, as confining as Hinduism. I am making my people available to all dimensions because the whole past is your heritage. Why remain so poor, clinging to one small tradition? Why not allow the whole sky to be yours? Why not open your wings?Communism missed the first revolution because it was not revolutionary enough. It was a reaction against Christianity; and whenever you react to something, you start behaving in the same way. In America they are becoming more and more a closed society because of fundamentalist Christianity. You will be surprised to know that in America thousands of books have been removed from the libraries – in this twentieth century, just now in this year – because they do not conform with the fundamentalist Christian attitudes, with the fanatic and fascist Christian mind.Even in American education Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot be taught; it has been prohibited, because it goes against Christianity. Christianity believes in creation. Perhaps you have never thought that the idea of creation and the idea of evolution are diametrically opposite. God created the world; now there is no question of any evolution. You cannot improve upon God.Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution is against Christianity. In no other country is it banned. But some American states have banned it; now it is a crime to teach it. And all books – and there are thousands of books written on the theory of evolution – have been removed from the libraries of colleges, universities and national libraries.A strange polarity. The Soviet Union has been up to now a closed society, and America at least pretended to be an open society. Now the Soviet Union is making every effort to become an open society, and America is becoming more and more closed.I would like to add a few words to Edgar Cayce’s prediction: If the Soviet Union is the hope for mankind, then the United States of America is the greatest danger for mankind. It is preparing for human death. And if the Soviet Union becomes not only politically open but also philosophically open – not confined to the out-of-date ideas of Karl Marx, but open to all kinds of theories, philosophies, religions; experiences of Zen, and Sufism, and Hassidism, of Tao and Yoga – it can certainly prove the savior of humanity.Osho,I have often heard you speak of aloneness and loneliness as being opposed; of aloneness being a state in which one is so full – fulfilled; of loneliness being a state in which one is missing the other, feeling very empty. Reading Ryokan's poetry, I feel some loneliness, yet the man is known as an enlightened Zen monk.“Standing alone beneath the solitary pine,quickly the time passes.Overhead the endless sky.Who can I call to join me on the path?”In the hankering for a true companion, in the need to share that richness, I wonder if in the heart of aloneness, there is a kind of loneliness. Please explain if aloneness and loneliness are interrelated.Loneliness is loneliness, and aloneness is aloneness – and the two never meet anywhere. They cannot by their very nature. Aloneness is so full, so abundantly full of yourself there is no space for anybody else. And loneliness is so empty, so dark, so miserable that it is nothing but a constant hunger for someone to fill it…if not to fill it, at least to help you to forget it.You are quoting from Ryokan’s poetry. I don’t think Ryokan is yet enlightened. He was certainly a Zen monk, and a great poet, but he fell short of being a mystic. He reached very close, but even to reach very close is not to be enlightened.I have also loved Ryokan’s poetry. But beware of poets, because they appear so close to the mystics. Sometimes their words are more juicy than the words of the mystics, because the poet is the artist of words; the mystic is an expert of silence.Ryokan was a Zen monk; hence something of the mystic echoes in his poetry. But that is because he lived in an atmosphere in communion with the mystics. But he himself was not a mystic.These are his lines, and you can see immediately what I mean:Standing alone beneath a solitary pine,Quickly the time passes.Overhead the endless sky.Who can I call to join me on the path?He is still in need of a companion, and he is still searching. He is still talking of “the path,” and the enlightened man knows there is no path. All paths are wrong, without exception, because every path leads you away from yourself. And to come to yourself you don’t need any path: you have to be just awake and you are there.It is almost like you are asleep in your room and dreaming that you are far away in London, in New York, in San Francisco. Do you think that if suddenly you are awakened you will find yourself in San Francisco? You were there, but that was only a dream. Awake, suddenly you find you are in your miserable room, and you have not even gone out of the door. You may be angry with the person who has awakened you, but he has brought you back to the reality. And there was no need of booking a ticket, because you had never gone out; you were only dreaming.You are only dreaming what you are. If you wake up, suddenly you will find all that you used to think your personality, your body, your mind, your knowledge, your feelings, your love – they were all dreams. You are only a witness. But you cannot dream about the witness; that is an impossibility.The witness remains a witness, never becomes a dream. Your aloneness is your witness, is your being. And it is so full, there is no need of any companion. And what is the need of a path? Where are you going? You have arrived.Ryokan was a beautiful poet, and perhaps a very disciplined monk, but he was not a mystic and certainly not an enlightened man.Let this be an opportunity to remind you again: beware of poets. They are like false coins, although they look exactly like authentic coins. But the false is false, and there is no way to make it real. Ryokan has still to wake up and see there is no solitary pine tree standing alone, there is no need of a companion, and there is no path.One is, and has always been, at home.To realize this at-homeness is aloneness.Going around in your dreams you will always find yourself lonely. Loneliness is a misunderstanding. Aloneness is an awakening.Osho,The other night I heard you speak of betrayal, and how it is impossible to disappoint you. My eyes filled with tears. Your eyes were so luminous, shining with enough love to fill this universe. I realized that I have been trying not to disappoint the people I love all my life, and my tears were of gratitude for your love, a love that cannot be touched or tarnished whatever happens. Your look had a burning intensity, yet a wholly impersonal quality too. What kind of love is this?Two little children were playing with their dog by the sea when the dog was carried out to sea by a big wave. A passing rabbi dived in, saved the dog and revived it by artificial respiration.The children asked, “Hey, rabbi, are you a vet?”“Am I wet?” replied the rabbi. “I am absolutely soaked!”I am talking about a love in which you are not only wet, but absolutely soaked.And there is no need to make any effort for it. Just being here, slowly, slowly, you will find your hardness melting. It cannot resist the temptation, because love is such a joy, such a bliss, that once you have seen a man of love you can never be the same again.Seeing the man of love, you have seen your own future. And things will start happening. The hardness which prevents you from being loving, melts; the heart which you have completely forgotten is suddenly remembered. The mind which has become your permanent residence is no more your residence, but only a workshop – useful as far as work is concerned and utterly harmful as far as love is concerned. Your heart becomes your home, and your life starts radiating without any effort on your part.Love is a contagious disease which has no cure. The world is loveless so much because very few people are there to spread the disease.I have heard that the doctor of Mulla Nasruddin knocked on his door. He was very angry, and he said, “I have waited for one month, and you have not paid me and I cured your child of smallpox!”Nasruddin said, “Listen. I have been patient enough; otherwise, the reality is that you owe much money to me.”The doctor said, “What? I owe money to you?”Nasruddin said, “Yes. Who do you think spread the disease to the whole school? My child! And from all that you have earned during this whole month, I have a percentage. I was being a gentleman and not asking for it, but you are being such a nasty fellow, so miserly, and you have some nerve, too.”Love has disappeared from the world for the simple reason that there are not enough lovesick people to spread it, not enough love-soaked people to spread it. It is something which is not taught, which is caught.Just don’t be worried about it. Being here you are going to be soaked. My whole presence, my silence, my words are nothing but to push you into the ocean so that you can be soaked.Osho,I love to watch you retreat so gracefully backward out of the hall until you are safely inside. I wonder how you avoid the door and the wall. But tell me, beloved one, are you afraid to turn your back on us?I will have to tell you a story. Mulla Nasruddin was invited to a conference where many wise people were gathered. He had his own disciples. He collected all the disciples and rode on his donkey.But the disciples said, “What are you doing?” – because he was riding on the donkey in the wrong way, not facing where the donkey was going. He was facing the disciples who were following him.They said, “Mulla, we know that to go with you anywhere is to get into trouble. Now the whole city will laugh and we will feel embarrassed because we are your disciples.”He said, “Don’t be worried about the city. I will see to those idiots.”“But,” they said, “at least to us you should explain the great principle.”He said, “The great principle is simple. If I ride on the donkey in the usual way, my back will be toward you. That is insulting you. I cannot do that. I respect you as much as you respect me. If I tell you to walk ahead of me, then your back will be toward me. That will be even worse – the disciples insulting the master.“I could not sleep the whole night until I discovered this great principle: I can ride on my donkey facing you; neither I am being disrespectful to you nor are you being disrespectful to me. And as far as the donkey is concerned, he is accustomed to me; he knows that I am a little crazy. He will giggle a little. As far as the city people are concerned, let them laugh. You need not feel embarrassed – you are disciples of a great master.”They said, “The principle seems to be great, but still we are feeling very much afraid.”And it happened just the way the disciples were thinking. People came out of the shops, crowds gathered. People started asking, “What is the matter?”The disciples said, “It is a very complicated thing. Its name is the Great Principle. If you want to understand you will have to come to the school where our great master teaches us.”They said, “It is a strange principle: sitting the wrong way on a poor donkey. But, if he says it is a great principle, it must be” – because they have known him, and every time he has proven himself right. He has his own way. They said, “We are going to come tomorrow to the school to understand the Great Principle.”And when the Great Principle was explained to them, they all looked at each other. Of course, it was right, because Mulla Nasruddin said to them: Unless a master respects his disciples, he should not expect any respect from them.It is the Great Principle.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,How can the world ever become a paradise when all enlightened people always choose not to be born again?One of the most fundamental things about the enlightened person is that he attains to enlightenment by dropping all choices; he attains it in a choiceless awareness. After enlightenment there is no way for him to choose anything.It is not that he chooses not to be born; it is simply the law of existence that once you are enlightened you do not need the body and the mind and the whole imprisonment which we call life. It is not that the enlightened person goes into nonexistence; he becomes part of existence itself – just like a fragrance, spread all over. In this way he helps the world to become a paradise. The more enlightened people disappear in the world as fragrance, the more light it will become…blissful, ecstatic.And the question of making life a paradise is for you, not for the enlightened person. For him it is already a paradise. Even in this whole misery, and anguish, he remains above and beyond. He showers his love and compassion, but he is not touched by the anguish and anxiety, the misery and the hell that people are living in. His heart is full of compassion for them, and he does everything to help them to come out of their darkness.Paradise is not a location; it is not part of geography. Paradise is a certain attitude toward existence; it is a way of life. The same energy that becomes misery becomes bliss; the same energy that creates jealousy and anger is transformed into love, into peace, into silence. It is not a question of only the enlightened person changing the world into a paradise; everybody has to change it by changing himself.All those people who have been dreaming of a better world can be divided into two categories. The major part of the dreamers who want the world to become a paradise think in terms of changing the world – its social structure, its economics, its politics. These people have been working for thousands of years.Their intentions are immensely beautiful, but they are ignorant about the basic fact that except for the individual, there is no world. You cannot change the world because the world is only a word, it is not a reality. If you go in search to meet the world you will always meet the individual. The individual is the reality. It is not just a word; it is existential.The small part, the minor part of dreamers who want to bring a utopia into the world have a totally different approach. Their approach is to teach you how to be silent, how to be peaceful, how to beautify existence around you, how to take everything and change it…to create a harmony, an accord.The same orchestra, the same instruments, can be played by monkeys too – and they will really enjoy. But music will not be born; what will be born will be a maddening noise! Even to people who do not know the art of music, who have not learnt, who have not gone into the discipline, all those instruments are useless. An orchestra in which thirty or more instruments are being played by those who know how to play them does not create noise; on the contrary it creates music – which is closest to silence. The higher the music is, the closer it is to silence. Listening to great music, you will fall into silence.In the East music has been always used as a support for meditation. It is difficult to fight with the mind, its constant rush of thoughts, but being absorbed in beautiful music all those thoughts disappear. Music is sound, but sound can be used in such a way that it creates silence; that is the whole art.Life has many components. They can all live together like a crowd – noisy, conflicting with each other, fighting to dominate – that’s how we create a hell. Hell is your inability to bring the crowd within you to a peaceful, loving existence. It is the inability to create an orchestra out of your being. The man who can create an orchestra out of his being – whose mind, heart, being, are all in tune – has created paradise for himself, and an energy field around himself, which will affect others also.It is everybody’s task; in fact it is the only task, the only challenge life gives to you – whether you turn it into a hell or into a heaven. The man who turns his life into a heaven is the greatest artist in the world. Musicians and painters and dancers and poets – all are left far behind. I call this man the mystic. He is the highest category.It is up to you to see that your components are not at war, that you are at peace with yourself. One great Sufi mystic, Bayazid was dying. His old grandmother was always worried about the life of Bayazid, because he was not a traditional, orthodox, religious person; he never went to the mosque, he never prayed the way a Mohammedan should pray, five times a day – he laughed at the very existence of God. As he was dying, his grandmother came close to him and whispered, “Bayazid, there is still time; make peace with God.”And Bayazid died with a great laughter, saying, “I don’t need to, because I have made peace with myself.”Those who are not at peace with themselves are trying in every way to make peace with God, to make peace in the world, to make peace among the warring nations. But the man who has found peace within himself, radiates it. He becomes the source, triggering the same kind of music, the same harmony, and the same beauty in others who come close to him.The enlightened man, while he is alive, works through his presence, through his love, through his silence. And when dead, he does not disappear; he simply becomes spread all over existence.Ramakrishna was dying and his last instructions to his wife were…. In India, the moment the husband dies the wife goes through a trauma. She cannot wear colored clothes, she has to shave her head – she cannot have hair; she cannot use any ornaments, not even the cheapest glass bangles – she has to break them.But before dying Ramakrishna, called Sharda, his wife, and told her, “Remember, you are never going to become a widow. I am dying, but I will be here. I will not be confined in the body, but you have not loved only my body; you have loved me, my consciousness. So don’t become a widow. Use beautiful clothes; just for my joy, use all the beautiful ornaments that I have given to you. And remember” – he loved delicious food too much – he said, “Remember, don’t forget to create beautiful dishes for me. I will not be able to eat them, but even the aroma of your beautiful food will be a nourishment to me. And don’t forget to prepare my bed rightly, particularly the mosquito net.”His disciples were feeling very embarrassed, “What is he saying? Has he gone insane? A dying enlightened person is worried about the mosquito net….”Sharda followed his instructions for almost thirty years that she lived after him. She would prepare his food the same way she used to prepare it while he was in the body. She would take it to his room – and nobody was there – and she would say, “Paramahansadeva, your food is ready.” She would sit like the way she used to sit, with her fan in her hand. There was nobody. The disciples tried to convince her – “This is absolutely mad; you go on fanning and there is nobody….”She said, “There may not be for you; there is for me.” She would prepare the bed the way he liked, with many covers. She would take care about the mosquito net, that not a single mosquito entered inside.Very few people have understood Sharda, but she really loved Ramakrishna – not the body in which he was, but him, his being. Now the body is no longer there, but the being is spread all over existence; he is more than he was before. Before he was imprisoned in the body; now he is unembodied. Now he is just freedom.The enlightened man helps people while he is alive, and he goes on helping people while he is not in the body. But if you cannot understand an enlightened man while he is in the body, it is very difficult for you to understand when he is not in the body.Once you have fallen in love with a master, slowly, slowly he is no more a body to you. He becomes only a pure consciousness.When Gautam Buddha died ten thousand sannyasins were present. Except twenty, almost everybody was crying. But what was the matter with those twenty? Were they not devoted to Gautam Buddha? One of them, Manjushree was asked, “What is the matter with you all? – because you have been closest to him.”He said, “That is the matter. We have known him not as the body; we have known him as an immortal consciousness. We are rejoicing. Up to now he was confined in a small space; now the whole sky is his. We can touch him anywhere, we can talk to him anywhere. We know he will be available – that’s why we are not crying, not weeping. You are crying and weeping because you have never gone beyond the body. The body was beautiful, but it is nothing compared to the beauty of consciousness.”The enlightened man naturally goes on creating a paradise wherever he is – in the body or not in the body. But he cannot create a paradise without your agreeing to it. Finally, you are the decisive factor. He can make all the arrangements, and you can refuse them; you can go on living in your hell. The first thing is that you are living in hell. So many times people have asked me, “Does hell exist?” And I have said to them, “You amaze me. You live in it, and you ask me, ‘Does hell exist?’ What is your life? It is not a joy, it is not a dance – you are living a nightmare.”To live unconsciously is to be in hell, and to live consciously is to be in heaven. To be fully enlightened…it is not that you enter paradise; paradise opens its petals, just like a lotus, in you. It is your innermost potential.Osho,Seeing such unbelievable changes in Russia these past two years, due to Gorbachev's leadership, do you have a special message for him? Would you at all consider going to Russia if he would have the courage to welcome you and your people? Do you think that one day Russia could be the country of the future of humanity?Yes, it appears as if unbelievable changes have been happening in Russia in the past two years. But as far as I am concerned, I was waiting for those changes; they are not unbelievable. Sixty years of oppression, exploitation and mass scale butchery were preparing the ground. No night is without a dawn. Sixty years was more than enough; it was absolutely certain that it would come to an end.Gorbachev is the first ray heralding that the morning has come. Many more changes will be happening in the future. Their speed is going to accelerate, because for sixty years the people have not tasted freedom, have not tasted trust, love; they have known only a fascist regime, which was ready to kill anybody for any small excuse. They have lived under the shadow of death.I welcome the dawn; the birds have started singing, and the flowers have not forgotten – even in sixty years – that when the sun rises they have to open and release their fragrance.You are asking me, do I have a special message for this great man, Gorbachev, who is bringing a second revolution in the Soviet Union? Yes, I have a message for him. And my message is not special, but the same as it is for every human being, wherever he exists. But the situation is certainly special. You will have to go a little bit back in the history….Communism is a reaction against Christianity. Christianity has done so much harm that the intelligentsia – particularly people like Karl Marx, who were geniuses – became so frustrated with Christianity that they created an alternative: a materialist philosophy with no God, with no soul, with no consciousness.It is understandable – but not forgivable – because Karl Marx was not acquainted with Gautam Buddha, nor was he acquainted with the Eastern flowers of Zen, of Tao, of Yoga. Without knowing anything about authentic religion – he thought that Christianity was equivalent to religion – he created a religionless society. This is moving from one extreme to another extreme.It has been always my understanding that among all the crimes that Christianity has committed, communism is also one of them – not directly, but indirectly. It is because of Christianity – its stupid superstitions, its exploitation of the people, its protection of the richest and its consolations for the poor – that Karl Marx had to say that religion is nothing but opium for the people. This is perfectly true for organized religions, but this is not true about men like Zarathustra, or Bodhidharma, or Basho. They are the pinnacles of consciousness.Gorbachev’s greatest contribution will be to introduce the people of the Soviet Union to the immense varieties of religious experiences, and not to remain confined to Christianity. Christianity has nothing of religion in it. The West has not produced any religions; its whole consciousness is extrovert.My message to Gorbachev is: Introduce meditations in the schools, in the colleges, in the universities; open the doors for Zen, for Tao, for Hassidism, and let people see that the essential religion is not a bondage, but the ultimate freedom. All other freedoms are small – political, economical, social. The only freedom that cannot be destroyed by anybody, and cannot be taken away by anybody, is of the spirit. He is trying to introduce political freedom, freedom of expression. These are good, but they are not enough; they are all superficial.The Soviet Union is in a very special state. For sixty years they have been denied…. There is a deep longing for truth, for freedom, for love – it is almost like a land that has been lying unused for sixty years, waiting for its spring, waiting for someone to sow seeds. It has gathered so much potential and power that if you sow the seeds this land can produce the most beautiful flowers, the richest crops.Gorbachev himself has to be introduced to the art of meditation, and he has to open the doors and the windows to all the dimensions that have been closed for sixty years, so people can choose the method to find themselves. A spiritual realization has to be made available to the people of the Soviet land. That will be the greatest contribution Gorbachev can make.You are asking, “If he had enough courage to welcome you, and your people, would you consider going there?”Absolutely, unconditionally! I would love to go there, to take my people…. And if he has courage enough I would like to create a commune in the Soviet Union to show America, “The day you destroyed the commune there, you have yourself committed suicide.”And you can see, Ronald Reagan has not the same prestige as he had when the commune was there; he cannot hope to become the president again. Governor Atiyeh of Oregon was very powerful just because of the commune – because he was opposing it, and people were supporting him. He could not gather courage even to run for the second time. He is no longer the governor; if we had been there, he would have been the governor still.The politicians who had become immensely important have lost all their power. Their power was because of us. If they had real intelligence, they would have continued to be against us superficially, and behind the curtain they would have been helping us to be as strong as possible – because we were the source of their power. The more powerful we would have been, the more powerful they would have been. But Oregonians are simply the most stupid people in the world. They destroyed their very source of power; now nobody takes any note of them.They were trying to collect signatures to change the rule that you can be a voter in Oregon if you have stayed there for twenty days before the voting but they needed the signatures of seventy-five percent of the population. Their campaign was going great when we were there; it was because of us they were afraid of those twenty days. I have been informed by my attorneys that, “The moment you left, your sannyasins left, their campaign completely failed.” They had gathered almost forty percent of the signatures, but now nobody is interested in it – for what?It would be a good answer to America if Russia could help us to create a commune in their land. And in fact, the whole philosophy of a commune is highest and most significant in the philosophy of communism itself; the very word communism comes from the word commune.And our commune can become a model for the whole Soviet Union. If Gorbachev has guts enough, I will do everything to create a commune on Soviet land that will be the sunrise in the Soviet Union, and the sunset in America.Osho,Questions arise and solve themselves after I meditate; then almost the same questions are asked in the following days. Once I heard you talk about the theory of relativity and its discovery: if Einstein hadn't managed to do it, it would have been discovered by another scientist, because the time was ready for it. Thought, as far as I can understand it, seems to belong to the same law of existence – especially in this strong energy circle around you. Will you talk about this phenomenon?No man is an island. We are all connected in a thousand-and-one ways. That’s what I was saying about Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.Somebody had asked him, “If you had not discovered it, do you think somebody else would have been able to discover it, ever?” And he was surprised by the answer. Albert Einstein said, “It would have taken not more than three weeks for somebody else to discover it.”As it happens, in fact, it was discovered by another scientist before Albert Einstein; he was just a lazy man and did not publish his article, and once Albert Einstein had published his article, there was no point.Our beings are connected. Of course, everybody cannot discover a theory like relativity; it needs a very refined intelligence. But there were at least a dozen people in the world who were of the same caliber, and who were looking in the same direction. It was only a question of time – of who is fast enough to reach the conclusion.Here you will feel it every day. A question arises in you. You can ask it, or just wait a little – somebody is going to ask it! Here you are, all for the same purpose, the same search; you are all looking in the same direction, accepting the same challenge. It is very natural that the same questions will arise in you.There are people who have never asked a single question because they know now so certainly, “What is the point? Somebody is going to ask it.” And it is always better when somebody else asks it, and you are just listening relaxedly. The person who has asked is tense, because it is his question. I am not a very predictable man, and I answer the questioner more than the question; so he is very alert, very tense, a little bit afraid. Everybody else can enjoy relaxedly – that poor fellow has finally asked the question.And I have seen that the people who are listening to the answers of other people’s questions understand more clearly, because they are more relaxed. They are almost like observers. They are more open. I am not going to hit on their head, of that they must…they are certain; so they can enjoy the answer. And it is their question too.And particularly because we are concerned in a single-pointed purpose – how to know yourself and how to be yourself – questions will be coming, and they will be applicable almost to everybody. It just depends on your attitude. You should not forget to listen to the answer thinking that because it is somebody else’s question it is none of your concern, and you can enjoy having your own yakkety-yak that goes on inside you. Then you will miss. And you will miss a great opportunity. It is unintelligent.The intelligent person will listen very carefully to any question, because it may not be significant for him today – but perhaps tomorrow…. Perhaps he has not come to that space, but he will come; it is better to be ready for it. All that is needed is a little intelligence.Although he was approaching eighty, the old colonel refused to accept his loss of sexual desire and stamina, so he consulted a doctor. The doctor was amused, and asked, “Why should you be so concerned? It is only to be expected at your time of life.”“But a friend of mine who is eighty-five says he still makes love to his wife every night,” replied the colonel.The doctor smiled, “Why can’t you say the same thing? It is only a question of saying.”Just a little intelligence….A young boy came before the court, charged with stealing a girl’s bicycle.“I did not steal it, sir,” he told the magistrate, “she gave it to me. She was riding me home on the handlebars, and she stopped in the woods; she took off her blue jeans and her panties and said I could have anything she had. Well sir, the panties were girls’ things and the blue jeans would not fit me – so I took the bicycle.”Just be a little intelligent. Don’t take the bicycle!

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 23 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What would be the form of education in the new commune?The education that has prevailed in the past is very insufficient, incomplete, superficial. It only creates people who can earn their livelihood but it does not give any insight into living itself. It is not only incomplete, it is harmful too – because it is based on competition.Any type of competition is violent deep down, and creates people who are unloving. Their whole effort is to be the achievers – of name, of fame, of all kinds of ambitions. Obviously they have to struggle and be in conflict for them. That destroys their joys and that destroys their friendliness. It seems everybody is fighting against the whole world.Education up to now has been goal-oriented: what you are learning is not important; what is important is the examination that will come a year or two years later. It makes the future important – more important than the present. It sacrifices the present for the future. And that becomes your very style of life; you are always sacrificing the moment for something which is not present. It creates a tremendous emptiness in life.The commune of my vision will have a five-dimensional education. Before I enter into those five dimensions, a few things have to be noted. One: there should not be any kind of examination as part of education, but every day, every hour observation by the teachers; their remarks throughout the year will decide whether you move further or you remain a little longer in the same class. Nobody fails, nobody passes – it is just that a few people are speedy and a few people are a little bit lazy – because the idea of failure creates a deep wound of inferiority, and the idea of being successful also creates a different kind of disease, that of superiority.Nobody is inferior, and nobody is superior.One is just oneself, incomparable.So, examinations will not have any place. That will change the whole perspective from the future to the present. What you are doing right this moment will be decisive, not five questions at the end of two years. Of thousands of things you will pass through during these two years, each will be decisive; so the education will not be goal-oriented.The teacher has been of immense importance in the past, because he knew he had passed all the examinations, he had accumulated knowledge. But the situation has changed – and this is one of the problems, that situations change but our responses remain the old ones. Now the knowledge explosion is so vast, so tremendous, so speedy, that you cannot write a big book on any scientific subject because by the time your book is complete, it will be out of date; new facts, new discoveries will have made it irrelevant. So now science has to depend on articles, on periodicals, not on books.The teacher was educated thirty years earlier. In thirty years everything has changed, and he goes on repeating what he was taught. He is out of date, and he is making his students out of date. So in my vision the teacher has no place. Instead of teachers there will be guides, and the difference has to be understood: the guide will tell you where, in the library, to find the latest information on the subject.And teaching should not be done in the old-fashioned way, because television can do it in a far better way, can bring the latest information without any problems. The teacher has to appeal to your ears; television appeals directly to your eyes; and the impact is far greater, because the eyes absorb eighty percent of your life situations – they are the most alive part.If you can see something there is no need to memorize it; but if you listen to something you have to memorize it. Almost ninety-eight percent of education can be delivered through television, and the questions that students will ask can be answered by computers. The teacher should be only a guide to show you the right channel, to show you how to use the computer, how to find the latest book. His function will be totally different. He is not imparting knowledge to you, he is making you aware of the contemporary knowledge, of the latest knowledge. He is only a guide.With these considerations, I divide education into five dimensions. The first is informative, like history, geography, and many other subjects which can be dealt with by television and computer together. The second part should be sciences. They can be imparted by television and computer too, but they are more complicated, and the human guide will be more necessary.In the first dimension also come languages. Every person in the world should know at least two languages; one is his mother tongue, and the other is English as an international vehicle for communication. They can also be taught more accurately by television – the accent, the grammar, everything can be taught more correctly than by human beings.We can create in the world an atmosphere of brotherhood: language connects people and language disconnects too. There is right now no international language. This is due to our prejudices. English is perfectly capable, because it is known by more people around the world on a wider scale – although it is not the first language. The first is Spanish, as far as population is concerned. But its population is concentrated, it is not spread all over the world. The second is Chinese; that is even more concentrated, only in China. As far as numbers go, these languages are spoken by more people, but the question is not of numbers, the question is of spread.English is the most widespread language, and people should drop their prejudices – they should look at the reality. There have been many efforts to create languages to avoid the prejudices – the Spanish people can say their language should be the international language because it is spoken by more people than almost any other language…. To avoid these prejudices, languages like Esperanto have been created. But no created language has been able to function. There are a few things which grow, which cannot be created; a language is a growth of thousands of years. Esperanto looks so artificial that all those efforts have failed.But it is absolutely necessary to create two languages – first, the mother tongue, because there are feelings and nuances which you can say only in the mother tongue. One of my professors, S. K. Saxena, a world traveler who has been a professor of philosophy in many countries, used to say that in a foreign language you can do everything, but when it comes to a fight or to love, you feel that you are not being true and sincere to your feelings. So for your feelings and for your sincerity, your mother tongue…which you imbibe with the milk of the mother, which becomes part of your blood and bones and marrow. But that is not enough – that creates small groups of people and makes others strangers.One international language is absolutely necessary as a basis for one world, for one humanity. So two languages should be absolutely necessary for everybody. That will come in the first dimension.The second is the inquiry of scientific subjects, which is tremendously important because it is half of reality, the outside reality. And the third will be what is missing in present-day education, the art of living. People have taken it for granted that they know what love is. They don’t know…and by the time they know, it is too late. Every child should be helped to transform his anger, hatred, jealousy, into love.An important part of the third dimension should also be a sense of humor. Our so-called education makes people sad and serious. And if one third of your life is wasted in a university in being sad and serious, it becomes ingrained; you forget the language of laughter – and the man who forgets the language of laughter has forgotten much of life.So love, laughter, and an acquaintance with life and its wonders, its mysteries…these birds singing in the trees should not go unheard. The trees and the flowers and the stars should have a connection with your heart. The sunrise and the sunset will not be just outside things – they should be something inner, too. A reverence for life should be the foundation of the third dimension.People are so irreverent to life.They still go on killing animals to eat – they call it game; and if the animal eats them – then they call it calamity. Strange…in a game both parties should be given equal opportunity. The animals are without weapons and you have machine guns or arrows…. You may not have thought about why arrows and machine guns were invented: so that you can kill the animal from a faraway distance; to come close is dangerous. What kind of game is this? And the poor animal, defenseless against your bullets….It is not a question of killing the animals; it is a question of being irreverent to life, because all that you need can be provided either by synthetic foods, or by other scientific methods. All your needs can be fulfilled; no animal has to be killed. And a person who kills animals, deep down can kill human beings without any difficulty – because what is the difference? And there are cannibals….Just a few days ago in Palestine, the people demanded that the government allow them to eat human flesh, because there was not enough food – so why waste a dead body? Whether it has died naturally or has been destroyed by the terrorists or has been in an accident, it is good food! And the surprising thing is that the government of Palestine has agreed – they had to. Food is short, and people cannot be left hungry. Today they will be eating the naturally dead or the accidentally dead, or those killed by terrorists; but this is not going on forever. Soon they will start finding ways to kill people – to steal children, because their flesh is thought to be the most delicious.A great reverence for life should be taught, because life is God and there is no other God than life itself, and joy, laughter, a sense of humor – in short a dancing spirit.The fourth dimension should be of art and creativity: painting, music, craftsmanship, pottery, masonry – anything that is creative. All areas of creativity should be allowed; the students can choose. There should be only a few things compulsory – for example an international language should be compulsory; a certain capacity to earn your livelihood should be compulsory; a certain creative art should be compulsory. You can choose through the whole rainbow of creative arts, because unless a man learns how to create, he never becomes a part of existence, which is constantly creative. By being creative one becomes divine; creativity is the only prayer.And the fifth dimension should be the art of dying. In this fifth dimension will be all the meditations, so that you can know there is no death, so that you can become aware of an eternal life inside you. This should be absolutely essential, because everybody has to die; nobody can avoid it. And under the big umbrella of meditation, you can be introduced to Zen, to Tao, to Yoga, to Hassidism, to all kinds and all possibilities that have existed, but which education has not taken any care of. In this fifth dimension, you should also be made aware of the martial arts like aikido, jujitsu, judo – the art of self-defense without weapons – and not only self-defense, but simultaneously a meditation too.The new commune will have a full education, a whole education. All that is essential should be compulsory, and all that is nonessential should be optional. One can choose from the options, which will be many. And once the basics are fulfilled, then you have to learn something you enjoy; music, dance, painting – you have to know something to go inward, to know yourself. And all this can be done very easily without any difficulty.I have been a professor myself and I resigned from the university with a note saying: This is not education, this is sheer stupidity; you are not teaching anything significant.But this insignificant education prevails all over the world – it makes no difference, in the Soviet Union or in America. Nobody has looked for a more whole, a total education. In this sense almost everybody is uneducated; even those who have great degrees are uneducated in the vaster areas of life. A few are more uneducated, a few are less – but everybody is uneducated. But to find an educated man is impossible, because education as a whole does not exist anywhere.Osho,So now this: I'm a fairly good-looking guy with a pretty good tan, and I'm with a beautiful girlfriend, and I'm pretty intelligent. I meditate once in a while and I can play some chords on the guitar; and I know the difference between a pre-frontal lobotomy and a free bottle in front of me; so while everyone else is trying to find out why they can't be themselves, I'd like to know why I can't be Milarepa?Satyadharma, you are perfectly good as you are. You need not be a Milarepa. These are the ideas which education and a competitive society have given to you. You want to be somebody else.You say, “I am a fairly good-looking guy.” Who told you that? It must have been your girlfriend – but every girlfriend says that to every boyfriend. You should not get too impressed by such things.You say “with a pretty good tan.” Particularly here in India, a tan is not pretty good – I hate it! – it’s just beautiful-looking people burning their skin under the sun. A tan is a stupid Western idea. If you want to rest, rest in the shade; don’t have any inferiority complex about your whiteness. The blacks have created the idea that “black is beautiful.” What about white? Not a single white man says “white is beautiful.”And you say, “And I am with a beautiful girlfriend.” And naturally you think these things mean you can be declared another Milarepa. But then everybody else…? Then we will have to name people “Milarepa number 1,” “Milarepa number 2.” And you say, “I meditate once in a while, and I can play some chords on the guitar, and I know the difference between a pre-frontal lobotomy, and a free bottle in front of me; so while everyone else is trying to find out why they can’t be themselves, I would like to know why I can’t be Milarepa.” You can be, but you will be only number two, and that hurts.You can be only a carbon copy, and you don’t know the difficulties of poor Milarepa; you are not aware of his problems.I have heard from reliable sources…Milarepa came home exhausted and terribly upset. “I was late for work today,” he told his wife.“I know,” she replied.“I quarreled with the boss.”“I know.”“He fired me,” he said glumly.“I know,” she answered.“How the hell do you know?”“He told me.”“Ah, screw him!” Milarepa said angrily.“I did,” replied the wife.Hearing this, Milarepa took his guitar and came here.You are perfectly good as you are – Milarepa has his own problems. You have a girlfriend, he has so many – and gets hit from everywhere. When one girlfriend throws him out, he reaches another. Finally he has a permanent girlfriend, Shunyo. When all the girlfriends are angry at him, then he reaches Shunyo. Shunyo is his last resort.I think you should drop this idea. You just be yourself. Milarepa is quite in a mess!Osho,Paul Gauguin, the famous French painter, dropped out of society and lived the remainder of his life on an island in the South Pacific. Shortly before his death, he finished his last masterpiece, entitled “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?” About this he writes, “I have put all my energies into this work before dying – a passion so painful, a vision so clear.” The other morning you spoke to us about being creative, and being joyful with it, not sad. Osho, is there any more you can say about the role of creativity in your vision?Milarepa, Paul Gauguin had to suffer just the way every creator suffers. Creativity is almost like pregnancy. The mother goes for nine months into deep troubled waters, and even after the birth of the child she is not free of responsibility. All creativity is a deep suffering, unless your creativity does not come out of the mind, but out of meditation. When it comes out of meditation, creativity is sharing the joy, sharing the blissfulness that you have.Mind has no joy – it is really a wound, very painful.Paul Gauguin had no idea of any meditation, but he had a tremendous passion, almost a madness to create. And just to create, he dropped out of society, forgot all about his wife and children and responsibilities. He was possessed by the idea of creating. The possession was so total that he could not allow any distraction. But when you are possessed by something, you are working almost as a slave, and slavery cannot bring blissfulness.All the creators in the West have passed through long years of suffering. Many of them have been forced to live in madhouses, and many of them have committed suicide. The suffering became too much, unbearable; they had to end their own life. But still the Western creator, either of meditation or of music, of painting or of dance, has not become aware of why he has to suffer.In the East, the situation is totally different – not a single creator has suffered. In fact only the creators have enjoyed life to its fullest. Not a single creator has been put into a madhouse, not a single creator has committed suicide; but creators have moved deeper into meditation, and many of them have become mystics. From painting, from music, from dance, they have moved deeper into their own being.Western society lives under an affliction – their ignorance about meditation; hence, whatever they do is out of the mind.And mind is not the source of joy.It can only create agony, but never ecstasy.Mind is your hell.So learn to be more meditative, and let your creativity be secondary to your meditativeness. Then you will have a totally different state of being – that of ecstasy; and out of ecstasy, whatever is created has also some flavor of it.In the West, perhaps Gurdjieff is the only man who has divided art into two sections: the objective art and the subjective art. Subjective art is from the mind, and is out of anguish. Objective art – the Taj Mahal, the caves of Ellora and Ajanta, the temples of Khajuraho – has come from meditative people. Out of their love, out of their silence, they wanted to share; it is their contribution to the world.The Western artist has lived under a very heavy burden. It is time that he should be made aware that there is something more beyond mind. First reach to that beyond, and then you can create stars; and they will not only be a great joy to you, they will also be a great joy for those who see them.Just on a full-moon night, sit by the side of the Taj Mahal – don’t do anything, just look at it – and you will find suddenly a silence descending on you, a peace filling your heart. The mind is stopping its constant chattering.An objective piece of art like the Taj Mahal is not just to be seen, but to be lived – and then you will be in a certain way connected with the creators of that beautiful architecture. It was created by Sufi masters. Its very shape somehow creates within you a new blissful space. But the Western tourist comes with the camera, takes a few shots from here and there and runs away to some other place. He does not know how to appreciate an objective art. One has to meditate on it – it may be that thousands of years have passed between the creator of that piece and you. Suddenly that distance disappears; you become part of that creative joy, of that creative dance.Milarepa, creativity is secondary, meditation is basic and fundamental; everything should come out of your meditation. Then it will give you a beatitude, your being a new song, and it will help others to experience something of it. It will depend on their meditativeness.I would like to make one very strange statement: that a great meditator will find more joy, more peace, more blissfulness, than even the creator himself. If a Gautam Buddha sits by the side of the Taj Mahal, then what those Sufi Masters had experienced by creating it will be left far behind. Gautam Buddha will experience something far deeper, far more truthful, far more beautiful.Whether you create, or you observe an objective piece of creativity, meditation should be the key. Without it, mind can only spread on the canvas its nightmares. Most of the paintings of the great painters like Paul Gauguin or Picasso are almost like vomit. They could not contain their agony and suffering – it was so much they threw it on the canvas to get relief. The real objective art is not a relief; it is not a sickness that you want to get rid of. It is a blissfulness that you want to share. And by sharing, it grows; you have more of it, the more it is shared.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 24 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What will be the legal system used in the new commune until all of its members are totally conscious? Will there need to be a system of punishment and reward?All legal systems are nothing but the revenge of society – revenge against those who don’t fit in with the system. According to me, law is not for protection of the just, it is for protection of the crowd mind; whether it is just or unjust does not matter. Law is against the individual and for the crowd. It is an effort to reduce the individual and his freedom, and his possibility of being himself.The latest scientific researches are very revealing. The people who are termed criminals are not responsible for their crimes; their crimes are genetic, they inherit them. Just as a blind man is not responsible for his blindness, a murderer is not responsible for his murderousness. Both inherit the tendency – one of blindness, another of committing murder. Now it is almost an established scientific fact that punishing anybody for any crime is simply idiotic. It is almost like punishing somebody because he has tuberculosis – sending him to jail because he is suffering from cancer. All criminals are sick, psychologically and spiritually both.In my vision of a commune, the courts will not consist of law experts, they will consist of people who understand genetics and how crimes are inherited from generation to generation. They have to decide not for any punishment, because every punishment is wrong – not only wrong, every punishment is criminal. The man who has committed anything wrong has to be sent to the right institution; maybe a hospital, to be operated on, or a psychiatric institution, or a psychoanalytic school. He needs our sympathy, our love, our help. Instead of giving him our sympathy and love, for centuries we have been giving him punishment. Man has committed so much cruelty behind such beautiful names as order, law, justice.The new man will not have any jails and will not have any judges and will not have any legal experts. These are absolutely unnecessary, cancerous growths on the body of society. There will certainly have to be sympathetic scientists; meditative, compassionate beings, to work out why it happened that a certain man committed rape: is he really responsible? According to me, on no account is he responsible. Either he has committed rape because of the priests and the religions teaching celibacy, repression for thousands of years – this is the outcome of a repressive morality – or biologically he has hormones which compel him to commit rape.Although you are living in a modern society, most of you are not contemporaries because you are not aware of the reality that science goes on discovering. Your educational system prevents you from knowing it, your religions prevent you from knowing it, your governments prevent you from knowing it.A man is attracted to a woman and thinks that he is in love. The woman also thinks she is in love. But the scientific truth is that they both have certain biological factors, certain hormones that attract each other. That’s why it is possible to change the sex of one person from man to woman or from woman to man just by changing the hormonal system. A good injection of hormones and you are full of love.The man who is committing rape perhaps has more hormones than those moral people who manage to live with one woman for their whole life, thinking that they are moral. The real fact is that their hormones are very weak; it is enough for their hormones to be satisfied with one woman. A man with more hormones will need more women; so will be the case with a woman. It is not a question of morality, it is a question of biology. A man who commits rape needs all our sympathy, needs a certain operation in which his extra hormones are removed, and he will cool down, calm down – he will become a Gautam Buddha.To punish him is simply an exercise in stupidity. By punishing, you cannot change his hormones. Throwing him in jail, you will create a homosexual, some kind of pervert. In American jails they have done a survey: thirty percent of the inmates are homosexuals. That is according to their confession; we don’t know how many have not confessed. Thirty percent is not a small number. In monasteries the number is bigger – fifty percent, sixty percent. But the responsibility lies with our idiotic clinging to religions which are out of date, which are not supported and nourished by scientific research.The new commune of man will be based on science, not on superstition. If somebody does something which is harmful to the commune as such, then his body has to be looked into; he needs some physiological change or biological change. His mind has to be looked into – perhaps he needs some psychoanalysis. The deepest possibility is that neither the body nor the mind are of much help; that means he needs a deep spiritual regeneration, a deep meditative cleansing.Instead of courts, we should have meditative centers of different kinds, so every unique individual can find his own way. And we will have – instead of law experts, who are simply irrelevant: they are parasites sucking our blood. We need scientific people of different persuasions in the courts, because somebody may have a chemical defect, somebody may have a biological defect, somebody may have a physiological defect. We need all these kinds of experts, of all persuasions and schools of psychology, all types of meditators, and we can transform the poor people who have been victims of unknown forces…and have been punished by us. They have suffered in a double sense.First, they are suffering from an unknown biological force. Secondly, they are suffering at the hands of your judges, who are nothing but butchers, henchmen; your advocates, all kinds of your law experts, your jailers – it is simply so insane that future human beings will not be able to believe it. It is almost the same with the past.Just the other day there was a report from South India that a woman was thought to be having intercourse with the devil. Now the devil has been almost dead for many centuries; suddenly he became alive in that small village. And the villagers took the woman to the priest who declared that she should be hung upside down from a tree and beaten: the devil is still inside her. Somebody informed the police of the nearby town. The police arrived, but the villagers were reluctant…. Two hundred villagers were standing, stopping the police, saying, “You cannot interfere with our religious conceptions.” And they were beating the woman – they killed her! Until she was dead, they were not satisfied. They could not find the devil, but they killed the woman.This used to be the common practice all over the world. Mad people were beaten to cure their madness; people who were schizophrenic, who were thought to be possessed by ghosts, were beaten almost to death – this was thought to be the treatment. Millions of people have died because of your great treatments.Now we can simply say that those people were barbarous, ignorant, primitive. The same will be said about us. I am already saying it: that your courts are barbarous, your laws are barbarous. The very idea of punishment is unscientific. There is nobody in the world who is a criminal; everybody is sick, and needs sympathy and a scientific cure, and half of your crimes will disappear. First, with the disappearance of private property…. Private property creates thieves, dacoits, pickpockets, politicians, priests.You will be surprised to know that just a few days ago a cartoonist was put into jail in the contemporary, educated city of Madras, because he has printed a cartoon in a magazine with the caption that the man who looks like a pickpocket is a cabinet minister; and the man who looks like a dacoit, is the prime minister. There were two men in the cartoon. Immediately, he was caught by the police – and this is called democracy! One cannot even joke, one cannot even laugh. He has not named anybody – but all your politicians are pickpockets, are dacoits. They also need psychiatric treatment, they also need sympathetic psychiatric nursing homes. They have to be cured of their politics.Politics is a disease.Man has suffered from many diseases and he has not even been aware that they are diseases. He has been punishing small criminals and he has been worshipping great criminals. Who is Alexander the Great? – a great criminal; he murdered people on a mass scale. Adolf Hitler alone killed millions of people, but he will be remembered in history as a great leader of man.I received a letter from the president of the Neo-Nazi party saying that I should stop speaking against Adolf Hitler because, “It hurts our religious feeling.” I said, “My God!” I had been receiving letters from Hindus, from Mohammedans, from Christians, from Buddhists, from Jainas. I have been facing hundreds of cases in courts on the same grounds, that I have hurt somebody’s religious feeling – but I had never even dreamt that to speak against Adolf Hitler was going to hurt someone’s religious feelings.And the president of Neo-Nazi party had said, “Adolf Hitler, to us, is not just a great political leader, he is also the reincarnation of the ancient, Old Testament prophet Elijah. Now he will be remembered in history as the great incarnation of the prophet Elijah who killed forty-five million people. Certainly it must have been done according to the will of God. Who are the people you read about in history?Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible, Nadir Shah, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane are all mass scale criminals. But their crimes are so big, perhaps, that you cannot conceive…. They have killed millions of people, burned millions of people alive, but they are not thought of as criminals.And a small pickpocket, who takes away a two rupee note from your pocket will be punished by the court. And perhaps the two rupee note that you were carrying was not authentic at all. But his mother is dying, and he has no money for medicine, and I cannot say that he is a criminal; he is simply a kind-hearted man who loves his mother.Once private property disappears…. And in a commune there is going to be no private property, everything belongs to all; naturally, stealing will disappear. You don’t steal water and accumulate it, you don’t steal air. A commune has to create everything in such abundance that even the retarded person cannot think of accumulating it. What is the point? It is always available, fresh. Money has to disappear from society. A commune does not need money. Your needs should be fulfilled by the commune. All have to produce, and all have to make the commune richer, affluent, accepting the fact that a few people will be lazy. But there is no harm in it.In every family, you will find somebody lazy. Somebody is a poet, somebody is a painter, somebody simply goes on playing on his flute – but you love the person. A certain percentage of lazy people will be respectfully allowed. In fact a commune that does not have lazy people will be a little less rich than other communes which have a few lazy people who do nothing but meditate, who do nothing but go on playing on their guitar while others are toiling in the fields. A little more human outlook is needed; these people are not useless. They may not seem to be productive of commodities, but they are producing a certain joyful, cheerful atmosphere. Their contribution is meaningful and significant.With the disappearance of money as a means of exchange, many crimes will disappear. As religions disappear, with their repressive superstitions and moralities, crimes like rape, perversions like homosexuality, diseases like AIDS will become unheard of. And when from the very beginning every child is brought up with a reverence for life – reverence for the trees because they are alive, reverence for animals, reverence for birds – do you think such a child one day can be a murderer? It will be almost inconceivable.And if life is joyous, full of songs and dances, do you think somebody will desire to commit suicide? Ninety percent of crimes will disappear automatically; only ten percent of crimes may remain, which are genetic, which need hospitalization – but not jails, prisons, not people to be sentenced to death. This is all so ugly, so inhuman, so insane.The new commune, the new man, can live without any law, without any order. Love will be his law, understanding will be his order. Science will be, in every difficult situation, his last resort.Osho,I have not a poem of my own to write to you, so I write others. I have not a song of my own to sing to you, so I sing others. I have nothing to give to you but my old desires, fears, failures, jealousies. My heart aches, for I want to be able to give you something of me, but that I am still trying to find. The heart only knows, my beloved. Please comment.Kendra, if you do not have a poem of your own, there is no need to write others. Send me blank sheets of paper. They will show much more of your heart than words which are borrowed.The only book in the world that I can call holy is a book Sufis have been carrying for almost twelve centuries. The first man who had it used to read it by locking his doors, closing his windows; his disciples were always puzzled, intrigued. They tried in every possible way – even sometimes they went up on the roof, removed a tile – just to see what is written in that book, because that old master never used to open that book before anybody. He used to keep it covered in beautiful cloth, hiding it under his pillow, so even while he was asleep nobody could manage to get to the book.It created more and more temptation. And the day he died, people were not so concerned with his death; they were more concerned to take out the book first and see what was there – “As far as he is concerned, he is dead; he can wait a little for the last funeral rites, but let us see what is in that book.” And they were shocked and surprised, the book was empty. Between those two covers there was not a single word, just empty pages.They went through all the pages, there were almost three hundred pages. They thought there must be something – that man was very clever and cunning, so he must be hiding it somewhere. But there was nothing in the book.And the old man was really very clever, he had not died. He just opened his one eye, and said, “Are you satisfied? I am going to die, don’t be worried. I was just waiting to see the reaction.”He laughed and he died. But he had told to his chief disciple just the day before, “You will be the possessor of the book, because it is the holiest of the holies. It is just the silence and wordless interiority of your being. For twelve centuries continuously, the book has passed from hand to hand, from master to disciple.”One of the Sufis who is very well-known in the West, Idries Shah, tried to publish the book, but no publisher was ready. Every publisher looked here and there and they said, “But there is nothing to publish.”Just to satisfy them, he has written a few lines as an introduction to the book; the history of the book for twelve centuries…the beginning, how it has been transferred from hand to hand, how it has been worshipped, and how it has been read for twelve centuries by great masters. Finally it has been published by a daring publisher, thinking that people may at least use it as a notebook.The Western mind cannot understand a few things, a few things which are absolutely Eastern. Those who understand have been angry at Idries Shah, that he compromised. I myself am angry at the man. There was no need to compromise, the book could have remained unpublished. But just to publish it, he wrote a few pages of introduction, and destroyed the beauty of it, the whole sanctity of it.Kendra, if you cannot sing your own song, be silent. Your silence is far more valuable than the greatest song which you have borrowed from somebody else. It will not be alive, it will not have a heartbeat. It will not be breathing.Your silence will be breathing.Your silence will have a heartbeat to it.Your silence will be alive.And don’t offer me dead things. You say, “I have nothing to give to you but my old desires, fears, failures.” But you don’t give them either. People just talk. They talk; they want to give their fears, their failures, their jealousies, their desires, but nothing reaches to me. I go on waiting and waiting, and they go on enjoying their jealousies, and their desires. If you don’t want to give, don’t say it. If you want to give, then give. And you are not giving any treasures. You are giving all kinds of poisons.But just the idea that you want to give is in itself beautiful. And I don’t care whether you give poisons or treasures, but give. Just don’t go on talking about giving.You say, “My heart aches, for I want to be able to give you something of me.”Kendra, you must be very miserly…something of you? Not even the totality? What will you give to me? Just a hand, which will become a burden to me?There is only one giving, it is never partial. And you cannot give yourself in installments, something today and something tomorrow…slowly, slowly gathering courage, cutting yourself into slices. You are not a loaf of a bread; you are a living being. Either you give yourself in totality, or you don’t give.This is not the case only with you, Kendra, it is the case with many people. They go on talking beautifully, “My heart aches”. I suspect.If you have a headache, I can believe it. But the heartache is a very deep, a very profound feeling. People know heart failures, people don’t know heartache. You can find so many medicines for headache, but have you heard of any medicine for heartache? It is just poetry, borrowed.“My heart aches, for I want to be able to give you something.”First you want to be able…. Can’t you give yourself as you are right now – because I don’t expect from you something very refined, cultured, a diamond cut with great art and polished. No, I love you as you are raw, wild, but simple and just yourself. Don’t wait for becoming able; you will never become able.But this too has been your conditioning by the society, that you can offer yourself only when you are qualified. But in this temple of love, no qualifications are needed. Just the longing to give is enough qualification. Just give yourself, and forget all about it. Don’t remember that you have given yourself, and don’t remind me again and again, “Listen, I have given myself to you.”Give yourself and forget the whole matter. Giving should be simple – so simple that no record should be kept of it, because you are not a kind of income that a record has to be kept. Then income tax officers will come, and I will have to be income taxed, because so many people are coming to me and offering themselves to me – their jealousies, their desires, their angers and their fears. And my income is so much, that I must be taxed…. You simply give! I have never paid any tax, and I am not going to pay any tax, ever.When I was a professor in the university, and my income came to the point that beyond it, it would become taxable, I informed the university, “Now my salary has come to the full point.”They said, “What do you mean? Within the next month, you are going to have an increment.”I said, “Forget all about it, I will not take any increment because with that increment comes taxation. And I hate only one thing in life, that is income tax.”And I never allowed them. They were very much surprised; the vice-chancellor tried to persuade me, even the clerks, the cashiers, said, “Look, this is very crazy; what will people think if they hear about it? The income tax is going to be very little, and if you stop taking increments then your salary will remain stuck always at this point. And you are so young you can reach to the salary of the vice-chancellor without any trouble just by your seniority.”I said, “I am not going anywhere. Just keep it at this point, because above it comes income tax.”Since then, my income is of a totally different kind – fears, anxieties, tensions, anguish; these are not taxable. Why should you be worried first to become able to give? Whatever you are, as you are…I don’t put any conditions on anybody.My love is unconditional, and my acceptance is without asking you to be anything other than you are. In this relaxed attitude, the meeting and merging between the master and the disciple happens; there is no other way.The rabbi was distressed at the lack of generosity among his congregation, and he prayed that the rich should give more charity to the poor.“And has your prayer been answered?” asked his wife.“Half of it was,” replied the rabbi. “The poor are willing to accept.”As far as I am concerned, I am willing to accept. Now it is a question of you – are you willing to give, or are you first waiting to become able to give? If I am ready to accept right now, why waste time, and why wait for tomorrow?Giving yourself will be such a relaxation, such a transformation, such a joy, that you cannot conceive it; you can only experience if you go through the gesture of giving.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 25 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,To me, the concept of loyalty has overtones of duty and honor and belief – all of which represent static, unquestioning attitudes that are rooted in outmoded sentimentality. I love and trust you as my master, and I cannot imagine the rest of my life having any significance except that it be in the service of that love and trust. But that is not my being loyal: it's something I consciously affirm in my life, moment to moment. Would you please talk on loyalty?Maneesha, one very fundamental thing has always to be remembered: man is very clever in creating pseudo-values. The real values demand your totality, demand your whole being; the pseudo-values are very cheap. They look like the real, but they don’t demand you in your totality – just a superficial formality.For example, in place of love, trust, we have created a false value: loyalty – the loyal person is only superficially concerned with love. He goes through all the gestures of love, but he means nothing by them; his heart stays out of his formal gestures.A slave is loyal, but do you think anybody who is a slave, who has been reduced in his humanity, whose whole pride and dignity has been taken away, can love the person who has harmed him so deeply? He hates him, and if the chance arises, he can kill him. But on the surface, he will remain loyal – he has to. It is not out of his joy, it is out of fear; it is not out of love, it is out of a conditioned mind which says that you have to be loyal to your master. It is the loyalty of the dog to his master.Love needs a more total response; it comes not out of duty, but out of your own heartbeats, out of your own experience of joy, out of the desire to share it.Loyalty is something ugly, but for thousands of years it has been a very respectable value because society has enslaved people in different ways. The wife is supposed to be loyal to the husband, to the point that, in this country, millions of women have died with their husband’s death, jumping in the funeral pyre alive, and burning themselves to death. It was so respectable that any woman who could not do it had to live a very condemned life. She became almost an outcast; she was treated only as a servant in her own family. It was concluded that because she could not die with her husband, she was not loyal to him.In fact, just think of it the other way around: not a single man has jumped into the funeral pyre of his wife. Nobody has raised the question, “Does it mean that no husband has ever been loyal to his wife?” But it is a society of double standards: one standard is for the master, the owner, the possessor, and the other standard is for the slave.Love is a dangerous experience, because you are possessed by something which is bigger than you, and it is not controllable – you cannot produce it on order. Once it is gone, there is no way to bring it back; all that you can do is to pretend, be a hypocrite.Loyalty is a totally different matter; it is manufactured by your own mind, it is not something beyond you. It is a training in a particular culture – just like any other training. You start acting; and by and by, you start believing your own acting. Loyalty demands that you should be always, in life or in death, devoted to the person – whether your heart is willing for it or not. It is a psychological way of enslavement.Love brings freedom.Loyalty brings slavery.On the surface, they both look alike; deep down, they are just the very opposite – diametrically opposite. Loyalty is acting, you have been educated for it. Love is wild, its whole beauty is in its wildness. It comes like a breeze with great fragrance, fills your heart, and suddenly where there was a desert there is a garden full of flowers. But you don’t know from where it comes, and you don’t know that there is no way to bring it; it comes on its own and remains as long as existence wills it. And just as it had come one day as a stranger, as a guest, suddenly one day it is gone. There is no way to cling to it, no way to hold it.Society cannot depend on such unpredictable, unreliable experiences. It wants guarantees, securities; hence, it has removed love from life completely – it has placed marriage in its place. Marriage knows loyalty, loyalty to the husband, and because it is formal, it is within your hands…but it is nothing compared to love, it is not even a dew drop of the ocean that love is.But society is very happy with it because it is reliable. The husband can trust you, can trust that tomorrow also you will be as loyal as you are today. Love cannot be trusted. And the strangest phenomenon is that love is the greatest trust – but it cannot be trusted. In the moment, it is total; but the next moment remains open. It may grow within you, it may evaporate from you. The husband wants a wife who is a slave for her whole life. He cannot depend on love; he has to create something looking like love, but manufactured by man’s mind.It is not only in the relationship of love, but in other fields of life, also. Loyalty has been given great respect because it destroys intelligence: the soldier has to be loyal to the nation…. The man who dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – you cannot call him responsible for it, he was simply fulfilling his duty. He was ordered, and he was loyal to his superiors; that is the whole training of armies.For years they train you, so that you become almost incapable of revolt. Even if you see that what is being asked from you is absolutely wrong, still your training has gone so deep to say, “Yes, sir,” that you will do it. I cannot conceive that the man who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a machine. He also had a heart just like you, he also had his wife and children, his old mother and father…he was as much a human being as you are – with a difference. He was trained to follow orders without questioning, and when the order was given, he simply followed it.I have thought again and again about his mind. Is it conceivable that he did not think that this bomb is going to destroy almost two hundred thousand people? Can’t he say, “No”? Is it not better to be shot by the general for not following the order, than to kill two hundred thousand people? Perhaps the idea never occurred to him.The army works in such a way as to create loyalty – it starts with small things. One wonders why every soldier for years has to go for parades and follow stupid orders – left turn, right turn, go backward, go forward – for hours, for no purpose at all. There is a hidden purpose in it. His intelligence is being destroyed. He is being turned into an automaton, into a robot. So when the order comes, “Left turn,” the mind does not ask, “Why?” If somebody else says to you, “Left turn,” you are going to ask, “What nonsense is this? Why should I left turn? I’m going right!” But the soldier is not supposed to doubt, to inquire; he has simply to follow. This is his basic conditioning for loyalty.It is good for the kings and for the generals that armies should be loyal to the point that they function like machines, not like men. It is comfortable for parents that their children are loyal, because a child who is a rebel is a problem. The parents may be wrong, and the child may be right, but he has to be obedient to the parents – that is part of the training of the old man that has existed up to now.I teach you the new man in whom loyalty has no place, but instead intelligence, inquiry, a capacity to say “No.” To me, unless you are capable of saying “No,” your “Yes” is meaningless. Your “Yes” is just recorded on a gramophone record. You cannot do anything; you have to say “Yes” – the “No” simply does not arise in you.Life and civilization would have been totally different if we had trained people to have more intelligence. So many wars would not have happened because people would have asked, “What is the reason? Why should we kill people – people who are innocent?” But they are loyal to one country and you are loyal to another country, and both the countries’ politicians are fighting and sacrificing their people. If the politicians love to fight so much they can have a wrestling match, and people can enjoy it just like any football match.But the kings and the politicians, the presidents and the prime ministers don’t go to war. The simple people, who have nothing to do with killing others, go to war to kill and to be killed. They are rewarded for their loyalty; they are given the Victoria Cross or other kinds of awards – for being inhuman, for being unintelligent, for being mechanical.Maneesha, you asked me, “To me, the concept of loyalty has overtones of duty, and honor, and belief.”It has not only overtones. It is nothing but the combination of all these diseases – belief, duty, respectability. They all are nourishment for your ego. They are all against your spiritual growth, but they are in favor of the vested interests.The priests don’t want you to ask any question about their belief system because they know that they have no answers to give. All belief systems are so false that if questioned they will fall down. Unquestioned, they create great religions with millions of people in their folds.Now the Catholic pope has fifty million people under him, and out of these fifty million people, not a single one inquires, “How can a virgin girl give birth to a child?” That would be sacrilegious! Out of fifty million people, not a single one asks, “What is the evidence that Jesus is the only begotten son of God?” – anybody can claim it. “What is the evidence that Jesus has saved people from misery?” – he could not save himself. But questions like this are embarrassing, and they are simply not raised. Even God is nothing but a hypothesis which religious people have been trying to prove for thousands of years, all kinds of proofs – but all bogus, with no substance, no support from existence. But nobody asks the question.From the very first day of life, people are being trained to be loyal to the belief system in which they were born. It is convenient for the priests to exploit you, it is convenient for the politicians to exploit you, it is convenient for husbands to exploit wives, for parents to exploit children, for teachers to exploit students. For every vested interest, loyalty is simply a necessity. But it reduces the whole of humanity into retardedness.It does not allow questioning, it does not allow doubt, it does not allow people to be intelligent. And a man who is not capable of doubting, of questioning, of saying, “No,” when he feels that the thing is wrong, has fallen below humanity – he has become a subhuman animal.“…all of which represent static, unquestioning attitudes that are rooted in outmoded sentimentality.“I love and trust You as my Master, and I cannot imagine the rest of my life having any significance except that it be in the service of that love and trust.”If love is asked, then it becomes loyalty. If love is given without being asked, if it is your free gift. Then it raises your consciousness.If trust is asked you are being enslaved but if a trust arises in you, something superhuman is growing within your heart.The difference is very small, but of tremendous importance. Asked or ordered, love and trust both become false. When they arise on their own, they have immense intrinsic value. They do not make you a slave, they make you a master of yourself, because it is your love, it is your trust. You are following your own heart. You are not following somebody else, you are not being forced to follow. Out of your freedom is your love, out of your dignity is your trust, and they are both going to make you richer human beings.That is my idea of the new man. He will love, but he will not allow love to be ordered. He will trust, but he will trust according to himself – not according to any scriptures, not according to any social structure, not according to any priest, not according to any politician.To live your life according to your own heart, following its beat, going into the unknown just like an eagle flying across the sun in utter freedom, knowing no limits…it is not ordered. It is its own joy. It is the exercise of one’s own spirituality.“But that is not my being loyal.”Certainly. I would not like anybody to be loyal to me, because I cannot destroy you, and I cannot take away your dignity. I am here to crown you with dignity, to help you achieve your potential to its fullest, to make you a master of your own destiny. I cannot ask loyalty from you, I cannot ask anything – neither love, nor trust, nor loyalty. But if love arises in you, trust grows in you, that is a totally different phenomenon. The whole credit goes to you; it has nothing…. As far as I am concerned you cannot disappoint me, for the simple reason that I am not asking any loyalty. If you fail in your love, if you fail in your trust, you are not disappointing me, you are disappointing yourself; you are not betraying me, you are betraying your own higher values.This is a totally different approach, but this is the way of the new man. And the new man is the only hope for the future.Osho,Lately I feel my life has come to a peak. Living in your presence is such a precious and delicious gift. Every moment is becoming so joyful and contented, but then often the fear of death comes up intense and strong and the fear of having to leave all this beauty, this friendship, and love. You keep on telling us lately that we don't have much time left before this world finishes. How is it possible to relax in this certainty of death?First it is possible to relax only when death is a certainty. Relaxing is difficult when things are uncertain. If you know that you are going to die today, all fear of death will disappear. What is the point of wasting time? You have one day to live: live as intensely as possible, live as totally as possible.It actually happened in a man’s life…. His doctor told him, “You have only six months more to live, not a single day more, so if you want to finish anything, finish it. If you have wanted to do anything, do it.”The man was very rich, and he always had an idea to go around the world to visit all the beautiful places, but there were so many problems that he was continuously postponing it. Now there was no time to postpone. He ordered beautiful clothes to be made for him…. People had never known him so extravagant: he was eating the best food, he purchased the best house in the town, he closed all his businesses. What was the need to keep them? For six months he had more than enough – he could live like a king.He went around the world, visiting all the beautiful places, all the beautiful people of the world. In fact, he simply forgot to die. By the time he was back home, six months had passed a long time before. He went to the doctor to thank him.The doctor said, “Are you still alive? How did you manage – because the disease was such that you were going to die within six months.”The man said, “Once it became certain that I was going to die, death was no longer a problem but a certainty. I had six months to live, so I wanted to live as multidimensionally as possible. And by living so totally and so intensely, perhaps I forgot to die at the right time.”The doctor checked him – his disease had disappeared. These six months had been of such relaxed, deep, joyful enjoyment that the disease had to disappear!So the first thing: The certainty of death is one of the most fortunate things. And death has never been so certain – so certain for the whole humanity. In fact, people should stop creating war materials. Instead of fighting with their neighbors, they should start singing and dancing with them. The time is so short, you cannot afford to fight. People should forget all their differences of religion, and Communism, Socialism and Fascism. All these differences are good when you have enough time – but time is very short. You cannot afford all these differences of being Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan.Just the shortage of time and the certainty of a global death can bring a transformation. Perhaps you may find yourself in the same position as this man, that the world stops being divided into nations, being divided into religions, continuously fighting and we start, for the first time, enjoying this beautiful planet together.Death may not come. death cannot come to people who live very intensely and very totally. And even if it comes, those people who have lived totally, welcome it because it is a great relief. They are tired of living, they lived so totally, so intensely, so death comes like a friend. Just as night comes after the whole day’s hard work as a great relaxation, as a beautiful sleep, so does death. Death has nothing ugly about it; you cannot find anything cleaner.You are asking, “Lately I feel my life has come to a peak.”Remember, there are peaks beyond peaks – just look ahead. Don’t get satisfied with what you have achieved. You need a divine discontentment. Every achievement should become a deep longing for something more, and greater. And there are peaks beyond peaks, unending, skies beyond skies. It is just that you need strong wings.It is good that you are feeling you have come to the highest peak, but don’t make it the end of your journey. Make it the beginning of a new journey. Every peak has to be made the beginning of a new journey – a search for a higher peak.“Living in your presence is such a precious and delicious gift. Every moment is becoming so joyful and contented, but then often the fear of death comes up.”That means your joy, your blissfulness, your contentedness is not total – it leaves spaces, loopholes, from which the fear of death comes in. The fear of death simply shows….Dance a little faster, live a little faster.I have never forgotten…in Ahmedabad I used to stay at Jayantibhai’s house. We had to cross a bridge, and as the bridge came near he would start driving faster, because there was a big board by the side of the bridge advertising Gold Spot. It said, “Live a little hot, sip a Gold Spot.”I asked Jayantibhai, “What is the matter? Suddenly, on this bridge, you start going fast.”He said, “Looking at that board, ‘Live a little hot,’ I start going fast!”If the fear of death comes in, that means there are a few loopholes which are not filled with living. So those fears of death are very indicative and helpful – show you that your dance has to go a little faster, that you have to burn the torch of your life from both ends together.Dance so fast that the dancer disappears, and only the dance remains.Then it is not possible for any fear of death to visit you.“And the fear of having to leave all this beauty, this friendship, and love.”If you are totally herenow, who cares about tomorrow? Tomorrow will take care of itself. Jesus is right when he prays to God, “Lord, give me my daily bread.” He is not even asking for tomorrow, just today is enough unto itself. And you have to learn that each moment has a completion.The fear of having to leave it all comes only because you are not completely living in the moment; otherwise there is no time, and there is no mind, and there is no space.For more than three decades I have never thought about tomorrow. And you cannot find a more simple life than mine. For my whole life I have been sleeping in the afternoon, and it happens often that Nirvano has to remind me when she wakes me up in the afternoon, because if nobody wakes me I am not going to wake up by myself – why bother? She has to remind me, “This is afternoon, not morning,” because I often forget.It happens once in a while that she forgets to remind me…I have gone into the bathroom and started taking my shower, getting ready for the morning talk and only when the cold water shook me a little I remembered, “My God! What am I doing?”But anyway, I enjoyed the shower!You are also saying, “You keep on telling us lately that we don’t have much time left before this world finishes. How is it possible to relax in this certainty of death?”In fact, my continuous emphasis that there is a possibility of this whole world being destroyed is to help you to live intensely right now because there may not be any tomorrow.You are in a very special position in the history of mankind. People have always had time to postpone – you don’t have. Your situation is unique. Use it – not for worrying, because that is not going to stop the world from ending. Use whatever time is left to live so deeply that ten years become almost equivalent to one hundred years.Once a merchant was asked, “How old are you?”And he said, “Three hundred and sixty years old.”The man could not believe it. He said, “Please, repeat it. Perhaps I have not heard rightly.”The merchant shouted and said, “Three hundred and sixty years old.”The man said, “Forgive me, but I cannot believe it. You don’t look more than sixty!”The merchant said, “You are also right. As far as the calendar is concerned, I am sixty. But as far as my life is concerned I have lived six times more than anybody else. In sixty years I have managed to live three hundred and sixty years.”It depends on intensity.There are two ways of living. One is the way of the buffalo – it lives horizontally, in a single line. The other way is of a buddha. He lives vertically, in height and in depth. Then each moment can become an eternity. And unless you learn the art of transforming each moment into an eternity, you have not been with me – you missed me.The world may end, may not end, that is not my concern. But I will go on insisting that it is going to end for a simple reason: to wake you up. And don’t waste your time in trivia, but live, sing, dance, love as totally and overflowingly as you are capable of; and no fears will interfere, and you will not be worried what will happen tomorrow. Today is enough unto itself. Lived, it is so full; it leaves no space to think about anything else. Unlived, worries come, fears come.It is not only me who is emphasizing the fact that the world is coming to an end. It is just a coincidence that alongside my insistence on it, the world situation is very supportive of what I am saying. But Jesus Christ, two thousand years ago, was saying the same thing, Gautam Buddha, twenty-five centuries ago, was saying the same thing.It is an old device to wake you up. Unless you know that your house is on fire, you are not going to run out of it. And Jesus and Gautam Buddha were using it as a device, without any corresponding reality.I am also using it as a device, but it is not only a device. For the first time, the world is really in a position to commit a global suicide. If Gautam Buddha managed to make two dozen people enlightened, then it should be very easy for me to make at least two hundred people enlightened – very easy, because his device was only fictitious.My device is not fictitious, it is a reality. The reality is supporting my device with totality.You just live, love, and make each moment a deep ecstasy. All fears may disappear. And if the whole humanity listens to me, perhaps the world may not end, perhaps we may continue. The old man may die and a totally new man with fresh values may arise to replace him.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 26 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The other morning I came across this passage from Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali which touched something deep inside me. “Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend. But I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room. The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death. I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy. Yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.” Would you please comment?Rabindranath Tagore is the very heart of this country. He is the most contemporary man, and yet the most ancient too. His words are a bridge between the modern mind and the ancientmost sages of the world. In particular, Gitanjali is his greatest contribution to human evolution, to human consciousness. It is one of the rarest books that has appeared in this century. Its rarity is that it belongs to the days of the upanishads – nearabout five thousand years before Gitanjali came into existence.It is a miracle in the sense that Rabindranath is not a religious person in the ordinary sense. He is one of the most progressive thinkers – untraditional, unorthodox – but his greatness consists in his childlike innocence. And because of that innocence, perhaps he was able to become the vehicle of the universal spirit, in the same way as the upanishads of old are.He is a poet of the highest category, and also a mystic. Such a combination has happened only once or twice before – in Kahlil Gibran, in Friedrich Nietzsche, and in Rabindranath Tagore. With these three persons, the whole category is finished. In the long history of man, it is extraordinary…. There have been great poets and there have been great mystics. There have been great poets with a little mysticism in them, and there have been great mystics who have expressed themselves in poetry – but their poetry is not great. Rabindranath is in a strange situation.I have heard about a man who loved two beautiful women and was always in trouble, because even one woman is trouble enough. Both of the women wanted to know whom he loved the most. They took him for a ride on the lake in a motorboat, and just in the middle of the lake they stopped the boat and they told the man: “It has to be decided, because it is heavy on our hearts…. Once we know we will become slowly, slowly tolerant about it; we may accept it. But remaining in the dark and always thinking about it has become a wound.”The man said, “What is the matter? Ask directly.”Both the women said together: “Our question is, ‘Whom do you love the most?’“The man fell into deep silence – it was such a strange situation in the middle of the lake – but he must have been a man of great humor. He said, “I love each of you more than the other.” And both women were satisfied. That’s what they wanted.It is difficult to say about Rabindranath whether he is a greater poet or a greater mystic. He is both – greater than each – and to be in the twentieth century….Rabindranath was not a man confined to this country. He was a world traveler, educated in the West, and he was continually moving around the world in different countries – he loved to be a wanderer. He was a citizen of the universe, yet his roots were deep in this country. He may have flown far away like an eagle across the sun, but he kept on coming back to his small nest. And he never lost track of the spiritual heritage, no matter how covered with dust it may have become. He was capable of cleaning it and making it a mirror in which you can see yourself.His poems in Gitanjali are offerings of songs to God. That is the meaning of Gitanjali: offerings of songs. He used to say, “I have nothing else to offer. I am just as poor as a bird, or as rich as a bird. I can sing a song every morning fresh and new, in gratefulness. That is my prayer.”He never went to any temple, he never prayed in the traditional ritual way. He was born a Hindu, but it would not be right to confine him to a certain section of humanity, he was so universal. He was told many times, “Your words are so fragrant with religion, so radiant with spirituality, so alive with the unknown that even those who do not believe in anything more than matter become affected, are touched. But you never go to the temple, you never read the scriptures.”His answer is immensely important for you. He said, “I never read the scriptures; in fact I avoid them, because I have my own experience of the divine, and I don’t want others’ words to be mixed with my original, authentic, individual experience. I want to offer God exactly what is my heartbeat. Others may have known – certainly, others have known – but their knowledge cannot be my knowledge. Only my experience can satisfy me, can fulfill my search, can give me trust in existence. I don’t want to be a believer.”These are the words to be remembered: “I don’t want to be a believer; I want to be a knower. I don’t want to be knowledgeable; I want to be innocent enough so that existence reveals its mysteries to me. I don’t want to be worshipped as a saint.” And the fact is, that in this whole century, there was nobody else more saintly than Rabindranath Tagore – but he refused to be recognized as a saint.He said, “I have only one desire – to be remembered as a singer of songs, as a dancer, as a poet who has offered all his potential, all his flowers of being, to the unknown divineness of existence. I don’t want to be worshipped; I consider it a humiliation…ugly, inhuman, and removed from the world completely. Every man contains God; every cloud, every tree, every ocean is full of godliness, so who is to worship whom?”It reminds me of another great mystic, Nanak, on whose songs Sikhism is founded. He was not the founder of it – it was not a deliberate act on his part. He simply went on singing his songs with his one disciple, Mardana, who was playing the sitar as he was singing.Nanak is the only mystic of this country who went all over the country, and beyond the boundaries of the country, too. He reached Kaaba, the holy place of the Mohammedans. It was evening and he was tired and his disciple, Mardana, made a bed for him. But the priests of Kaaba were very angry. They had heard about Nanak because he had been singing in the nearby villages, and thousands of people were influenced by his songs. They were waiting for him to come one day. But they had never thought that he would do something so sacrilegious: he was sleeping, keeping his feet toward the holy stone of Kaaba. The priests came….The story goes this way: They said to Nanak, “We have heard that you are a spiritual man, but what kind of spiritual man are you? You can’t even recognize a small thing: that your feet should not be toward the holy Kaaba.” Nanak laughed. The story is beautiful; whether it is true, whether it is historical or not, it does not matter – it is significant, immensely meaningful. Nanak said, “You turn my feet toward any place which is not holy. I am in a difficulty, I have to put my feet somewhere. Kaaba is holy, but the remaining universe is not unholy. You turn my feet.”The priest turned his feet, and wherever they turned his feet, they found the Kaaba also moved in that direction. That may be fiction, but a fiction worth loving, significant; it may not be a fact, but it is a truth. The stone of Kaaba may not have moved, but the priests must have recognized that they were being stupid. The whole existence is holy…what is the point? They moved in a circle and finally they gave an apology and kept Nanak’s feet toward Kaaba.Rabindranath never went to any temple, never worshipped any God, was never, in a traditional way, a saint, but to me he is one of the greatest saints the world has known. His saintliness is expressed in each of his words.The lines that you have quoted are very pregnant: Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.He is saying something not only about himself, but about all human consciousness. Such people don’t speak about themselves; they speak about the very heart of all mankind.Obstinate are the trammels…. The hindrances are great, the chains that prevent my freedom – I have become too attached to them. They are no more chains to me; they have become my ornaments. They are made of gold, they are very precious. But my heart aches, because on the one hand I want freedom, and on the other hand I cannot break the chains that prevent me from being free. Those chains, those attachments, those relationships have become my life. I cannot conceive of myself without my beloved, without my friends. I cannot conceive of myself absolutely alone, in deep silence. My songs have also become my fetters, so My heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want…This is the situation of every human being. It is difficult to find a man whose heart does not want to fly like a bird in the sky, who would not like to reach to the faraway stars, but who also knows his deep attachment with the earth. His roots are deep in the earth. His split is that he is attached to his imprisonment, and his deepest longing is for freedom. He is divided against himself.This is the greatest anguish, anxiety. You cannot leave the world that chains you; you cannot leave those who have become your hindrances in life, because they are also your attachments, your joys. They are also in some way a nourishment for your pride. You can neither leave them, nor can you forget that you don’t belong to this world, that your home must be somewhere else, because in your dreams you are always flying, flying to faraway places.Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it, I feel ashamed. Why should one feel ashamed to hope for freedom? – because nobody is preventing you. You can be free this very moment. But those attachments…they have gone very deep in you; they have become almost your very existence. They may be bringing misery to you, but they also bring moments of happiness. They may be creating chains for your feet, but they also give you moments of dance.It is a very strange situation every intelligent man has to face: he is rooted in the earth and he wants wings to fly in the sky. He cannot be uprooted because the earth is his nourishment, his food. And he cannot stop dreaming of wings, because that is his spirit, that is his very soul, that is what makes him a human being.No animal feels the anguish; all animals are utterly satisfied as they are. Man is the only animal who is intrinsically discontented; hence, the feeling of shame – because he knows, “I can be free.”I have always loved an ancient story: A man, a great man, a fighter for freedom was traveling into the mountains. He stayed in a caravanserai for the night. He was amazed that in the caravanserai there was a beautiful parrot in a golden cage, continually repeating, “Freedom! Freedom!” And the serai was in such a place that when the parrot repeats the word Freedom! it goes on echoing in the valley, in the mountains.The man thought: I have seen many parrots, and I have thought they must be desiring to be free from those cages…but I have never seen such a parrot whose whole day, from the morning to the evening when he goes to sleep, is spent in asking for freedom. He had an idea. In the middle of the night he got up and opened the door of the cage. The owner was fast asleep and he said to the parrot, he whispered, “Now get out.”But he was very surprised that the parrot was clinging to the bars of the cage. He told him again and again: “Have you forgotten about freedom? Just get out! The door is open and the owner is fast asleep; nobody will ever know. You just fly into the sky; the whole sky is yours.”But the parrot was clinging so deeply, so hard, that the man said, “What is the matter? Are you mad?” He tried to take the parrot out with his own hands, but the parrot started hitting him, and at the same time started shouting, “Freedom! Freedom!” The valleys in the night echoed and re-echoed…but the man was also stubborn, he was a freedom fighter. He pulled the parrot out, and threw him into the sky; and he was very satisfied, although his hand was hurt. The parrot had attacked him as forcefully as he could, but the man was immensely satisfied that he had made a soul free. He went to sleep.In the morning, as the man was becoming awake, he heard the parrot shouting, “Freedom! Freedom!” He thought perhaps the parrot must be sitting on a tree, or on a rock. But when he came out, the parrot was sitting in the cage. The door was open.I have loved the story, because it is very true. You may like to be free, but the cage has certain securities, safeties. In the cage the parrot has no need to worry about food, has no need to worry about enemies, has no need to worry about a thing in the world. It is cozy, it is golden. No other parrot has such a valuable cage.Your power, your riches, your prestige – all are your cages. Your soul wants to be free, but freedom is dangerous.Freedom has no insurance.Freedom has no security, no safety.Freedom means walking on the edge of a razor – every moment in danger, fighting your way. Every moment is a challenge from the unknown. Sometimes it is too hot, and sometimes it is too cold – and nobody is there to take care of you.In the cage, the owner was responsible. He used to cover the cage, when it was cold, with a blanket; he used to put an electric fan close by when it was too hot.Freedom means tremendous responsibility; you are on your own and alone. Rabindranath is right: Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it, I feel ashamed, – because it is not a question of hope; it is a question of taking a risk.I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend. But I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee…. In the world of freedom, in the experience of freedom, I am certain there is priceless wealth.” But this certainty is also a projection of your desire, of your longing. How can you be certain? You would like to be certain. You know that longing for freedom is there. It cannot be for a futile freedom; it must be for something rich, something priceless. You are creating a certainty to gather courage so that you can take the jump into the unknown.…and that thou art my best friend. But these are all beautiful dreams, these are hopes; the certainty is your own cage, its security. But I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room. The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death. These are beautiful ideas in the mind.I hate it, yet hug it in love. You know your body is going to die. In fact, your body is made of dead material; it is already dead. It seems alive because something alive is inside it. It radiates warmth and aliveness, because of a guest inside you. The moment that guest has flown away, the reality of the body will be revealed to you.Rabindranath says, The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death. Our bodies are made of dust and death. I hate it, and yet hug it in love. But when you fall in love with a woman, then two skeletons hug each other; both know that the skin is only a covering of a skeleton. If you could see each other in real nudity – not only without clothes, but without the skin, too, because that is the real clothing – then you would be shocked, and you would escape as fast as possible from the beloved with whom you were promising to live forever and forever. You would not even look back; you would not even like to be reminded of the phenomenon.It happened in the court of one Mohammedan emperor of India, Shah Jehan. He was in love with a woman, but the woman was not willing to marry him.He was a gentleman; otherwise he could have forced her. He tried to persuade her, but she was in love with a bodyguard of Shah Jehan. And when he found out about it, he was really enraged. They were both immediately caught and brought to the court.Shah Jehan was going to cut off the heads of both, then and there. But his prime minister, who was a very old man – he had been his father’s prime minister and Shah Jehan respected him just like his father – said, “Don’t do that. Be a little wiser; that is not enough punishment. I will give them the right punishment.” He ordered that both should be tied together naked, in a hug, and then chained to a pillar in the court. The other members of the court could not believe it – what kind of punishment is this? This seems to be a reward; that’s what they always wanted, to hug each other. But they were wrong.That old man really had a great psychological insight. Those two lovers also felt, what kind of punishment is this? – this is a reward. They hugged each other with great love.They were tied by a rope, so they could not escape from each other; then they were tied to a pillar. How long can you hug somebody? Five minutes, seven minutes, half an hour…? After twenty-four hours they hated each other…because they pissed on each other – they had to, there was no other way. They were perspiring, their body smells filled the place, and there was no way to escape. After twenty-four hours the old man said, “Now give then their clothes and make them free.”And as they got their clothes, they rushed in opposite directions, never to meet each other again; they had met enough! Twenty-four hours…it is good for half a minute to hug somebody, or maybe one minute, but more than that and you will start feeling restless.My grandfather used to love me very much. But in the evening I started to avoid him, because he would pull me to his bed, cover me with the blanket, hug me inside the blanket…and he was very old, so sleeping was not the question. I would wait until he started snoring so that I could slip out, but his sleep was very shallow – in old age it becomes very shallow – and he would say, “What? Are you going out?”I would say, “I have to live my whole life; you have lived enough. In the day your love is good, but this night affair does not suit me at all.”He was a chain smoker, so his breath was so smelly of tobacco and he would cough the whole night, and he would go on pulling me closer to him.I said, “This is not love – you will kill me!”But he made me learn one lesson: never allow anybody in your bed. I don’t allow anybody even in my room. My room is locked from outside; even if I want to get out, I cannot get out. I remember him and just cover myself and go to sleep.The shroud that covers me, is a shroud of dust and death. I hate it, yet hug it in love.Such is the schizophrenia of man, the split personality of man. His house is divided against itself; hence, he cannot find peace.My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy. Yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted. These lines can be understood only if I remind you of another poem of Rabindranath in the same book, Gitanjali.In that other poem, he says, “I have been seeking and searching God for as long as I can remember, for many many lives, from the very beginning of existence. Once in a while I have seen him by the side of a faraway star, and I have rejoiced and danced that the distance, although great, is not impossible to reach. And I have traveled and reached to the star; but by the time I reached the star, God has moved to another star. And it has been going on for centuries.“The challenge is so great, that I go on hoping against hope…I have to find him, I am so absorbed in the search. The very search is so intriguing, so mysterious, so enchanting that God has become almost an excuse – the search has become itself the goal.“And to my surprise, one day I reached a house in a faraway star with a small board in front of it, saying ‘This is the house of God.’ My joy knew no bounds – so finally I have arrived! I rushed up the steps, many steps, that led to the door of the house. But as I was coming closer and closer to the door, a fear suddenly appeared in my heart. As I was going to knock, I became paralyzed with a fear that I had never known, never thought of, never dreamt of. The fear was: if this house is certainly the house of God, then what will I do after I have found him?“Now searching for God has become my very life; to have found him will be equivalent to committing suicide. And what am I going to do with him? I had never thought of all these things before. I should have thought before I started the search: what am I going to do with God?“I took my shoes in my hands, and silently and very slowly stepped back, afraid that God may hear the noise and may open the door and say, ‘Where are you going? I am here, come in!’ And as I reached the steps, I ran away as I have never run before; and since then I have been again searching for God, looking for him in every direction – and avoiding that house where he really lives.“Now I know that that house has to be avoided. And I continue the search, enjoy the very journey, the pilgrimage.”The insight in the story is so tremendous. There are seekers of truth who have never thought, what will I do with truth? You cannot eat it, you cannot sell it; you cannot become a president because you have the truth. At the most, if you have the truth, people will crucify you.He is right when he says, My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy. Yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted – because these things are good to talk about: God, truth, good, beauty. It is good to write treatises on them, have universities confer PhD’s, let the Nobel awarding committee give you a Nobel prize. These things are good for talking, for writing, but if you really get to experience them, you will be in trouble. That’s what he is saying: I am afraid that my prayer may be granted.It is good that God is deaf. He does not hear prayers; otherwise you all will be in trouble. Your prayer will create your trouble, because in prayers you will be so romantic, asking great things which you cannot live by, which will become very heavy, and will interfere in your so-called life – which is going on smoothly, although in misery.Truth becomes a cross; life becomes heavy. Truth becomes poison to a Socrates. Truth becomes death to Al-Hillaj Mansoor. Truth becomes crucifixion to Jesus Christ. And you pray, “God, give me truth. Give me qualities which are divine, godly.” But God is deaf on purpose – so that your prayers cannot be heard and you can enjoy both, your miserable life and your beautiful prayers. The prayers will not be heard – you can remain jealous, angry, full of hate, full of egoism, and go on praying to God, “Make me humble; and because ‘blessed are the meek,’ make me meek.” – but on purpose.It is not written in any scripture, but I tell you on my personal authority that after creating the world in six days, the last thing God did was destroy his ears. Since then, we has never heard anything; and since then, neither have we heard anything about him.So it is perfectly good: in the morning you go to the temple or the church or the mosque, have a beautiful prayer, ask great things – knowing perfectly well that he is deaf – and go on being your ugly, miserable self. Then tomorrow morning again have a good prayer…. This is such a good settlement, a good arrangement.Rabindranath in his poem is indicating a tremendous truth: Do you really want God? Do you really want truth? Do you really want silence? If you ask, and you are honest, you will feel ashamed. You will have to accept that you don’t really want…. You are only pretending to meditate – because you know you have been meditating for many years, and nothing happens. There is no fear; you can meditate, nothing happens.Once something starts happening, then there is trouble. once something starts growing in your life that is not growing in the hearts of the crowd that surrounds you, you will be a stranger, you will be an outsider. And the crowd never forgives strangers, the crowd never forgives outsiders; it destroys them. It has to destroy them just for its own peace of mind.A man like Jesus Christ is a continual nuisance, because he reminds you that you can also be of the same beauty, of the same grace, of the same truth, and it hurts. He makes you feel inferior, and nobody wants to feel inferior.And there are only two ways not to feel inferior: one is to become superior; that is a hard way, and a long way – dangerous, because you will have to walk alone. The simple way is, destroy that superior man. Then the whole crowd is of equal people. Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior. All are cunning, all are cheats, all are criminals in their own way. All are jealous, all are ambitious. They are all in the same boat, and they understand each other’s language. And nobody creates any fuss about truth, about God, about meditation.People are happy without a Gautam Buddha, without a Socrates, without a Zarathustra, because these people are like high peaks of mountains and you look so tiny, so pygmy – it hurts. They say that camels never go near the mountains. They have chosen to live in the desert, because in the desert they are the walking mountains, but near the mountains, they will look like ants – and that hurts.The easiest way is to forget all about mountains, to say, “These mountains are all mythological, fictitious; the reality is the desert.” So you enjoy the desert, you enjoy your ego – and you also enjoy the prayer, “God, please free me of the ego, make me humble,” knowing perfectly well that he does not hear, that no prayer is answered. You can pray for anything without fear because you will remain the same and you will also have the satisfaction of praying for great things.That’s why people, without becoming religious, become Christians, become Hindus, become Mohammedans. They are not religious people at all; these are strategies to avoid being religious. A religious person is simply religious; he is neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian, nor Buddhist – there is no need. He is truthful, he is sincere, he is compassionate, he is loving, he is human – so human that he almost represents the divine in the world.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 27 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,More and more easily do I feel filled with you during discourse, and thoughts tend not to intrude as much as they used to. Still, the fact remains that I don't carry the serenity and bliss that I feel in your presence into my daily activities. And until there is no difference between how I feel near you and away, I haven't got it, have I? It feels as if all other questions are simply a distraction to avoid this homework. Is this so?The difference that you feel in my presence from when you are doing something alone is going to remain to the very last moment. The explosion will come, but there is no way to say when. The time will come certainly when there will be no difference: either you are in my presence or you are alone – it will be the same. It becomes the same only when, in your aloneness also, you start feeling my presence. When you are doing other things, they are not distractions; you are doing them for me.Love is full of mysteries, but even this much is more than one can expect because it is a right becoming – you have started feeling me. Now that feeling will continue to grow on its own; you have to be just nourishing it. Don’t make it a problem. Rather accept it as a necessity of growth.The first flowers of the spring have come. All the flowers will be coming soon. And one should not expect, one should rather learn to enjoy that which is happening. That allows more happenings, makes you available, and open and vulnerable for greater possibilities.The real problem is when nothing is happening. You can feel no difference at two points: if in my presence, you don’t feel anything different in your being – it feels just the same as you are when you are alone, or with others, or doing something else – this is the lowest point. There is no difference. On the highest point, also, there will be no difference. It is a question of how much deeper your melting and your merging becomes. It does not depend on you. There is nothing like homework – you cannot do anything…you can only wait, you can only hope, you can only trust. And existence brings everything to your door.Eighty-year-old Goldstein marries a very beautiful and attractive twenty-year-old girl. All his friends and business partners, lustlessly married since ages, declare him foolish. “How can you in your old age expect her to be faithful to you?” they ask.Shrewd old Goldstein smiles and says, “Why shouldn’t I expect it? I don’t understand your concern since it has been my basic principle all my life, that it is better to have only a twenty-five percent share in an excellent business than a hundred percent share in a lousy one.”Even a twenty-five percent share in a good business is great. Don’t ask for a hundred percent in a lousy one. That twenty-five percent is happening. The seventy-five percent will also follow, but it is a question of happening – it is not part of doing. And it is good that there are things men cannot do, but can only be a recipient of. Only those things are valuable which you cannot do, but which happen. They don’t have a price, but they have value. Things that you can do have a price, but they don’t have any value.Osho,It's hilarious! I keep drinking and drinking, and you are the one who is drunk. Could you please pass the bottle – no, the whole ocean – once more?Okay. Satyadharma…an American, an Englishman, and a Frenchman are on a boat. After a while, the boat begins to sink. The Englishman, being a gentleman, says, “Women and children first.”The American says, “Fuck them!”The Frenchman says, “Do we have time?”You are drunk; but no drunk accepts that he’s drunk, he goes on asking for more bottles.In a pub one night, a drunk was creating too much nuisance. He was utterly drunk, and still was asking: “More bottles.”The owner of the pub said, “Absolutely no!” and called his servants to throw the man out of the door. He said, “It is more than you can absorb. Come again tomorrow, but tonight just go home and rest.”The drunk was feeling very thirsty – that is one of the problems in drinking: the more you drink, the more thirsty you feel. He went staggering a few steps and came back in from the back door and asked for a few bottles.The owner said to the servants, “Throw him back out again.”He said, “It is strange…do you own all the pubs in the city?”Satyadharma, you are saying, “It is hilarious….” It is! “I keep drinking and drinking, and…you are the one who is drunk.” If I was not drunk, from where would you go on drinking and drinking?Here you are sitting with all kinds of drunkards. Even if you come sober, just sitting with these people, soon you will start feeling something hilarious is happening. Even the air is very heavy; just breathing with all these people is enough for amateurs to get drunk. And don’t ask for the bottle; the whole ocean will be delivered to you – just become capable of absorbing it.Our capacity in every dimension is very limited. And as far as drinking is concerned – particularly drinking joy, ecstasy, blissfulness – our capacity is very limited. We soon come to a point beyond which we cannot move. The fear of being lost…one has to learn to drop the fear, and to learn the art of being lost.When Bodhidharma reached China, Emperor Wu had come to the border to receive him because his name and his fragrance had reached far ahead of him. Bodhidharma, in the tradition of Gautam Buddha, is one of the rarest flowers…even Gautam Buddha may sometimes feel jealous of him, although Bodhidharma is his disciple.Bodhidharma came with one shoe on his foot and another shoe on his head. Emperor Wu could not trust his eyes, and could not trust…he has heard so much about the man, and he seems to be absolutely mad. But he was a man of very great culture, etiquette; he was an emperor. He tried to avoid seeing that shoe on the head. It was not right to inquire about it, but the temptation was becoming greater and greater…what is the matter? He talked about God, and he talked about truth, but all the time inside he was thinking about the shoe.Finally Bodhidharma said, “Don’t ask unnecessary questions; ask the necessary question. I can see a shoe in your heart. You cannot hide from me. My eyes are almost capable of penetrating into the thickest skull: ‘Why are you keeping that shoe on your head’?”The emperor was amazed: This is too much. This man seems to be either drunk or mad, but certainly he has a method in his madness. He is carrying the shoe on his head…. But he is not wrong – I am suppressing the shoe in my heart, in my mind; my whole being wants to ask only one question: “Why are you carrying this shoe?” And when he is insisting, “Ask the real question,” it is better to ask it; otherwise, I will not be able to sleep.He said, “Forgive me, it is very embarrassing.”Bodhidharma said, “Nothing is embarrassing. You simply ask.”The emperor said, “I am trying to avoid that question, and just to avoid it I’m asking all other questions – I don’t mean anything. But you seem to be a strange fellow; you have caught me red-handed. I have not asked, but you have heard the question: “Why are you carrying the shoe on your head?”Bodhidharma said, “Now we can talk. Now you are being simple, innocent – now you are not repressing. I am carrying this shoe on my head so that you can ask a real question. Now there is no need….” He removed the shoe, put it on his foot, and he said, “Now you have to understand: start from the very beginning; don’t start asking questions about God. You seem to be a born shoemaker.”The emperor was very angry and shocked. Obviously this man was making fun of him, but he still tried to hide his embarrassment. His whole court was present, and they were all trying to hide their laughter. He asked, “Who are you?” – because that is one of the most significant and most ancient, spiritual questions.Bodhidharma said, “As far as I am concerned, I don’t know. Do you know who you are?”The emperor said, “This is something I have come to inquire from you because I don’t know.”Bodhidharma said, “You are ignorant; I also don’t know, but I am innocent. Just now, go back. Sleep will not be possible because you will have to figure out why you are ignorant and I am innocent – and for the same reason.”The emperor returned home very puzzled. The man had a charisma: he could not forget his eyes, he could not forget his presence. He could not sleep the whole night; he could not make the distinction how one person saying, “I don’t know” is ignorant and another person saying, “I don’t know” is innocent.He came back again. Bodhidharma said, “You are knowledgeable; you have never recognized the fact that you don’t know yourself – you have always believed that you know. At least, you have pretended to the world that you know. It is out of ignorance.“I have searched deeply into myself. I don’t know because there is nobody to be known. I have found the house empty – a pure nothingness, a sky without clouds. There is no knower, there is nothing to be known.“You are saying it out of ignorance, because you still think you are, but you don’t know who you are. I am saying it out of innocence, because I know there is no one to be known, to be a knower. It is just pure silence.”The bottle will be delivered to you – just get ripe for it. Right now, you are asking out of ignorance. The day you will ask out of innocence, the bottle…? no, the whole ocean will be delivered to you – it belongs to you. It is already within you. Your insight just has to grow more, your awareness has to be more clear, your silence has to be more deep, more profound. And all these qualities are almost ready to explode within you – it is just that you don’t allow them, you are preventing them.Nobody wants to be just a nobody, nobody wants to be a pure nothingness. The moment you are ready to disappear, a new presence arises in you which has nothing to do with “I” and “me,” which is part of the whole existence. And then only the thirst is quenched.My work is to make you more and more thirsty – so thirsty that one day, you take a jump into your own nothingness, and disappear. Your disappearance is your enlightenment.Osho,Unable to write you a meaningful question, I am overjoyed seeing people loving you. Beloved Master, please help me to keep moving on.Nirupa, the feeling that you are unable to write a meaningful question gives you what I was calling innocence; otherwise, people think their questions are very meaningful. Out of ignorance, you cannot ask a meaningful question. It is one of the mysteries of life: the day you can ask a meaningful question, you will find the meaningful answer within yourself. A meaningful question carries as a shadow the meaningful answer.But to be aware that you cannot ask a meaningful question is an achievement on the way of innocence. There is no need for any question, and there is no need for any answer. Questions and answers are just the stuff your mind is made of. When you become disinterested in questions and answers, you start stepping out of the mind; and out of the mind is your glorious being, is your authentic self.It is beautiful that you say, “I am overjoyed seeing people loving you.” Ordinarily mind does not function that way. Only if you have slipped a little bit out of the mind is it possible to be overjoyed seeing people loving me. Mind is always jealous, it cannot be overjoyed. It will feel hurt that “others are loving, are ahead of me, and I am lagging behind.” And it will create a thousand and one rationalizations that “their love is fake – they are all pretending. My love is true and authentic – these are all hypocrites.”The function of the mind is to make you competitive, to make you jealous, to make you believe yourself superior to others. Once you are just a little bit out of the mind, things start changing. If somebody is joyful, you don’t feel jealous; you feel grateful that you saw a joyful man. Somebody is loving – you don’t feel jealous; you feel again grateful that you have been able to see somebody loving somebody else, and jealousy has not arisen in you.You say, “I am overjoyed seeing people loving you.” This is a good indication, Nirupa. You have been long enough with me, and it is time for you to go out of the mind. All those who are with me, their only work is to go out of the mind, to transcend mind, to function as a no-mind, to function as a heart, and finally, to function as a being.You are asking, “Please help me to keep moving on.” My blessings are with you, my love is with you; you don’t need anything more. That will go on helping you move onward – just don’t become too greedy. Great things come very slowly. Don’t ask for seasonal flowers; they come quickly, but they also disappear quickly.Little Moishe goes skating on the lake while his mother stands by watching over him. Suddenly, through a crack in the thin ice, little Moishe vanishes.“Oy vey!” shrieks his mother. “My Moishe, in front of my very eyes!” Eventually a policeman comes, strips naked, and dives into the icy water. Again and again, blue from cold, he dives in and eventually finds Moishe. The policeman manages to revive him, wraps him in his own clothes, and rushes him to the hospital where little Moishe eventually recovers.Moishe’s mother goes up to the policeman afterward and says, “So, where is his hat? He had a hat!”This is particularly a Jewish mind, but all minds are Jews. She is worried about a hat. She is not even thankful to the policeman that he risked his own life and saved her boy. Her concern is, “Where is the hat?”Never be greedy and never be concerned with trivia, and your movement toward greater silences of the heart will become easier every day. Be loving, be joyous, and be always thankful for whatever is happening to you. Don’t ask for the hat.Be thankful for what has been given to you – and life is giving you so much that your thankfulness is always going to fall short. But the thankful heart grows easily; with gratitude, you are nourished. You become stronger in moving toward the unknown.Except gratitude, there is no other prayer.Osho,This question has come up many times for me, but you have just provoked it into the open. Isn't enlightenment the last resort?Prem Shunyo, enlightenment is certainly the last resort, but not for Milarepa. For Milarepa, you are the last resort. In other words, for Milarepa, you are the enlightenment. So don’t be worried, let him fool around, but he cannot escape you. You are his last resort, his enlightenment.They say that behind every great man there is a woman. They have forgotten to know that sometimes in front of every great man there is a woman. In your case, you are not behind Milarepa, you are in front of Milarepa. Searching you, he will grow, because you will be growing toward enlightenment. And he will stagger, somehow carrying his guitar, behind you – it will be a unique enlightenment.Two persons have never become enlightened together – but in your case, it seems it is going to happen, an exception. And when you both are enlightened, he will play on the guitar…. No enlightened master up to now has carried the guitar to those heights. And his enlightenment is sure – just you go on being ahead of him. Don’t follow him; otherwise, you both will lose the path. You search enlightenment, and let Milarepa search you.A story for you to tell Milarepa…. A proud father gave his son twenty bucks and sent him off to the local whorehouse. On his way, the boy passed by his grandmother’s house, and she called him in. He explained where he was going, and she insisted that he keep the twenty dollars and do it with her.The boy returned home with a big smile. “How was it?” asked the father.“Great! and I saved the twenty bucks,” responded the boy.“How is that?” his father asked.“I did it with grandma,” the boy explained.His father screamed, “You mean you made love to my mother?”“Hey, why not?” said the boy. “You have been making love to mine!”Osho,The other night, as your leg gave way and you began to fall, something like lightning happened. In a moment, I knew my deepest fears, my deepest tears, and total trust. Even to talk about this as an experience is impossible. It was not an experience as I have known experience to be. I can only stumble about with the words. It was as if there are hearts within heart. My heart felt an instant beat of deep sadness, far beyond any sadness I have even known. And, as if holding this heart within itself, a bigger heart existed in exactly the same moment, completely still, knowing, watching. This was trust. The words fall so short. Osho, will you please say something about this moment?Satyadharma, the question you are asking may be in the heart of many other sannyasins. You are asking, “The other night as your leg gave way and you began to fall, something like lightning happened. In a moment, I knew my deepest fears, my deepest tears, and total trust.”One may recognize or not…deep down those who have loved me are carrying a certain fear that one day I will not be in the body – that is their deepest fear, and their deepest tears, because they cannot conceive themselves without me, I have become almost a part of their being. It is no longer a relationship, it is a merging and a melting. Without me, they will find a vast gap in their being which cannot be fulfilled. With my disappearing from the body, they will find a part of their life has also disappeared – and perhaps, that was the part which was the most significant, the most meaningful.The day my leg gave way and I began to fall, all these fears and tears suddenly came to the surface. It has been tremendously good of my leg to give you an opportunity to see deeper within yourself that I am not going to be here forever.So you are not to postpone a single moment; you have to be ready before I leave the body. Only then will you not miss me; in your own realization, you will have found me again – more close, more fresh.It is true: even to talk about this as an experience is impossible, because it was exactly like lightning – not like a slow experience – so quick, so sudden, so unexpected.After all, my leg is a master’s leg. When it is going to do something, it is going to do something really deep. It provoked in you many feelings, and the greatest of them was of trust.While I am alive, in the body, you can take me for granted, that tomorrow morning I will be coming back to talk to you. But in that moment, you knew it is possible that any moment you may have to lose me. And before that moment comes, unless you have attained yourself, you will be in utter misery and darkness.Suddenly, you could not take me for granted. I have been insisting, “Don’t take me for granted. Today I am here; tomorrow I may not be.” It is easier to attain to the truth while I am holding your hand in my hand; it will be more difficult when you are left alone.And one never knows how long it will take for you to find another man who can love you unconditionally, who can trust you as you are. It can take lives to find such a person again. You will meet many, but they will all require that you have to be a certain way to be acceptable to them. Gautam Buddha, or Zarathustra, or Jesus Christ, they all require you to be a certain way, then you deserve to be accepted.I am breaking a new path: I accept you as you are.The difference is they want you to change before they accept you; I trust my acceptance. I know that my acceptance is going to change you. They expect you to be deserving, to be worthy; only then they can shower their love on you.My attitude is totally different from them, from anybody who has ever lived on the earth. I will shower my love on you because I trust in my love and its alchemical qualities. My love is going to transform you, to make you deserving. It may take lives and lives to find another man. And if you cannot become enlightened with me, it will be very, very difficult with that old type of disciplehood, and the old type of masters.The world is not a paradise yet because nobody has accepted you. First they wanted you to change according to their ideals and only then you would be accepted. It used to take five years, seven years, or even ten years to become an initiate with Gautam Buddha. Ten years you would remain a novice…just preparing, and hoping that you will be accepted. Thousands tried, and only very few of them were accepted.You are not new on the earth; perhaps many of you have lived with other masters, but they made the whole thing so difficult. Even the initiation requires qualities to be developed in you – you have to be acceptable and presentable. Millions have longed for a better consciousness, but nobody was there to help them – they were not worthy to receive help.Your deepest fear is not an experience that can be easily expressed. It has shaken your whole being. It has made you aware that you have to put your totality into transforming your consciousness while I am here in the body; otherwise, you had every opportunity to find the deathless, and you missed it. You will never be able to forgive yourself.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 28 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Toward the end of the first millennium, humanity was afraid that God would put an end to the world, because of what he said in the apocalypse of St. John. Nowadays, as we are coming close to the end of the second millennia, man is becoming more and more afraid that perhaps he himself is going to put an end to the world. Has anything changed at all in human consciousness during the last one thousand years? What does man need to understand now that he knows that he and only he will be responsible and not some fictitious God?There has been a great change in human consciousness during the past one thousand years. But the change is such that you can see it only when a real situation arises, and man responds in a totally different way than he has ever responded before. For example, there has never been so much awareness about peace, and there has never been so much antagonism toward war.In fact, war was always respected in the past, and peace was never thought of as anything more than a gap between two wars – nothing positive, just a preparation for a new war. You need some time. A war destroys so much that you cannot immediately start another war; hence a time of peace is needed. This is not authentic peace, it is simply cold war. The war and all its components continue underground, preparing for a more dangerous and a more destructive war in the future.The whole past has been respectful of the warrior. It is only just now in these few past years that war has become a dirty four-letter word, and peace has become for the first time a desire and a longing of the very heart of humanity.As far as I am concerned, war has become almost impossible.The impossibility of war is based on two fundamentals. One is a human consciousness about the futility of war. Nobody can claim that it is something beautiful, something honorable, something which gives dignity to humanity. Slowly, slowly it has penetrated into human consciousness that war takes away all dignity. It makes man fall below animals, because even animals don’t kill their own species; lions don’t kill other lions, deer don’t kill other deer. It is only man who kills other human beings. It is a disqualification, not a great quality to be honored.So the first thing is that war has fallen into disrespect, into utter futility, stupidity; it has lost all its past glory and significance.Secondly, the war materials – atomic energy and nuclear weapons – have reached to such a point that they have made war impossible. Unless the whole of humanity suddenly goes mad, war is impossible, because the only purpose of war was to defeat the enemy, the only purpose was to be victorious. Victory was the end. But now, with nuclear weapons, there is no defeat, no victory; no one is defeated, no one becomes victorious, all are dead. The whole life on the planet simply disappears.What Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus, Zarathustra and the great teachers of humanity have not been able to convince man about, has been done by nuclear weapons. Now war means only one thing: a global suicide. And no man is ready to commit suicide. In fact, the closer comes the possibility of a third world war, the deeper becomes the urge to live – and to live more consciously, and to live more lovingly, and to live more intensely. A longing for life itself has never been so intense and so profound as it is today.I predict the impossibility of any war in the future. And this is going to change a thousand and one things in life, because if war becomes impossible, sooner or later the piling up of nuclear weapons will become an exercise in stupidity.In the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Gorbachev, they have stopped creating nuclear weapons one-sidedly. They have tried hard to negotiate with America that they should both stop together. They said, “We go on creating out of the fear that you are creating; you go on creating out of the fear that we are creating – we can stop together.” But Ronald Reagan is Adolf Hitler number one – a very fascist mind.Gorbachev has taken a step so revolutionary and so intelligent and so courageous and so risky that one cannot conceive of him just as a politician. He is a man of deep understanding. He stopped creating more nuclear weapons almost one year ago, and he has been cutting the budget every moment, because he can see the possibility of what I am saying: that there is not going to be any war, because you cannot convince five billion people to die for no purpose. Gorbachev has made history by taking the step single-handedly, but America is still piling up….The American masses should rise up in a rebellious uproar against their own government, because now even Ronald Reagan cannot say, “We have to create because the Soviet Union is creating.” The Soviet Union has opened its doors to world scientists to come and examine their plants and be satisfied, because Ronald Reagan was lying continuously saying “Gorbachev has not stopped creating nuclear weapons; he is simply deceiving us.” Now the whole world is convinced that the Soviet Union is no longer interested in destroying human life.All the intelligent people of the world should protest against this American fascist attitude, and force America to stop bringing death to this beautiful planet. And I think, as the century comes to its end, there is bound to be a great protest from all over the world. America has to be put right – it is already late!I am reminded of George Gurdjieff. He used to say laughingly that America has not been discovered for the first time, and that is true. It is a lie that is being taught in the schools and colleges and the universities that America was discovered by Columbus. In Turkey there is a seven hundred year old map in which America is completely drawn, both the Americas, North America and South America, an exact map of the whole world. When that map was discovered it was so shocking that not only was America known, it was so well known that maps of it existed. Then what had happened?In Indian mythology, one of the great warriors of Mahabharata, the great Indian war of five thousand years before, had married a woman from Mexico. The word in Sanskrit literature for Mexico is Makshika. Mexico is a distortion of a Sanskrit word Makshika, because the description is exactly of Mexico; and in Mexico, Hindu temples have been found, and Hindu gods and their statues have been found. The Mexican temple is a replica of the Hindu temple.George Gurdjieff used to say that America has been discovered many many times, but it becomes such a nuisance that we have to hush it up and forget all about it – then somebody else discovers it again!If Ronald Reagan and his fascist colleagues are not going to listen to the protest of the whole intelligent world, then the only way will be an absolute boycott; forgive the fools – and forget them, so they can be discovered again by some Columbus.The steps that Gorbachev is taking are immensely valuable, and are very convincing to the whole world that his intentions are for a beautiful co-existence.There is no need of any war. You can have your democracy, you can have your communism, you can have your own ideology – what is the problem? There is no need to impose your ideology on somebody else. At least man’s spirit should be left in freedom to choose its own ideology – religious, political, social. No government has the right over the rights of the individual; all governments are only servants. But strangely, because of the power in their hands, servants become masters; they start behaving as if the masters are servants. But this cannot go forever.Yes, all the predictions of the ancient seers, like Nostradamus, that the world is going to end by the end of this century, are true in a very different sense than has been understood. The old world is going to end, and a new world is going to begin. That is my interpretation of Nostradamus.The old man has to disappear to give place to a new man with fresh values, with one earth undivided into nations, with one humanity undivided by religions, because religions don’t need to be organized. Religion is a love affair, a love affair with existence. There is no question of any organization like Christianity or Hinduism or Mohammedanism.Religion is as much purely individual as love, because religion is nothing but the purest and the highest quality of love. You don’t organize love! You don’t say that this is Christian love, this is Hindu love, this is Mohammedan love. Love is simply love, meditation is simply meditation, peace is simply peace, enlightenment is simply enlightenment. It cannot have any adjective with it.Changes have been happening. They will come to a peak by the end of this century when the moment of ultimate decision will have to be faced by humanity, either to transform yourself totally; drop all that is old…. Don’t look backward; start creating new values, look forward – because the past is the past and to visit the graveyard too much is dangerous. The graveyard is a place one should visit only once, and that too is a one-way affair…you simply go there and never come back.It is the future that should be your concern. It is the future and the faraway stars that will become your challenges. You have heard always about the golden past. We have to forget all about it; we have to create a golden future.The decisive moment is coming close-by; either we have to decide to commit suicide…. If we cling with the past, then that is the only possibility. If we drop the past and the dead and start afresh from ABC, from the very scratch, writing the destiny of man, the days of the last part of this century will be of a tremendous revolution. The revolution is going to be so great that Nostradamus can be said to be right, that the world will end – the world as we have known it – and a world that we have never even dreamt of has to begin.You are right that we cannot throw away the responsibility on some fictitious God, that he will end the world. We are perfectly aware that if a third world war happens, we will be the only responsible people to have destroyed ourselves. I think changes happen only in such dangerous and critical moments. If life goes on smoothly and comfortably great changes don’t happen, but if life comes to a place where you have to choose between death or a new style of life, I am absolutely certain you will choose the new style of life rather than the old well-acquainted death.Yes, there is no god, and man is going to be responsible for whatever he chooses. And I trust in the deepest longing of everybody: it is for life, it is for love, it is for joy, it is for song, it is for flowers, it is for dances. It is for love.Man cannot choose a global death.It is an impossibility.Yes, the old world will come to an end; Nostradamus is not going to be wrong. But his interpreters are all wrong. My interpretation is: The death of the old is the birth of the new.A man down on his luck goes home to his wife and tells her, “Look dear, we are running out of money and we are gonna have to cut down on all the luxuries.” He then adds scornfully, “If you would just learn to cook we could fire the chef.” “In that case,” replies the woman, “if you would learn to make love we could fire the chauffeur.”In critical moments one has to be truthful, and if things are going to change, then you have to change also. Your ways of love have to change. You have to drop old kinds of jealousies, competitions; you have to drop old values of honor, respectability, royal blood…all nonsense. You have to learn that the whole humanity is one brotherhood. The black and the white and the in-between, all are the same.I am reminded…Rabindranath was in Geneva. He had just been awarded the Nobel prize, and he was being received by the government of Switzerland in a vast welcome party. Everybody was white. Somebody asked, Rabindranath, “What is your explanation? Why has God created such discriminations – because you insist on one brotherhood of the whole humanity.”Rabindranath said, “God first created a man out of mud and baked him, but being inexperienced, baked him too much. He’s the Negro. He created a second man. Being afraid that he may again make another Negro, he pulled him out quite early, unbaked…he’s the white man.”That’s why in the white man the desire for having a tan continues…a little more baking. And baking powders are available, baking lotions are available; put on those lotions and powders and lie down naked under the hot burning sun. This desire is because they were pulled out of the bakery a little too soon. God said, “My God, I have committed another mistake.”That’s why the Indian is in-between. That is the third person he baked, just right, neither a little more, nor a little less. But more than that, there is not any difference…just a little more sun, a little less sun.There is no need for any color discrimination. There is no need to have boundaries of nations, because the earth has no boundaries. There is no need to have flocks of people gathered separately – the Catholics, the Protestants, the Hindus, the Mohammedans; each one should be free to have his own immediate and personal contact with existence, his own prayer.The new man is on the horizon.All the preparations to destroy the world will only destroy the old man and the old world. They will create the basic necessity for the birth of a new man. I can see him on the horizon already. He has arrived; it will just take some time for people to recognize him.Osho,the other day someone asked me where I came from before coming to Pune and I couldn't remember. He started mentioning major European cities while I got more embarrassed. I said, “Just wait, it will come,” and suddenly remembered Sydney, Australia. Osho, since I've been with you this time I'm losing my memory. What's happening? I ask this question in the hope that this shows something to do with meditation.You are really becoming intelligent. It is not expected from people who come from Sydney, Australia. This has never happened before! Losing your memory is of great significance. It means the energy is shifting from memory to intelligence.Memory is mechanical; intelligence is non-mechanical. That’s why computers can have memory; they don’t have intelligence. If you ask them a question about which they have not been told before, you have to feed the information first, then you can ask the question, and without fail the answer will come. Intelligence is a totally different matter.Your meditation is certainly going deeper. Leaving aside Sydney, Australia, and all the memories concerned with Sydney, Australia, leaving aside the past – you are entering into a new space.Only once in a while a computer has been intelligent – only in jokes, not in reality.A man was asking a computer, “Tell me about my father. What do you know about my father? I want all the information.” The information came – “Your father has gone fishing just three hours ago in the ocean.” The man laughed and he said, “You’re stupid! My father is dead and he has been dead for three years; he cannot go fishing.” The computer laughed and said, “That was not your father, that was only the husband of your mother. Your father has gone fishing; you just go to the beach and you will find him there.”I used to think that only in jokes computers can be intelligent, but just today Anando brought me the news that in Japan there are one hundred thousand robots – just men, mechanical men – working in factories, and not a small number, but working in thousands…. And the government has just released information that a strange thing is happening which is creating tremendous fear. These robots have suddenly started killing men. The robot is just working, he sees some man passing by, jumps, catches hold of him, and with his steel hands gives him a good hug and finishes him.Ten people have been killed just in a few days. And if the government says ten, you can multiply by ten; at least one hundred must have died. Then governments accept, reluctantly, a small percentage. But the fear has become great, because one hundred thousand robots – if they simply come out of the factories into the streets and start making hugging gestures to men and women…. These ten deaths happened in a strange situation, because those robots work through computers, they receive orders from the computer. They are machines, but somehow it seems something strange and mysterious is starting to happen.The government has assured people, “Don’t be worried about ghosts et cetera” – because that is the first thing that comes to mind, that Anando’s ghosts, finding a perfect body…. They have perfect human bodies, just they are made of steel; they can be good abodes for ghosts! Poor ghosts have to live on trees, in rain, in cold; this is a great opportunity! But once a ghost enters in, then there is danger. It may start doing things which the computer is not ordering, which it is not supposed to do.You are not a robot. When you become silent, you start seeing your memories far away, as distant echoes. It is a very common experience that intelligent people have not very good memories, and vice versa; the people who have very good memories have never been found to be very intelligent. Sometimes idiots have great memories; because their whole energy is involved in their memory, they don’t have any intelligence.Intelligence is the power to face a new situation about which you know nothing. Memory is a reaction. You know the answer, the question is asked, you repeat the answer. But if any new question is asked the memory is impotent. A new question, a new situation, does not need your memory; it needs intelligence, because a new answer is needed, a new response is needed.Linelli said to his daughter, “I no like-a that Irish boy taking-a you out. He’s a-rough and common and besides he’s-a big-a dumbbell.”“No papa,” replied the girl. “Tim is the most clever fella I know. Why you say-a that? We have only been dating for nine weeks,” the daughter replied, “and already he has cured me of that little illness I used to get every month.”Don’t try to cling to memory. Here nobody is bothered about where you come from; in fact nobody knows. Everybody comes from nowhere and goes on disappearing into nowhere again. Sydney or Calcutta or Bombay or San Francisco or Rome or London are all stations between two nowheres. And the trains are becoming faster; they don’t stop on every station! There is no need to be worried. If you forget everything that you know, you will not be a loser – because what do you know? It is not valuable at all. In fact it will be a great richness if you can forget all that you know, and suddenly enter into a state of not-knowing, fresh and young and innocent – childlike. That’s what meditation is, and that’s what brings tremendous intelligence to you: to face every moment with a totally new response not borrowed from the past.The most important thing…if you want to remember, if you are addicted to remembering and if you find it difficult, then don’t be bothered about where you come from; then be bothered about where you are going to. That is better. At least that will keep you open, searching, hoping. Why cling to graves, and why be a digger of graves? Your memory-system is nothing but a graveyard. Try to live without memory, and see how life becomes suddenly fresh. Every face looks so new…you can even fall in love with your own wife.Be happy! And next time when somebody asks you from where you are coming, just ask him: “From where does everybody else come?” – nobody knows. And nobody knows where we are going.Still, the going is good, we are enjoying. Who cares about the beginning and the end? The real thing is in-between – the pilgrimage.I want to make your pilgrimage a bliss, a benediction, without any goal and without any source.Osho,These last few days I often find myself being in very dramatic and miserable moods. I see myself walking around with a long, long face and with thoughts like, “I am a failure.” Then suddenly something – anything – happens, and I just stand there, watching and feeling an overwhelming giggling inside me, which increases to a big smile and sometimes even to an explosion of laughter and the feeling of being absolutely happy. It is always so strong that I can't even hold on to my dramatic mood anymore! Yesterday, in one of these situations, with the giggling from somewhere deep inside me came the words: “Laugh your way to God.” It felt like a recipe for growth. Osho, does this giggling have anything to do with the watcher inside me? Would you please speak on the relationship between easy-going laughter and the watcher?Lokita, there is certainly a relationship between the watcher and the laughter arising in you, because the watcher can see not only the stupidities of other people, but the stupidities of your own.The watcher could see your dramatic mood. Before the watcher came in, you were identified with the dramatic mood; you had forgotten that it is just a dramatic mood.Just watch people. Everybody is carrying a face which is a role, repeating some dialogue inside, preparing himself – what he is going to say to the wife, because he is late…. And he knows perfectly well that not even once in his whole life has he been able to deceive her, but still he goes on doing the same stupidity.If the watcher comes in, if suddenly you remember to witness, you will start giggling at yourself that you are such a fool. You go on falling in the same ditch every day, deciding every day never to fall again in the same ditch. But when the ditch comes close by, the attraction, the fascination, of falling in the ditch is so much that you forget all your decisions. You console yourself, “Just once more. From tomorrow, I’m going to keep my word, given to myself.” But this has happened so many times. And you will do it your whole life, unless you allow the watcher to see the ridiculous acts that you are doing.And there is certainly a deep relationship. As you watch you will start giggling about why you unnecessarily have a serious face. In fact, nobody is even looking at you; you can relax. And even if they are looking at you, a serious face is not a beauty. A joyous face, a face full of smile, radiant with some deep blissfulness, may be worth having. If you are being an actor, then choose at least some good act, some good part!Everybody has chosen such ugly parts; their faces are dull and sad, their vibe that of a corpse. Still they want everybody to love them, respect them. And even dogs don’t bark, even they tolerate; they just don’t look, just “Let him go.” Dogs also get tired, barking unnecessarily the whole day. They have their own fundamental ideology; they bark at people who wear uniforms – policemen, postmen, sannyasins. They are absolutely against uniforms. They are certainly very rebellious people. They don’t want any organizations in the world; everybody should be an individual. “What is this nonsense!” The whole army, the whole brigade is going, and all the people are in the same dress – dogs cannot resist the temptation to protest.You pass by; even the dog does not protest. But if you watch, you will giggle! You will giggle at yourself, “Why you are carrying such a face?” and you will giggle at the dog, “Why are you ignoring me? You are also trying to be very serious.” And you will be surprised, if you are really watching, that the dog is also giggling at you.Lokita, if you don’t believe me, you can try with Niskriya; he’s such a serious man. Just look at him with a giggling face, and he is bound to giggle. Although it is against his German background – he’s a serious photographer, totally dedicated to his art; he does not look here and there – but even he will laugh. And you will help him in being watchful too, because while you are laughing, watchfulness is easiest.Perhaps you have not noted that fact. Next time you have a full-hearted laugh, try to see a very fundamental fact: watching is easiest while you are laughing, because laughing is not a serious act, and laughing is natural. Laughing creates in you an atmosphere of silence. If your laughter is really total, mind stops – “Let this fool first laugh.” Those are the moments when you can bring in the watcher very easily.You heard these words “Laugh your way to God.” Just remember that you don’t laugh your way to a serious God, that’s all. Laugh your way to a laughing God – which is a very rare phenomenon. You will find on the way many gods who are absolutely serious, who have forgotten laughter.Just for your giggling…and remember to watch while you are giggling:The first grade class gathered around the teacher for a game of “Guess the Animal.” The first picture the teacher held up was a cat. “Okay, boys and girls,” she said brightly, “can anyone tell me what this is?”“I know! I know! It is a cat.” Yelled a little boy.“Very good, Eddy. Now who knows what this animal is called?”“That’s a dog,” piped up the same little boy.“Right again. And what about this animal?” she asked holding up a picture of a deer.Silence fell over the class. After a minute or two the teacher said, “I will give you a hint, children, listen. It is something that your mother calls your father around the house.”“I know! I know!” screamed Eddy, “It is a horny bastard!”A sailor from the Greek navy was stranded on a desert island and managed to survive by making friends with the local natives – such good friends, in fact, that one day the chief offered him his daughter for an evening entertainment. Late that night, while they made love, the chief’s daughter kept shouting, “Oga, boga! Oga, boga!” The arrogant sailor assumed this must be how the natives express their appreciation when something is fantastic.A few days later the chief invites the sailor for a game of golf. On his first stroke, the chief hit a hole in one. Eager to try out his new vocabulary, the Greek enthusiastically shouted “Oga boga! Oga boga!”The chief turned around with a puzzled look on his face and asked, “What you mean, ‘Wrong hole?’“

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 30 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The silence I experience lately in your presence is becoming vaster and deeper; and when you leave Chuang Tzu auditorium, tears roll gently down my face and I want nothing more than to stay there. So it is difficult to be active afterward because I know slowly the experience will change, and I would like to remain there. Beloved Master, is love so fragile that we cannot hold it even with two fingers?Prem Azima, everything that is of value is fragile. Beauty is fragile, silence is fragile, love is fragile. Look at a roseflower dancing in the wind, and in the rain, and in the sun. It seems it is strong enough for the wild wind, strong enough for the sun, strong enough for the rain. It is very fragile; by the evening, its petals will be thrown in all directions. But while it was, it was tremendous; while it was, it was more than any rock. The rock will remain, the rock is permanent; the flower will come and go. The higher the value, the more fragile it is.One has to deeply understand it; otherwise you start clinging to great experiences, and you destroy those experiences by your very clinging. They are so fragile that your clinging can destroy them, your attachment can destroy them; even your desire to continue them can be poison, destructive, murderous to them.As you become acquainted more and more with silence, peace, blissfulness, ecstasy, you will have also to learn the lesson: enjoy them while they are at their fullest, and when they go, let them go with a joyful and grateful heart.Yes, tears are allowed, but not tears of pain – tears of prayer, tears of gratitude. The more easily you let them go, the more those experiences come to you. And once you have understood the science that your let-go is the way to desire them, to long for them – not the desire, but a desireless love – one should feel blissful enough, even if a fragile experience visits you only once. If you are grateful, it is bound to come again and again. Slowly, slowly, it may not go at all; it may become your very heartbeat. It can your very breathing, but one has to learn the whole science.Ordinarily, what our mind is going to do is to close the doors, close the windows, and keep the fresh breeze in, so that it cannot escape. But just by closing all the doors and the windows you have destroyed the freshness of the breeze; soon it will be stale. It will have lost its dance, it will have lost its aliveness; you will be sitting by the side of a corpse.And people are sitting by the side of corpses – corpses of love, which they call marriages, corpses of prayer, which they call their temples, their churches, their mosques, and corpses of authentic and sincere experiences, which they call holy scriptures. People are surrounded by corpses. And if you keep company with corpses, you cannot remain alive very long yourself; you will become a corpse among other corpses. It is a very dangerous friendship.Beware of it! Learn the simple fact that truth, love, beauty, bliss – all are very fragile, very momentary. You cannot grasp them in your fist; they are like fragrances. You cannot run after them. You have to wait and trust: the same existence that has brought an experience to you will bring many more. It is abundant, it wants to share, but it can share only with people who are not hoarders. It can share only with people who know the momentariness, the fragileness – and the beauty of fragileness, and the joy of momentariness.Only dead things are permanent.All that is alive is changing, moment to moment.All that is alive is living under the risk of death at any moment. If you want to be secure, absolutely secure, then you will have to enter into your grave; only graveyards are absolutely secure places. In a grave, nothing else happens; everything stops, time stops, nothing changes anymore. Even death cannot do any harm to you.But if you want to be alive, then more aliveness…the more you have to be alert and aware of the fragileness of all the qualities that are not created and manufactured by man, which descend from the beyond – unpredictable, out of nowhere, suddenly overwhelming you. Don’t think about whether they will remain or go, because if you get into thinking about your future, and the possibility of the experience remaining permanently with you, you may miss everything. Enjoy it, dance with it, let time cease. Put the mind aside. Then even a single moment is equal to eternity.You are asking, Azima, “The silence I experience lately in your presence is becoming vaster and deeper; and when you leave Chuang Tzu auditorium, tears roll gently down my face and I want nothing more than to stay there. So it is difficult to be active afterward because I know slowly the experience will change.”It will change. Even if you don’t do anything, even if you stay here it will change. It does not change because you have to go to work, it changes because change is the nature of life. And it is good that it changes. Otherwise, tomorrow you will not have again the tremendous experience of silence. You will be carrying the stale, old experience of yesterday; you won’t have space enough for the new to enter in.Change is favorable to life. That’s why even death, I say, is favorable to life – because it is the greatest change. It brings you into new spaces, into new forms, into new existences; it keeps your pilgrimage continuously new, it keeps your excitement alive. Every moment remains always a challenge and a deep awaiting, because anything is possible. Silence can come to you, blissfulness can come to you, ecstasy can descend into your heart, truth can open its doors; life is full of mysteries, uncountable. So when it happens, be thankful – and move on.And slowly, slowly, as you become more acquainted with the depth of silence, while you are working, doing something, the unknown guest may come suddenly and stand by your side.A time comes when these experiences start following you like a shadow; just close by, you can feel their coolness, you can smell their fragrance. Just remember not to grab, not to possess, not to make the effort of changing them into your property. They come in freedom, and they remain in freedom. You cannot enslave them.The desire, Azima, is not only yours; it is as ancient as man. Man has tried to capture truth in words and failed, utterly failed; he has tried to capture beauty in sculpture and failed; he has even tried to capture God into temples – and has utterly failed. But such is the blindness, that nobody sees all these failures! Your temples, your churches, your synagogues are landmarks of your failures. Your scriptures are the failures of your forefathers, of trying to catch hold of truth in words.Words have remained, but the truth has evaporated. Now they go on worshipping these scriptures, these statues.All the religions are nothing but failures. That’s why they are against a man like Jesus or Socrates or Mansoor – because these people’s crime is that they have tried to make you aware that you are blind, that what you are worshipping is not truth, but a corpse. Perhaps once there was truth…but people behave like drunkards.An old English lady was looking through her curtains. Spying on her neighbors, she saw a man coming out of the house opposite. He rushed to the side of the road, jumped three feet into the air, and fell flat on his face. The old lady ran to his side and asked, “Excuse me, what happened?”“I was late for work, and I came rushing out, and jumped on my bike. But I forgot – I have not got one!”In a hurry, it is possible to forget.I have heard about a drunkard who was watching a man doing pushups on the beach. For a long time the drunkard went around him, looked from every side, and finally said, “Listen, man, I should not interfere in whatever you are doing, but I cannot resist the temptation any more. Your girl is no longer there; you are unnecessarily doing exercises. She must have gone long ago, because I have been watching you for almost one hour; you are perspiring, huffing and puffing, and the girl is no longer there, I have looked from every nook and corner. Strange that this man is so deep in love!”But in life, that’s exactly what we are doing with all our fragile experiences. Somehow we have an unconscious desire for things to be permanent. Why this desire is in the unconscious, is something to be explored. Perhaps it is the fear of death. Most probably it is, because we are ourselves fragile. This moment you are alive, next moment you may be gone. Because of our own fragileness, we desire to have permanency in everything around us as a security, as a safety. But if we are fragile, how can our experiences be anything else?An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Polack have been stranded on a desert island for almost a year, when they discover a lamp lying in the sand. They rub it, and sure enough, a genie appears.“Well, gentleman,” says the genie, “traditionally, I give the finder one of three wishes, but since there are three of you, I will grant you one wish each.”The Englishman speaks right up: “I know what I want. I wish to be back on Hampstead High Street, having a pint in my favorite club.”Poof! He disappears.The Frenchman speaks up: “I wish to be back in Paris, in a nice little restaurant, with a bottle of good wine, and a gorgeous woman by my side.”Poof! He disappears.The Polack is thinking and thinking, when finally the genie asks him, “And what is your wish, my friend?”“Gee, I only want to be the pope at the Vatican.”Poof! And he disappears.Many have wondered why a Polack has become the pope. Now I open up the secret. Poof! And the Polack becomes the pope.But that is how things disappear. Enjoy them while they are, and don’t ask for any permanence, because permanence is non-existential; it is only in our desires, out of fear of death. But in existence, everything is change. Existence believes in the law of change.Every moment, everything is changing. Our language gives us a very fallacious idea, because our language consists of nouns and pronouns, and existence knows only verbs.When you see the river, the actual fact is that there is not a river; the actual fact is that there is a rivering, because the water is continuously flowing. A tree does not exist, there is only treeing, because the tree is continuously growing. And the same is the case with you. You won’t go back from this place the same as you have entered – so much water will have gone down the Ganges.Gautam Buddha was the first man in history who reminded his disciples that existence consists only of verbs, not of nouns, not of pronouns. To make a language only of verbs, will be very difficult, almost impossible – conversation will become so ridiculous – so we have to continue to use nouns and pronouns. But remember, deep down, that there is nothing static.Don’t be befooled by the language you use. Look around, everything is changing – every moment, every split second. And once you understand change as the God of existence, your whole life pattern – your attitudes, your approaches, your style – will change accordingly. You will become more of a flow than a dirty pond.You will become more like a river, a pilgrimage into the unknown toward the ocean, where even you are going to disappear.Osho,In your vision of a model society, would there be one large commune, or a series of communes? If there is more than one, what would be their relationship to one another? Do you envisage people of different communes being able to be interdependent, sharing ideas and skills, and without any of the attitudes that grow out of possessiveness, like nationalism and fanaticism?Maneesha, the question raises a very important thing: the concept of interdependence. Man has lived in dependence, and man has desired and fought for independence, but nobody looks into the reality – that dependence and independence both are extremes.Reality is exactly in the middle; it is interdependence. Everything is interdependent. The smallest blade of grass and the biggest star both are interdependent. This is the whole foundation of ecology. Because man has behaved without understanding the reality of interdependence. He has destroyed so much of the organic unity of life. He has been cutting his own hands, his own legs, without knowing.Forests have disappeared, millions of trees are being cut every day. Just now scientists are giving warnings – but nobody is ready to listen – that if all trees disappear from the earth, man cannot live. We are in a deep inter-exchange. Man goes on breathing in oxygen, and throwing out carbon dioxide; trees go on inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. Neither you can exist without the trees, nor can the trees exist without you.This is a simple example; otherwise life is interwoven in a thousand and one ways…. Because many trees have disappeared, so much carbon dioxide has gathered in the atmosphere, that it has raised the temperature on the whole earth by four degrees. To you it may seem insignificant – four degrees – but it is not insignificant. By the end of this century, this temperature will be enough to melt so much ice that every ocean will rise four feet higher. One degree of temperature more means the ocean rises one foot higher. So the cities which are on the coast of the oceans – and all the great cities are there – will be flooded with water.If the temperature goes on increasing, as is the possibility, because nobody is listening…. Trees are being cut, without any understanding, for useless things; for third rate newspapers you need newsprint, and you are destroying life. There is a possibility that if the eternal ice of the Himalayas starts melting, which has never happened in the whole past, then all the oceans will rise twenty feet higher, and will drown almost the whole earth. They will destroy all your cities – Bombay and Calcutta, New York, London, and San Francisco. Perhaps a few primitive people who live high in the mountains may survive.Such is the interdependence that when your first astronauts reached to the moon, we became aware for the first time that the whole earth is surrounded by a thick sheet of ozone, which is a form of oxygen. That layer of ozone surrounds the whole earth, like a blanket. It has been because of this ozone blanket that life has become possible on this planet, because ozone does not allow in the death rays that come from the sun. It allows in only the life rays and prevents the death rays; it returns them.But in our stupidity to reach to the moon, we have made holes in the blanket. And the efforts continue. Now we are trying to reach Mars! Each time a rocket goes beyond the atmosphere of the earth, that is two hundred miles beyond, it creates great holes. Through those holes, death rays have started entering in. Now scientists are saying that these death rays will increase the rate of cancer by almost thirty percent; and other diseases are not counted, small diseases are not counted.The stupid politicians are not listening. And if you call them stupid, then you are jailed, you are punished; false allegations are made against you. But I don’t see what else to call them. Stupid seems to be the most gentle and the most cultured word for them. They don’t deserve it; they deserve something worse.Life is a deep interdependence.My vision of commune, Maneesha, is that nations disappear, big cities disappear, because they don’t allow enough space for every human being – and every human being has a certain psychological need for a territorial imperative, just like other animals. In big cities, man is continuously moving in a crowd. That creates great anxiety, tension, agony, and does not allow him any time to relax, any time, any place, to be himself – to be alone, to be with the trees, which are life-giving sources, to be with the ocean, which is a life-giving source.My vision of a new world, the world of communes, means no nations, no big cities, no families, but millions of small communes spread all over the earth in thick forests, lush green forests, in mountains, on islands. The smallest commune manageable, which we have already tried, can be of five thousand people, and the biggest commune can be of fifty thousand people. From five thousand to fifty thousand – more than that will become unmanageable; then again comes the question of order and law, and the police, and the court, and all old criminals have to be brought back.Small communes…five thousand seems to be the perfect number, because we have tried that. Everybody knows everybody else, all are friends. There is no marriage – children belong to the commune. The commune has hospitals, schools, colleges. The commune takes care of the children; parents can visit them. It is simply insignificant whether the parents are living together or they have separated. For the child, they both are available; he can visit them, they can visit him.All the communes should be interdependent, but they will not exchange money. Money should be dissolved. It has done tremendous harm to humanity. Now it is time to say good-bye to it!These communes should exchange things. You have more milk products; you can give them to another commune, because you need more clothes, and that commune can provide you with more clothes – a simple barter system, so no commune becomes rich. Money is a very strange thing. You can accumulate it; that is the strangest secret of money. You cannot accumulate milk products, you cannot accumulate vegetables. If you have more vegetables you have to share with some commune which has not enough vegetables.But money can be accumulated. And if one commune becomes richer than the other commune, then comes from the back door, the poverty and the richness and the whole nightmare of capitalism, and the classes of the poor and the rich, and the desire to dominate, because you are rich. You can enslave other communes. Money is one of the enemies of man.Communes will be exchanging. They will be broadcasting on their radio stations, that such and such a product is available from them. Anybody who has certain other products that they need can contact them, and things can be exchanged in a friendly way; there is no haggling, there is no exploitation. But the commune should not become too big, because bigness is also dangerous.A commune’s criterion of bigness should be that everybody knows everybody else; that should be the limit. Once that limit is crossed, the commune should divide itself into two. Just as two brothers separate, when a commune becomes big enough it divides itself into two communes, two sister communes. And there will be a deep interdependence, sharing ideas and skills, without any of the attitudes that grow out of possessiveness – like nationalism and fanaticism. There will be nothing to be fanatic about. There will be no reason for a nation.A small group of people can enjoy life more easily, because to have so many friends, so many acquaintances, is a joy unto itself. Today in the big cities, you live in the same house and you don’t know your neighbor. In one house one hundred thousand people may be living. A one hundred story building can contain that many people – almost a whole city. And they are absolute strangers to each other, living in a crowd, and yet being alone.My idea of a commune is, living in small groups, which gives you enough space, and yet living in a close, loving, relationship. Your children are taken care of by the commune, your needs are taken care of by the commune, your medical care is taken care of by the commune. The commune becomes an authentic family without any diseases that families have created in the past. It is a loose family and a constant movement.There is no question of any marriage, and no question of any divorce. If two persons want to be together, they can be together, and if one day they don’t want to be together, that is perfectly good. It was their decision to be together; now they can choose other friends. In fact, in one life why not live many lives? Why not make it richer? Why should a man cling to a woman, or a woman cling to a man unless they enjoy each other so much that they want to be together for their whole life. But looking at the world, the situation is clear. People would like to be independent from their families; children want to be independent from their families.Just the other day, one small boy in California did something unique and special. He wanted to go out and play. This was nothing special; all children should be allowed to go out and play. But the mother and father insisted, “No, don’t go out; just play inside the house.” And the boy shot both the mother and the father. He played inside the house. There is a limit…always listening to “no, no, no!”In America the time rate of husbands and wives changing is three years. It is the same rate that people change their jobs; it is the same time-rate people change cities. There seems to be something special about three years. It seems it is the limit one can tolerate. Beyond that, it becomes intolerable. So people change wives and husbands, people change cities, people change jobs.But in a commune, there is no need to make any fuss. You can say good-bye any moment, and you can still remain friends, because who knows? After two years, you may fall in love again with the same man, with the same woman. In two years time you may have forgotten all the troubles, and you want to have a taste again; or perhaps you had fallen into the hands of a worse man and a worse woman, and you repent, and you want to go back! But it will be a richer life; you will have known many men and many women. Each man has his own uniqueness, and each woman has her own uniqueness.Communes can also exchange people, if somebody wants to move into another commune, and the other commune is willing to accept. The other commune may say, “If somebody else wants to go into your commune, exchange is possible – because we don’t want to raise our population.” People can decide. You can go and advertise yourself; some woman may like you, some people may turn friends. Somebody may have been bored in that commune, and would like to change their commune….The whole world should be one humanity, only divided by small communes on a practical basis: No fanaticism, no racism, no nationalism. Then, for the first time, we can drop the idea of wars. We can make life with honesty, worth living, worth enjoying; playful, meditative, creative, and give every man and every woman equal opportunity to grow and bring their potential to flowering.The scene is the crucifixion. Three huge crosses are outlined against the sky, as the sun sets. A crowd of jeering soldiers and citizens surround the dying man, Jesus. Raising his eyes, he looks to the back of the mob and sees Peter trying to hide himself.“Peter, Peter,” Jesus cries in a hoarse voice. “Come closer, come closer!”Peter wraps his cloak around his head and pretends not to hear. Jesus with his last strength calls out, “Peter, please…come closer.”Peter, realizing that he cannot ignore his dying master, creeps to the foot of the cross, “Yes, Lord, what do you want of me?”“Peter, I can see my house from up here!”His house must have been deep down in the city of Jerusalem; he is dying on the cross, hanging high up, and he wants to share his experience. I have always loved the story that even at the time of death, he says, “From here, from this height…I can see my house from up here.”Jesus was crucified only once. I have been on the cross almost my whole life. Jesus was crucified in a small unknown part of the world, Judea. I have been crucified in almost every country of the world. And my crime is that I can see the new house where man will live in the future: the new man, his new house, his new commune, his new future.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 32 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,It touches so much when you talk about the new man. When you first mentioned this concept to us many years ago, the new man was simply that to me: a concept that was intriguing, a fascinating possibility. But lately, I feel as if I know this new man – this new race of people – and really care about him. It sounds audacious to repeat the words I have heard you use: “I am pregnant with the new man.” But actually, that's how I feel; not only about myself, but about all of your people. What is our relationship to the new man?Maneesha, the new man contains my whole philosophy about life and how it should be – lived in totality, in intensity, in wholeness, so that we are not only dragging ourselves from the cradle to the grave, but we can make each moment a tremendous rejoicing – a song, a dance, a celebration.The old man that has existed up to now is on his death bed. He has suffered much; he needs all our compassion. He has been conditioned to live in misery, in suffering, in self-torture. He was given promises: promissory notes for great rewards after death – the more he suffers, the more he tortures himself, the more he is masochistic, the more he is destructive of his own dignity, the more he will be rewarded.That was a very convenient concept for all the vested interests because the man who is ready to suffer can easily be enslaved. The man who is ready to sacrifice today for an unknown tomorrow has already declared his inclination to be enslaved. The future becomes his bondage. And for thousands of years, man has lived only in hope, in imagination, in dreams, in utopias, but not in reality. And there is no other life than the life of reality, than the life that exists in this moment.The new man is a rebellion, a revolt, a revolution against all the conditionings which can enslave him, oppress him, exploit him, just by giving him hopes of a fictitious heaven, frightening him, blackmailing him about another fictitious phenomenon: hell. All the old ways of life were strangely in agreement on one point: that man is a sacrificial animal at the feet of a fictitious God.There were times when men were actually sacrificed alive, butchered before stone statues. Although nobody dares to do such a thing now, psychologically the situation has not changed. Man is still sacrificed either in the name of communism, or in the name of capitalism, or in the name of an Aryan race, in the name of Islam, in the name of Christianity, in the name of Hinduism. Instead of stone gods, now there are only phony words, meaningless. But man has accepted to live like this for the simple reason that every child finds himself born in a crowd which is already conditioned. The teachers are conditioned, the parents are conditioned, the neighbors are conditioned; and the small child is almost helpless – he cannot envisage any other alternative than to be part of the crowd.The old man was a crowd, a cog in the wheel; the old man had no individuality. The vested interests had taken all care to destroy self-respect, dignity, a joy and a gratefulness that you are a human being, that you are the highest creation in the long, long path of evolution…that you are the crowning glory.These ideas were dangerous. If a man has some respect for himself, some dignity of being human, you cannot reduce him to a slave; you cannot destroy his soul and make him a robot. Up to now, man has only pretended to live – his life has been only hypothetical.The new man is a revolt against the whole past.He is a declaration that we are going to create a new way of life, new values of life; that we are destined for new goals – faraway stars are our targets. And we are not going to allow anybody to sacrifice us for any beautiful name. We are going to live our lives, not according to ideals, but according to our own longings, our own passionate intuitions. And we are going to live moment to moment; we are no longer to be befooled by the tomorrow, and the promises for tomorrow.The new man contains the whole future of humanity. The old man is bound to die. He has prepared his own grave – he is digging it every moment, deeper and deeper. What do you think Ronald Reagan is doing? – digging a grave for humanity as deep as possible. These people seem to be afraid even of dead people – that if the grave is not deep enough, they may come back; they may come back alive.Nuclear weapons and all destructive measures are a preparation for a global suicide. The old man has decided to die. It is up to the intelligent people in the world to disconnect from the old man before he destroys you too…to disconnect yourself from old traditions, old religions, old nations, old ideologies.For the first time, the old is no longer gold. The old is the rotten corpse of an ugly past. It is a great responsibility for the new generation, for the young people to renounce the past.In the past, religions used to renounce the world. I teach you to love the world so that it can be saved, and to renounce the past totally and irrevocably, to be discontinuous.The new man is not an improvement upon the old; he is not a continuous phenomenon, not a refinement. The new man is the declaration of the death of the old, and the birth of an absolutely fresh man – unconditioned, without any nation, without any religion, without any discriminations of men and women, of black and white, of East and West, or North and South.The new man is a manifesto of one humanity. It is the greatest revolution the world has ever seen.You have heard about the miracle that Moses parted the sea in two parts. That miracle is nothing. I want to part humanity, the whole ocean of humanity divided in two parts: the old and the new.The new will love this life, this world. The new will learn the art of living and loving and dying.The new will not be concerned about heaven and hell, sin and virtue. The new man will be concerned about how to increase the joys of life, the pleasures of life – more flowers, more beauty, more humanity, more compassion. And we have the capacity and the potential to make this planet a paradise, and to make this moment the greatest ecstasy of your life.Let the old die. Let the old be led by people like Ronald Reagan. Let the blind people follow the blind.But those who have a younger spirit – and when I say “a younger spirit,” it includes even those old people who are not old in spirit; and it does not include even the young people who are old in spirit. The spiritually young are going to be the new man.The new man is not a hope: You are already pregnant with it.My work is just to make you aware that the new man has already arrived. My work is to help you to recognize him and to respect him.You are asking, Maneesha: “What is our relationship to the new man?” There is no relationship between you and the new man because you are the new man. You just have to drop all the dust that has gathered down the ages on the mirror of your consciousness.The new man is not someone coming from another planet. The new man is you in your freshness, in your silences of the heart, in your depth of meditation, in your beautiful spaces of love, in your songs of joy, in your dances of ecstasy, in your love of this earth. No religion teaches you to love this earth – and this earth is your mother, and these trees are your brothers, and these stars are your friends.You are not going to have a relationship with the new man because that would be a separation; all relationships separate. You are going to be the new man. In my vision you are already on the path of the new man. You have started the journey, although you are not fully awake; but as you will see the old man moving more and more toward the graveyard, it will become easier for you to renounce him and his ways of life, his churches, his synagogues, his temples, his gods, his holy scriptures.Your holy scripture is your whole life, and nobody else can write it – you have to write it. You come with an empty book, and it depends on you what you make of it. Birth is not life; it is only an opportunity given to you to create life…to create a life as beautiful, as glorious, as loving as you can imagine, as you can dream.The new man’s dreams and his reality will be one because his dreams will be rooted here in this earth. They will bring flowers and fruits. They will not be just dreams – they will make the world a dreamland.Realize the responsibility…man has never faced a greater responsibility before: a responsibility to renounce the whole past, to erase it from your being.Be Adam and Eve again, and let this earth be the Garden of Eden; and this time we will see who the God is who has the guts to drive man out of the Garden of Eden! It is going to be our garden, and if God wants to be in our garden, He will have to knock on our doors.This earth can be a splendor, a magic, a miracle. Our hands have that touch – it is just that we have never tried it. Man has never given a chance to his own potential to grow, to blossom, to bring fulfillment, contentment, to shower the whole earth with flowers, to fill the whole earth with fragrance. To me, that fragrance is godliness.The new man will not worship a God as a creator of the world; the new man will create God as a fragrance, as beauty, as love, as truth. Up to now God has been the creator: for the new man, man will be the creator, and God is going to be the created. We can create godliness – it is within our hands.That’s why I say the new man is the greatest revolution that has ever happened in the world. And there is no way to avoid it because the old man is determined to die, determined, committed to commit suicide. Let him die peacefully. Those who have a rebellious spirit should just disconnect themselves, and they will be the saviors, they will create a Noah’s ark, they will be the beginning of a new world. And because we have known the old world and its miseries; we can avoid all those miseries; we can avoid all those jealousies, all those angers, all those wars, all those destructive tendencies….We can go through a total transformation: we can create innocent people, loving people, people who breathe in freedom, people who help each other to be free. We can create nourishment for everybody to be dignified, to be respected – not according to some ideals and values, but just as he is.The new man is going to be the very salt of the earth.Osho,last night, after you had left discourse, and I was bowing down, a feeling came over me so strongly that I couldn't imagine living after you die. I felt that without your constant showering, I would be lost in darkness forever. Later, sitting in my room, I felt a tremendous fear coming up in me – the sort that usually catapults me into some neurotic and compulsive activity. This time though, I sat, felt you, and let the feeling come until it was so strong that I felt absolutely paralyzed. Suddenly, it popped; and I was sitting there in a kind of silence I have never known before. Today, I feel quiet and uncomplicated – my usual obsessions far away, not ecstatic, not down; just very simple and sober. Beloved Master, was this an encounter with death?Rafia, there is no way to encounter death, just because death is a fiction. You can think about it, you can be afraid about it; but you cannot encounter it. Nobody ever dies – people are simply changing houses.What you have experienced was first the fear that: after I die, how are you going to live without me? Don’t be worried about it. First, if I see that you cannot live without me, I can postpone dying – unless you come with folded hands, and you say, “Now, it is too much – I cannot tolerate you any more.”Secondly, before meeting me you have lived without me. If I die, it will be a shock – for a few days, you will feel in a dramatic mood of sadness, and then life will take you over again. Millions of people have died – every day people go on dying – and life continues with all its songs, with all its discos, with all its music. People go on dying, but if you think before…it is the thinking that makes it difficult. Death itself is a wound that time heals very quickly. But I will not even leave that wound in you. Before I die, I will make you able to see that there is no death.What is the purpose of all your meditations? It is a deep search to know that life is eternal, and death as such is only an observation of the outsiders. You have always seen other people die: have you ever seen yourself die? But what do you know when other people die? Only one thing – that they don’t breathe, they don’t talk; that their blood circulation stops, that their hearts have no more beats.I was telling you just a few days ago…. One man in the part of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan, has played a joke on people for the third time. He is one hundred and twenty-five years old: he has died three times. This was the third time, and because he has done the act two times before, people were very, very cautious. Doctors were called, every examination was done, and when everybody agreed that this time the poor guy had really died – it was no longer a joke – that man opened one eye, and said, “Who is saying I am dead? At least, this time I’m not!”The relatives had gathered from faraway villages, and they all went away in sadness: “It seems he will have a few years more, and he will again torture us into coming!” But the old man said, “Listen, this is my last act; next time I’m really going to die.”He has been asked by doctors what his secret is, and he says his secret is very simple: going deep into meditation, he realized that as you go deeper, your breathing becomes slower. When you are deepest in meditation, your breathing stops. And it is simply a knack…. Once he learned that stopping the breathing is not death, he allowed even the heart to stop – he just relaxed. And from deep down, he was watching the whole show that was going all around: the doctors, and physicians, and the relatives.There was one man, Bhrahma Yogi, from South India – he did the same experiment in almost every university of the world, particularly the medical colleges. For ten minutes, it was possible for him to pretend to die. And he had certificates from the greatest authorities – from Oxford, from Cambridge – that he is dead; the doctors signed certificates for his death. And after ten minutes he would start breathing again, smiling, and he would open his eyes. It was very frightening.He had collected so many certificates – death certificates from so many authorities – that he had challenged the whole medical science: “Your idea of death is incorrect. You simply think that these symptoms of life are life; they are only symptoms – very outward symptoms. They show only one thing: that life is connected with the body. When the connection is no longer there, the symptoms disappear. It does not mean that life disappears.”It is almost like electricity: you can see the electricity, you can put it off, and all symptoms will disappear; but that does not mean that electricity has died. Life is nothing but bioelectricity – living electricity – a higher form, a refined form of the same energy as electricity.I will not leave, Rafia, unless you have experienced that there is no death. I will ask your permission before I leave. You will have to sign your signature that you give me leave, then I can go on a holiday. And once you know that your inner life, your real life, is eternal, you will be able to have some contact with me – although I will not be in the body.To be in the body is not equivalent to life. It is a kind of imprisonment. You are imprisoned in the body; you can be free of the body, you can become part of the whole. And this time I am going to become part of the whole. I am not going to enter another womb, into another imprisonment. I have done my jail terms – complete!But one thing important happened that you have not been very conscious about: the moment you allowed the fear – the darkness surrounding you – and you relaxed into it, with no resistance, with no fight, with no desire to escape into some activity, slowly, slowly, the fear and the darkness and the death disappeared. You became profoundly silent…a silence that you have never known before.“Today, I feel,” you are saying, “quiet and uncomplicated – my usual obsessions far away, not ecstatic, not down; just very simple and sober.” This is beautiful – this is a great experience. You have touched something deep in existence itself. Feel blissful, and remember the experience. Next time, anything that happens, allow it to happen and just sit silently in the middle of it – a center of the cyclone. Slowly, slowly, the cyclone will disappear, and only the center will be left behind. You will feel immensely centered, silent, sober, innocent, simple – experiences which are tremendously valuable.We miss these experiences because we always escape. When you feel afraid, you get involved in some activity; you go to meet a friend, you start fighting or loving your girl friend, you go to the restaurant. If nothing else, you start smoking – but you have to do something to escape from the experience. This way, people go on missing great opportunities of spiritual growth.Whatever has happened this time should be remembered, and if another opportunity arises – and it is bound to arise – use it even more deeply, more joyously, with a welcome, and it will open doors of great riches and great treasures.But you have not understood the great opportunity because in the end you still ask: “Beloved Master, was this an encounter with death?”You have encountered silence, you have encountered a new quality within you of soberness, quietude – which is unusual to you. You were not ecstatic, and not down, very centered: neither at this extreme nor that extreme, but exactly in the middle. But you have not understood. It is natural – when for the first time it happens, it is expected that you will not understand it. But I want you to remember, it was not an encounter with death; it was an encounter with your fear of death, with your fear of being left behind, with your fear of being without a master.Ten years after his arrival in America from Italy, Roselli had saved enough money from his vegetable business to build a huge house.“I want-a three bedroom-as upstairs,” he explained to the builder. “Nice big-a staircase leading up to bedroom-as, and right over here next to a staircase, I want-a hollow statue.”Months later, he returned and found everything to his satisfaction. Then he noticed a statue next to the staircase.“Hey, what’s-a matter with you?” shouted Roselli. “You no understand-a what I tell-a you?”“Isn’t that what you ordered?” asked the builder. “A hollow statue?”“Are you stupid, or something?” cried the Italian. “I want-a one of those things-a that goes-a ring-a ring. You pick it up and say-a ‘hallo, ‘s tat you?’”Just a little misunderstanding…otherwise, Rafia, you had a beautiful experience.Osho,Whenever, I am in love with a man, for those years no other man attracts me. But for the man, it's not the same. Though he is happy and satisfied with me, and wants to keep the relationship with me, he has his short love affairs every few months. I understand the different nature of man and woman. I also understand every love relationship has its peaks and valleys. Still, sadness in me keeps on coming for a short while, and leaving. I give a long rope to the man. My friends say I make myself so available that I let the man take me for granted and I lose my self-respect. Osho, is it so? I'm not clear. I don't expect anything from him. You know me better. Would you please like to comment?Neelam, there are many things in your question. First, you have a misunderstanding about man’s nature. You think, as many people in the world think, that man is polygamous, and the woman is monogamous…that the woman wants to live with one man, to love one man, to devote and dedicate herself totally to one man, but man is different in nature – he wants to love other women too, at least, once in a while.The reality is: both are polygamous. The woman has been conditioned by man for thousands of years into thinking that she is monogamous. And man is very cunning; he has exploited the woman in many ways. One of the ways is: he has been telling her that man is, by nature, polygamous. All the psychologists, all the sociologists are agreed upon the fact that man is polygamous; and none of them says the same thing about woman.My own understanding is that both are polygamous. If a woman does not behave in a polygamous way, it is nurture, not nature. She has been utterly conditioned so long that the conditioning has gone into her very blood, into her bones, into her very marrow. Why do I say so? – because in the whole of existence, all the animals are polygamous.It would be really surprising that if the whole existence is polygamous, only woman has an exceptional nature. In existence there are no exceptions. But because a woman had to depend financially on man, man has cut the woman in so many ways: he has cut her wings, he has cut her freedom, he has cut her dependence upon herself. He has taken her responsibilities on his shoulders, showing great love, saying: you need not be worried about yourself, I will take care. But in the name of love, he has taken the freedom of the woman. For centuries he has not allowed a woman to be educated, to be qualified in any way, in any craft, in any skill – she has to be financially dependent on the man. He has taken away even her freedom of movement – she cannot move freely the way man moves; she is confined to the house. The house is almost her imprisonment.And in the past particularly, she was continuously pregnant because out of ten children, nine children used to die. To have two, three children, a woman had to be continually pregnant the whole time she was capable of reproducing. A pregnant woman becomes even more dependent financially – the man becomes her caretaker. The man is knowledgeable, the woman knows nothing. She has been kept ignorant because knowledge is power – that’s why woman has been deprived of knowledge.And because it is a man’s world, they all agree as far as keeping the woman enslaved is concerned.But everything has been done with very articulate intelligence. She has been told that it is her nature to be monogamous. Now there is not a single psychoanalyst, not a single woman sociologist to refute this: if man is polygamous, then why should woman be monogamous? Man has made the way for his polygamy: he has created prostitutes. It was an accepted fact in the past that no wife would have objected if her husband, once in a while, visited a prostitute. It was thought that it is just natural for man.I say unto you that both are polygamous. The whole existence is polygamous. It has to be – monogamy is boredom. However beautiful a woman may be, however beautiful a man may be, you become tired – the same geography, the same topography. How long do you have to see the same face? So it happens that years pass, and the husband has not looked attentively at his wife for a single moment.My own approach is natural and simple. I want no marriages in the world of the new man. Marriage is such an ugly and rotten phenomenon – so destructive, so inhuman. On the one hand it makes one woman a slave, and on the other hand, it creates the ugliest institution of prostitutes. The prostitutes are needed to save the marriage; otherwise, the man will start fooling around with other people’s wives. It is a social device so that he doesn’t get entangled with another’s wife – there are beautiful women available.In India, in the days of Gautam Buddha, it was the tradition that the most beautiful woman in the town was not allowed to be married; she had to become a prostitute. She was called nagarvadhu: the wife of the whole city – because she was so beautiful that to be married to one man was going to create jealousies, conflicts, problems. It was better to avoid all those conflicts among men, to make her a prostitute – available for all.In India, every temple had devadasis. Still in South India, there are devadasis. Every family was required, in the past, to donate their most beautiful girl to the temple, to God. In the name of God, those beautiful girls in the temples became prostitutes. First, they were used by the priests; second, they were used by the rich customers – I mean the rich worshipers. And they were so many that they were available in every price range; even the poorest could afford one. Of course, it would not be so beautiful a woman, but any woman is better than no woman.Even today, just a few days ago, a survey was made in Bombay of all the prostitutes – thirty percent of them have come from South India, from temples where their parents have dedicated them to God. For the parents, there was an incentive: dedicating her to God was easier than to get a girl married. It is so difficult in India…you have to give so much money, that not all parents can afford it – just one daughter, and they will have to sell their land, their house, they will become beggars. So it was very easy, and comfortable, convenient, and virtuous, too – respectable, honorable – the society honored it.They offered those girls; they still offer those girls to the temples, and the temples are selling those girls to all great cities because now rich worshipers don’t come to the temples. It is better to have those girls sold to agents in Bombay, in Calcutta, in New Delhi because politicians will need them, priests will need them, rich people will need them. People who are living far away from their homes, working in cities – their families are in the villages – will need them.Thirty percent of the prostitutes in Bombay have come from temples where they were dedicated to God. Every temple in the past was nothing but a sacred facade to hide prostitutes under the name of devadasis. The word means: servants of God.Man has arranged for himself, but he has prohibited the woman…. First, his ego is hurt if his woman falls in love with somebody else. That means he is rejected, that means he is not man enough, that means something is missing in him.And more than that, there is another problem: private property. He has to keep a perfect guard on his woman because he wants his own blood to inherit his property. And if the women are free to have love affairs, then it is very difficult – almost impossible – to be certain that your son is really your son. It may be somebody else’s son, and he will inherit your property. To protect private property, the woman has to be conditioned that she is monogamous. But it is not true, it is not natural.Whether one is man or woman, everybody needs a change, at least once in a while – for the weekend. Five days you can both be monogamous; for two days, on the weekend, you can both be polygamous. And what is the worry about the property – who owns it when you are dead – whether it is your blood or somebody else’s blood? It seems to be an unnecessary worry – somebody will inherit it.And if you become interested in other women, you should understand that your woman is also human, has the same heart, the same consciousness – she also likes sometimes to meet a new man. She also gets tired and bored.In the new world, to which I have dedicated my whole life, there should be no marriage – only lovers. And as long as they are pleased to be together, they can be together; and the moment they feel that they have been together too long, a little change will be good. There is no question of sadness, no question of anger – just a deep acceptance of nature. And if you have loved a man or a woman, you will love to give the other person as much freedom as possible.If love cannot give freedom, then it is not love.You say that, “Sadness in me keeps on coming for a short while and leaving. I give a long rope to the man.” Now, the very idea is wrong. Is your man a dog that you give him a long rope?You cannot give freedom – freedom is everybody’s birthright. The very idea, “I’m giving a long rope”…still the rope is in your hand. You are the giver of freedom. You cannot give freedom; you can only accept the freedom of the other person. You cannot keep one end of the rope in your hand, watching the dog pissing on this tree, pissing on that tree…. You think that is freedom? No, the very idea is wrong.The other person has his freedom; you have your freedom. Neither he needs to have one end of the rope in his hand, nor do you have to have it; otherwise, both are chained. His rope is going to be your chains, your rope is going to be his chains. And you think you give enough rope – you think you are being very generous.Freedom is not something that has to be given to another person. Freedom is something that has to be recognized as the property of the other person.And the freedom of the person you love will not hurt you. It hurts because you don’t use your own freedom. It is not his freedom that hurts; what hurts is that you have been incapacitated by centuries of wrong conditioning – you cannot use your own freedom. Man has taken your whole freedom. That is the real problem. Your freedom has to be returned to you, and it will not hurt; in fact you will enjoy it.Freedom is such a joyful experience. Your lover is enjoying freedom, you are enjoying freedom. In freedom, you meet; in freedom, you depart. And perhaps life may bring you together again. And most probably…. All the researches about love relationships indicate a certain phenomenon which has not been accepted by any society up to now. And even today, when I say these things, I’m condemned all over the world. When your man becomes interested in another woman, it does not mean that he no longer loves you; it simply means just a change of taste.Once in a while, you like to go to Sarjano’s pizza place. That does not mean that you have renounced your old food, but once in a while, it is perfectly good. In fact, after visiting Sarjano’s place, you go to the canteen more joyously. It takes a few days for you to forget the experience – then again, one day, the spaghetti. These affairs don’t mean much. One cannot live on spaghetti alone.The psychologists are agreed on one point: couples who love each other should have a few love affairs once in a while. Those love affairs will renew their relationship, will refresh it. You will start seeing beauty again in your wife. You may start fantasies, dreams of having your wife again – that you misunderstood her before; this time you are not going to misunderstand. And the same is true about your husband.In my idea of a commune, people will be absolutely free to say to their partner: “I would like two days holiday. And you are also free; you need not sit in the house and boil.” If you want to meditate, that is another thing; otherwise you have been interested in the neighbor’s wife too long…. The green grass on the other side of the fence – you wanted to chew it for so long; now your wife is giving you a chance!You should say, “You are great! Just go for a holiday, and enjoy it. And I’m going to the neighbor’s house – the grass is greener there.” But in two days, you will find that the grass is grass, and your own lawn was far better.But an authentic experience is needed, and when after two days, you meet again, it will be the beginning of a new honeymoon. Why not have honeymoons every month? Why be satisfied with one honeymoon in one life? That is strange, and absolutely unnatural. And love is not something bad or evil so that you have to prevent your wife loving somebody else. It is just fun; there is not much to be bothered about. If she wants to play tennis with somebody, let her play! I don’t think that making love has more significance than playing tennis. In fact, tennis is far cleaner.Neelam, you say, “I don’t expect anything from him. You know me better.” I do know you better! I know everybody better. Even in your no-expectations, there are hidden expectations – unspoken…and they are more subtle, and more binding. Simply, one has to accept a simple fact: your partner is a stranger – it is just an accident that you are together – and you never expect anything from outsiders, from strangers.One of the wisest women I have met in my life told me that she makes love only to strangers.I said, “Why? It will be really a difficult thing to find a stranger to make love to.”She said, “No – in trains, in airplanes…I don’t even ask their name, and I don’t say anything about myself – we remain strangers, I have made love to them, and we meet the next day in the marketplace: neither I recognize him, nor he…. There is no need – we enjoyed the moment just out of sheer freedom, no bondage, no commitment.”She is a married woman, married to a very rich man in the Philippines, but she rarely goes to the Philippines. She goes on moving around the world, finding strangers. She says, “Once in a while, I go to the Philippines. My husband himself becomes by that time a stranger, and I love him. But the moment I feel that I am falling into the trap of relationship, I rush out – again, on the road.”I can see something tremendously deep in her insight. Love as much as you can. Never think of the next moment; and if your lover goes somewhere else, you are also free. And don’t deceive yourself: can any woman say that while she is in love with one person, she does not get attracted to other people? Maybe it is a very repressed desire, maybe she never allows it to surface; but it is impossible not to, because there are so many beautiful people around. You have chosen only one stranger among many strangers.Keep freedom as a higher value than love itself. And if it is possible – and it is possible because it is natural – your life will not be a misery, it will be a continuous excitement, a continuous exploration of new human beings. We are all strangers: nobody is a husband, nobody is a wife. Some idiot registrar cannot – just by putting his seal – make you a husband and wife. And once that idiot has put the seal, if you want to separate, you have to go to another idiot – bigger idiots – and wait for months or years to be separated. Strange! – it is your private affair; no business of any registrar, no business of any judge. Why do you go on giving your freedom into the hands of others?You say, “My friends say I make myself so available that I let the man take me for granted, and I lose my self-respect.” Your friends don’t understand a thing – and they are not your friends either because their advice is that of enemies.One should make oneself absolutely available. Your friends are telling you that when your man wants to make love to you, one day say you are having a headache; another day, you are too tired; the third day, you are not in the mood…so keep the man hanging around. Don’t give that much rope – just a little rope, and a beautiful bell around his neck with your name written on it, saying, “Beware, personal property.” What do you mean by “availability?” You should be available to the person you love, and if once in a while he feels to change – enjoy. And let him go joyously. That will bring self-respect to you, and dignity.A divorced woman, frustrated with married life, ran an ad in the local newspaper that read, “Looking for a man who won’t beat me, who won’t run around on me, and who is a fantastic lover.”After one week, her doorbell rings. She goes to the door, opens it, and sees no one there. She closes the door, and is about to walk away when the bell rings again.Opening the door once again, she sees no one there, but happens to look down and notices a man with no arms and no legs sitting on the doorstep.“I’m here to answer your ad,” he says.The woman does not know quite what to do, what to say.So the man continues, “As you can see, I can’t beat you, and it will be impossible for me to run around on you.”“Yes, I can see that,” said the woman, “but the ad also said I wanted a ‘fantastic lover’.”The man smiles and says, “I rang the doorbell, didn’t I?”

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 33 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Although I am deeply satisfied and nourished by my ekdam Punjabi food, still from time to time I feel a strong pull toward other dishes, and enjoy Italian pizzas, French wine, or Japanese sushi. It's not that I don't want to eat out occasionally, but I'd like to feel it is in my hands whether I do or not, and not be a victim of this hormonal conspiracy. Beloved Master, can you please give me a clue how to go beyond these biological pulls?Kamal, if one allows nature without any inhibitions to take its own course, one transcends biology, body, mind, without any effort. But we are full of inhibitions. Even the so-called young people, who think that they have disowned repressions, are in a very subtle way repressive. If you are repressive, then you cannot transcend biological pulls naturally, without any effort. So, the first thing to be remembered is that nature is right.All old traditions have been telling you that nature is not right. You have to divide nature into right and wrong. But nature is indivisible. So while you are dividing it, you are simply making an impossible effort. The whole of nature has to be accepted with great joy and gratitude. Biology is not your bondage, but a certain stage of growth.Life taken with insight and understanding helps you to go beyond itself without asking you for any discipline, any effort, any arduous conflict. We are children of nature. But all the religions have created one thing certainly: a divided mind, a schizophrenic man who is pulled in two directions. They have all given you moralities.The natural man needs no morality. Easy is right. To be natural, to be spontaneous is right…and transcendence comes on its own. The people who are split against themselves – that biology is something to be transcended, that body is something to be fought, that mind is something to be dropped – anybody who is entangled in all these conflicts will never transcend.One should go more easy. It is not a war field. Your life is an autonomous growth. The first need is of a total acceptance with no reluctance, no unwillingness, no subtle condemnation anywhere in your mind.You are saying, “Although I am deeply satisfied and nourished by my ekdam Punjabi food….” His Punjabi food is Neelam. You say you are deeply satisfied; you don’t understand the nuances of being deeply satisfied. It becomes a kind of death. To be alive one needs a little discontent, a little restlessness. If you are deeply satisfied, from that deep satisfaction arises your desire to change your food once in a while.Man is a creature of evolution and growth. Being deeply satisfied brings a full stop to your life…ekdam. Ekdam means: once for all, once for ever. Neelam has an individuality, a grace, a loving heart, and it is very easy to be satisfied with her – she is not a quarreling type, a fighting type. She herself is at ease, and anybody who loves her will find himself soon at ease. A harmony arises – but harmony on the one hand is beautiful, and on the other hand is boring.Perhaps you have never thought that satisfaction is a kind of death. It means you are ready to repeat the same every day, that you have forgotten to change, to evolve.“…still from time to time I feel a strong pull toward other dishes, and enjoy Italian pizzas, French wine, or Japanese sushi.” It is absolutely natural. The problem is arising because of your conditionings that when you are absolutely satisfied with a woman, why should you ask? Why should the desire for somebody else even arise in you? It arises because of your deep satisfaction. Deep satisfaction starts deadening you…nothing new, no excitement, no possibility of “No,” always “Yes.” On the one hand it is very sweet; on the other, it is too sweet.Hence, the desire arises once in a while to have some affair with another woman. It is absolutely natural. If Neelam were a fighting type, nagging type, bitchy, this desire would not have arisen so much, because she would never have allowed you to be satisfied. She would have kept you always unsatisfied; she would have remained a stranger to you, still to be explored. I know her…she has been open to you, available to you, she has not been holding secrets from you. That is not her fault, that is her beauty. But even the most beautiful rose flowers have their thorns, even the most satisfying situations have their problems.Because you are too satisfied, you start asking for a change of taste: Italian pizzas, French wine, or Japanese sushi. Nothing is wrong in it. At least my people, who are the herald of the new man, have to understand it, that there is nothing wrong in it. The whole old conditioning goes against what I am saying to you, but if you are intelligent, you will see the point.Accept it, but don’t keep it a secret from Neelam. Don’t let her down. Don’t make her feel that she is not enough for you. Say to her, “You are too satisfying, and my mind wants a little change of atmosphere, some excitement so that I can feel that I am still alive.” And remember, whatever you take for yourself, you have to give her too. It has not to be one-sided, not that you go to Sarjano’s place, or find a Chinese restaurant; you allow her also. Not only allow…the woman has been repressed by man so much that you will have to pull her out from her conditionings. You will have to help her to move, once in a while, into new pastures. If you can do that, you will not only be accepting your nature; you will also be helping her to find out her nature.As a man, you are also guilty, because it is the man who has forced the woman, made her monogamous. In fact, she needs to move with other people more than you. The most astounding research about men and women and their sexualities is just amazing: Man can have only one orgasm, the woman can have multiple orgasms. The reason is simple because in orgasm, a man loses energy; he will need to recover for sometime, according to his age, to have another orgasm.But the woman does not lose any energy. On the contrary, her first orgasm gives her a deep incentive to have more orgasms, and she is capable of at least half a dozen orgasms in a single night. Because of this fact, man became so afraid that he prevented the woman from knowing the fact that anything like orgasm exists. So he is very quick in making love. The woman will take a little longer time because man’s sexuality is local, genital; woman’s sexuality is spread all over her body. If a man wants her to have an orgasm, he has to play with her whole body, the foreplay, so her whole body starts throbbing with energy.But once she has had one orgasm, she is utterly dissatisfied because now she knows the taste, and she is capable, and she knows that now she can have deeper orgasms. And man is simply impotent after the first orgasm, at least for twenty-four hours. He cannot do anything else – he just turns over and goes to sleep. The poor boy is finished. And every woman weeps, cries because she has not even come, and her lover is finished.To avoid the woman from having the knowledge of orgasm – for centuries the woman was not allowed even to know the beauty and the pleasure of orgasm – man also has had to prevent himself from having orgasm. All that he knows is ejaculation; ejaculation is not orgasm. Ejaculation is simply throwing out energy: one feels more relaxed, the tensions of the energy are gone, and one snores better.The woman has become aware of orgasm only in this century and the whole credit goes to the movement of psychoanalysis. In the East, ninety-eight percent of women are still unaware that there is anything in making love, because she gets no juice, no experience. She in fact hates the whole affair. Ejaculation is not her need, it is man’s need; but both have remained deprived of sex and its ultimate orgasmic experiences.But the trouble is, how to manage it? Anything looks very immoral. Either you have to invite all your friends, so that five, six friends make love, one by one, to the woman. Then she will be satisfied, but that looks very hurting to the ego. Or you have to provide her with an electric vibrator. But once she knows the electric vibrator, you are useless because the electric vibrator gives her such tremendous orgasmic experiences that you cannot give.It seems there has been some mistake by nature itself: men and women are not equal in their orgasmic capacity. You are fully satisfied, but have you ever bothered whether your beloved has found even a single orgasm? Because she has not found a single orgasm, she can remain devoted to you: monogamous. But if she knows what orgasmic experience is, she will also want, once in a while, to be with another man.If you really love your woman, you will help her to come out of her old conditionings which are far deeper, because man himself is responsible. Man himself does not have those conditionings; his morality is very superficial and a hypocrisy. But the woman’s morality has gone very deep. Man has been enforcing it from the very childhood. If you feel to change it, it is your responsibility; and particularly Kamal, a man of your understanding should be able to understand what I am saying.It is your responsibility to bring Neelam also out into the sun, into the rain, into the wind, so that she can drop all her conditionings. You have to help her; you have to teach her how to enjoy Sarjano’s place, and not go on eating the Punjabi food her whole life…how to enjoy Japanese food or Chinese food. If men and women really love each other, they will help each other to be unconditioned from the past.Man does not have many conditionings, and they are superficial. He can drop them very easily, the way you drop your clothes. The woman has been conditioned so much that it is not like dropping her clothes, it is like peeling her skin. It is hard and unless you really love a woman…. It will be impossible, on her own, to get rid of all those conditionings, help her. Give her also the taste that in the world there are so many other foods; in the world, other than you, there are many more beautiful men. Your woman must know all of them. It is part of your love that your woman becomes more and more rich in her experiences. And the richer she is, she will not only give you satisfaction; she will start giving you excitement and ecstasy.You say, “It’s not that I don’t want to eat out occasionally, but I’d like to feel it is in my hands whether I do or not….” It is in your hands, but it can be in your hands only if it is in the hands of Neelam too. As far as I am concerned and my concept of the new man and new woman is concerned, there should be equal opportunity for both. Not that you are the master and your woman is your slave; that she can remain satisfied with you, and you can go, once in a while, fooling around the neighborhood. She has every right to fool around in the same neighborhood! And there is no need to feel guilty; you have to help her not to feel guilty.It is a very strange phenomenon that woman’s liberation will be man’s liberation, too; their slavery is together. Because you don’t allow your woman to be free, how can she allow you to be free?Freedom has to be, from both sides, a precious value – loved, recognized, respected.You say “…and not be a victim of this hormonal conspiracy.” If you want to get beyond the hormones and the biology; live it totally, exhaust it. My own understanding is that by the age of fourteen your hormones start working, and if you allow them total freedom if you go with them joyously by the age forty-two, they will like to go to rest. And this transcendence will be natural; it will not be a celibacy imposed. It will be a sacred celibacy that is coming to you from the beyond, because you have lived your life totally and now nothing in the ordinary life interests you. Your interest is in higher values, for a deeper search about life, about truth, about creativity. You have passed a childish age. By the age of forty-two, according to me, a man really becomes adult, but only if he lives naturally. If he lives halfheartedly then it will take a longer time – maybe forty-nine years, maybe seventy-five. Maybe even when he is dying he is thinking only of sex and nothing else; he never transcends it.You both are understanding people and you both love me, and you both can see things without screens on your eyes, clearly. Love each other totally, and occasionally allow each other freedom. But it has to be on both sides. And it is not going to destroy your love; it is going to make it richer, deeper, more fulfilling, more orgasmic. And those few occasions when you are on holiday from each other will not take you away from each other; they will go on bringing you closer to each other. Don’t have any secret – be absolutely open, and allow the other person also to be absolutely open, and respect openness. Never, even by your gestures, make the other person feel guilty. That is the greatest crime humanity has been committing: making people guilty. If the other feels guilty because of very deep rooted conceptions, help her to be free of the guilt.Love lived in an atmosphere of freedom will transcend you from sex naturally, easily, effortlessly. Love will remain, sex will be gone and then love has a purity and a beauty and a sacredness of its own.Sitting on a bus in New York, a prim old lady was shocked to overhear an Italian say to another, “Emma come-a first. I come-a next. Two ass-a come-a together. I come-a again. Two ass-a come-a together again. I come-a once more. Peepee twice. Then I come-a for the last time.”When the Italian was finished, the red faced old maid turned to a policeman sitting nearby, and said, “Are you not going to arrest that terrible old man?”“What for?” asked the policeman. “For spelling Mississippi?”Take life more joyously and more jokingly. Let your whole life become a beautiful joke. There is nothing wrong in nature, and to be natural is to be religious.But there are disparities between man and woman; neither biologists, nor psychologists have been able to figure out why these disparities exist. The woman is far stronger as far as orgasmic experience is concerned. She needs to have more lovers than man, and man must have become aware of the fact in the very beginning of life. To prevent her, he has completely closed even the possibility of having one orgasm. That’s why all women hate sex. I was puzzled – why do women hate sex? All the women go to celibate monks and worship them; as far as their own husband is concerned, they know he is a dirty old man. The reason is, to them sex is an experience – just dirtiness. The man is throwing his dirt onto the woman. The woman feels used, and nobody likes being used.The new man will make love not a one way affair, from man to woman; it will be a two-way affair. Both will be enjoying it. And science has to find some way either to make man capable of having multiple orgasms so he can go a long, long time with the woman, giving her as many orgasms as she requires, and make the whole journey beautiful; or science has to cut woman’s multiple orgasmic capacity to a single orgasm. Something has to be done, and it is one of the most important things because it creates problems in everybody’s life.You both are intelligent, and I hope that you will prove my hypothesis that you can love each other, and yet once in a while have different affairs – joyously, not reluctantly. Not because I am saying it, but out of your own understanding.Osho,The other day when your body fell a little, some of your sannyasins rushed toward you in a split second to help. There was no hustle and no confusion among them, and their movements were in perfect harmony. After the necessary assistance was finished, they sat back in their seats as if nothing had happened. This all happened within a couple of seconds. Osho, is this the reflection of the awareness that you are constantly talking about?Yes. It is something of alertness, something of silence and peace – a discipline that arises out of awareness, not a discipline that is being forced through training. Only Sarjano missed out because he did not have the camera ready.After you had gone back to your seats and I moved, I remembered Sarjano, and I remembered a small story….An American couple are touring darkest Africa on safari. They are walking cautiously through the jungle, when suddenly a huge lion springs out in front of them. It seizes the wife with its giant jaws and proceeds to drag her into the bush.“Shoot!” she screams. “Shoot for Christ’s sake!”“I can’t,” answers the husband. “I have run out of film.”Everything was right, only Sarjano was not ready with his camera. I have heard he is angry with his camera, wants to sell it. Don’t do any such stupid thing! Even if you have run out of film we can get more!Osho,Not long ago, in a discourse, I heard you say that you hated spaghetti. Then recently, you said you hated suntans. And now, just the other day, I heard you say that the only thing you hated was income tax. Does this mean that you don't hate spaghetti, and suntans anymore? Or is there some mysterious connection between these three seemingly unrelated phenomena?I don’t hate anything. But just when I am talking to you, there are points which have to be emphasized. And when I say I hate spaghetti, I am simply emphasizing something. Hatred is not part of my being at all. In fact, I have never tasted spaghetti, and perhaps I will never taste it because of an accident.One Italian woman, a professor with a doctorate from the University of Rome, used to be my sannyasin. But she had strange habits: one was that I don’t think she had ever taken a single shower in her life. She used to stink. And she went putting on powder, layers of powder…she was a beautiful woman. And it was she who made me so much afraid of spaghetti, because she prepared spaghetti one day and brought it for me to eat. The spaghetti was smelling of her.I told her, “Out, you just go out of the room. Leave the spaghetti, I will eat…but I always eat alone. You just go out.” And as she went out, the first thing was: I threw her spaghetti down the toilet. And the smell was so dangerous that even today – it must be twenty-six, twenty-seven years ago – but suddenly, if I remember spaghetti, I remember the woman and the smell. And then it is no more a memory; I have to live it again. That’s why I say, “I hate”; otherwise, I have never tasted spaghetti. It just came in a wrong way to me, through a wrong vehicle.A suntan also I don’t hate, but certainly I don’t like, because to me it seems a modern way of self-torture. It is something masochistic, lying down in the hot sun. All over the world millions of women are suffering, and nobody protests that – “Stop this nonsense!” And that suntan does not remain long. You are simply sunburned. In a few days, you are healed and you are back to your normal color.If one really wants to be a little less white, a suntan is not the way. You need a certain pigment to be injected into your body, and then you will remain, for your whole life, the color you wanted. A suntan to me always looks something like religious self-torture; the beaches are full…there is no space on the beaches on a sunny day.I don’t hate – why should I hate? It has nothing to do with me. I simply don’t like…I myself don’t like to go into the sun. I love to see the sun from my air-conditioned room.A wealthy English tourist visiting America was curious about the native American Indians. After touring one reservation, she asked her guide why some men had more feathers than others in their headdresses.“We only have one feather because we only have one squaw,” said the guide. Thinking the guide must be joking, she asked another man who said, “Uh! we have four feathers because we have four squaw.”Disturbed that any culture could possibly have such a crude custom, she decided to ask the tribal chief for further explanation. “Why are there so many feathers in you headdress, chief?” she asked.“Me chief, so me fuck them all. Big, small, short, tall, make no difference.”The English lady was mortified. “You ought to be hung,” she snorted.“You damned right,” said the chief. “Me hung like buffalo.”“Well,” she cried. “You don’t have to be so damned hostile!”“Hoss-style! Dog-style! Any style! Me fuck them all!”Tears in her eyes, and red with embarrassment, the woman cried, “Oh dear, Oh dear.” To which the chief replied, “No deer! Me no fuck deer! Asshole too high. Fuckers run too fast!”I have just been joking. I don’t hate anybody…neither the spaghetti, nor the suntan, nor the tax collectors. But when I am speaking, I never say anything that I have prepared beforehand and whatever I say, I want to say with my totality, with my spontaneity. My word hate is simply a total expression of my dislike.My God! I’m still smelling that spaghetti!

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 34 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Your outstretched hands ever-patiently wait beside my open cage door, beckoning. But time and time again, I return to my cage shouting, “Freedom, freedom!” Having a taste here and there of the vastness of the unknown, why do I return to my lesser home? Your beckoning eyes, your inviting hands pull so strongly at my heart, and yet I resist. Beloved Osho, which is it I am more afraid of – life or death?The old man, the way he has existed for centuries, is afraid of life, not afraid of death. Death he worships, life he renounces.All the religions that have prevailed in the world have been life-negative; they have continuously hammered the thought into your mind that to love life is something wrong; to love life is for sinners, to hate life is for saints. All their disciplines are managed and planned in such a way that they destroy your life; they destroy your joy of life, they destroy your longing for more and more life.Rather than helping you to live more aesthetically, more artistically, more beautifully, more blissfully, they condemn life so much in so many ways that your whole longing for life is poisoned. And in a very indirect way, they all teach you to worship death. What is renunciation of life if not the worshipping of death? They are afraid of life because life seems to be against their religions. A man who loves life will not bother at all about temples, and mosques, and churches; life is enough unto itself.One who has known life in its depths and in its heights will not bother at all whether God exists or not because he has already known something more real, something more certain than any God has ever been.All gods are hypothetical.Only life is the real God.Naturally, the priests are worried that you should not get too much involved with the mysteries of life, because if you are too much involved with the mysteries of life…who is going to be a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist? Who is going to worship dead gods, dead saints? Who is going to listen to the priests?One who has heard the song of life itself, one who has lived intensely and totally the music of life itself, who has danced it, is not going to be concerned about belief systems – he has no need. And there are only two ugliest professions in the world…one is that of the prostitutes and the other is that of the priests.Of course, the profession of the priests is far worse because the prostitutes only sell their bodies, they don’t sell their souls. And they don’t interfere with anybody else’s freedom, they don’t destroy your joy; on the contrary, they in some way enhance it, intensify it, make it more aflame. It is the priest who sells gods, and who enslaves man, and who interferes in everybody’s life – his freedom, his individuality.He can not tolerate seeing anybody happy, because the person who is happy is not going to be his customer; his business is dependent on your misery. The more miserable you are, the more you will seek the advice of the priest, the more you will worship statues, the more you will look beyond life for some consolation. This life is full of suffering. You have to believe in a life other than this life just to bear it, just to tolerate it; otherwise, it will become impossible even for a single moment for any intelligent man.The priests have left only one thing, and that is suicide. They have destroyed everything that life is capable of, and they have poisoned your minds so deeply that even if you try to enjoy something…you want to dance, but you find that some invisible chains are preventing your feet; you want to sing, but you find some invisible hands are choking your voice; you want to love, but you suddenly hear some voice coming from within your own mind that you are going to commit a sin, it is against God and against all the holy scriptures.Your question is of tremendous importance. You are asking, “Which is it I’m more afraid of: life or death?”Nobody is afraid of death.It may seem unbelievable, but I repeat that nobody is afraid of death, because you cannot be afraid of something you don’t know. You cannot be afraid of something with which you are not acquainted – what do you know about death? How can you be afraid of the unknown?It is the known that creates fear. It is the miserable life that you have lived today, that you are afraid you may have to live tomorrow again. You know it; you have been living it year after year, hoping that some miracle will happen, and tomorrow with the rising sun everything will change. But the sun rises every day; it has risen thousands of times, and nothing changes. On the contrary, life goes on becoming more complicated, more miserable, more full of suffering, more full of fear.Yes, you are afraid of old age, you are afraid of disease, but not of death. You know nothing about death. Death, you worship.One of my friends was meeting with the home minister. He asked, “Ramakrishna Mission is given tax-exempt status, Vivekananda Mission is given tax-exempt status; why are you all against a man who has not done any harm to you?”And the home minister said to him – “they are friends, old colleagues – because Oshois still alive, he cannot be given tax-exempt status.” My friend could not believe that to get tax-exempt status, you have to be dead! He said, “What kind of logic is this?”And the home minister explained, “A living man cannot be given a tax-exempt status because he may change tomorrow, he may change his whole ideology; he may become a communist, he may become an anarchist. And particularly the man you have come to recommend to me is already dangerous!“Once a man dies, everybody is satisfied; at least one thing is certain – that man cannot change. He cannot give another interpretation to life, he cannot declare that there is no God. We can be certain about his philosophy, and if it fits into our categories, we can give the tax-exempt status, but not to a living man – and especially to a living man like Osho!”My friend was going to see the prime minister, but the home minister said, “It is better you don’t mention Osho’s name to anybody. Just the name makes them afraid for the simple reason that he does not belong to any religion; nobody knows what exactly is his teaching. He does not give any discipline to his people; on the contrary, he takes away people’s disciplines and beliefs. Rather than conditioning them to be obedient to the society and the society’s morality, he corrupts them. He takes away their conditionings and leaves them open, vulnerable, rebellious.”Have you ever seen anybody who is alive being worshipped as a saint? Even when Ramakrishna was alive, people thought, “He is an idiot, he is a madman.” When Ramateertha was alive, the great Hindu scholars of Varanasi declared that he could not be a saint because he did not know Sanskrit. His whole upbringing was in Persian, Arabic and Urdu, because he was born in Lahore which is now in Pakistan. But once dead, nobody asks whether Ramateertha knew Sanskrit or not; dead, everything is right. Now he is worshipped as a great saint. Ramakrishna is no longer described as a madman; he is worshipped as an incarnation of God – by the same people.To worship the dead has been one of the basic attitudes of the old man, because the dead man cannot create rebellion, cannot provoke people to revolt. A dead man is very comfortable, convenient. But one who is alive, and not only alive, but who believes life to be the only God, looks certainly dangerous.Just a few days ago here in Pune, one of the shankaracharyas, Swami Swarupananda, told a conference, “Osho is the most dangerous man mankind has ever known.” I don’t carry nuclear weapons with me, I don’t have even a knife to cut vegetables, but I am the most dangerous man of the whole history of mankind because I teach life and not death, love, rejoicing and not renunciation.The old man has lived so wrongly, so stupidly, so insanely that the harm that has been done to us is incalculable.A man is shipwrecked, and finds himself in an uninhabited region. After wandering long in the jungle, he comes at last to a village where he sees a noose from which a corpse is hanging.“The Lord be praised,” he cries. “Civilization at last!”But this is the civilization we all have inherited.Two guys at a bar were comparing the sexual behavior of their wives. “Hey,” one said, “Does your wife close her eyes when you are making love to her?”“Sure, she does,” the other replied. “She can’t stand to see me having a good time.”The priests are just like these wives who can’t stand to see anybody having a good time. All your religions are nothing but condemnations of everything that can give you pleasure, joy. They are very supportive of everything that is nothing but self-torture.Your question is: “Osho, your outstretched hands ever-patiently wait beside my open cage door, beckoning, but time and time again, I return to my cage shouting, “Freedom, freedom!” Having a taste here and there of the vastness of the unknown, why do I return to my lesser home? Your beckoning eyes, your inviting hands pull so strongly at my heart; and yet I resist.”Naturally, a great question mark arises in your heart – why? Why do you choose slavery when freedom is available? Why do you choose the cage when the doors are open, and the whole sky is yours?The answer is not very far to find. The cage has security. It protects you from rain, from sun, from strong wind, from your enemies. It protects you from the vastness in which one can be lost. It gives you a shelter, it is your cozy home, and you don’t have any responsibility of worrying about your food, of worrying about the rainy season, of worrying about whether tomorrow you will be able to find nourishment or not.Freedom brings tremendous responsibilities.Slavery is a bargain: you give your freedom and somebody else starts being responsible for your life, for your protection, for your food, for your shelter, for everything that you need. All that you lose is your freedom, all that you lose are your wings, all that you lose is the starry sky. But that was your soul.In a cage safe and secure, you are dead; you have chosen a life of no risk, no danger. That’s why you go on returning to your cage, although your deepest soul is restless in slavery; it would like to risk all and to have the freedom to go to the very end of the sky. It longs to fly across the sun to faraway stars. That’s why my hands become significant to you, my words become a beckoning. But you decide, finally, to be a hypocrite; that’s what almost everybody in the whole world has decided.You start singing songs of freedom in the cage. Although the doors are open and the sky is available, you settle for a life of hypocrisy – to have all the coziness and the insurance and the security of the cage, and have all the joys of freedom in your song, in your poetry, in your painting, in your music. That’s why you go on shouting, “Freedom, freedom!” You are simply deceiving yourself.The new man will not be a hypocrite.The old man was basically taught to be a hypocrite. The greater the hypocrite he was, the more honored, the more rewarded, the more respectable. He had settled with society: “You respect me and I will be a slave, I will be at your disposal. You just go on giving Nobel prizes to me.”But you are not to be part of that old hypocrite world. I want you to come out of all security, all coziness, all shelter. Make the whole sky your home, be a wanderer, a pilgrim, know all the mysteries and all the secrets of life. And let not your life be a serious and miserable phenomenon. Let it be a joyous laughter, a playfulness.To me, authentic religiousness means a childlike innocence, playfulness, and a wholehearted capacity for laughter.Then each moment becomes so precious that you will not sing the song of freedom, you will live it. You will not talk about truth, you will know it. You will not worship God, you will find him wherever life is – all over existence.Osho,The closer I get to you, the madder I become, and I have noticed this phenomenon in other disciples. Please comment.The question shows you are not yet mad enough because those who are mad never accept that they are mad. That is one of the absolutes: the madman never accepts that he is mad.You can look in madhouses, you can ask as many madmen as possible, and you will be surprised that they are all shocked that people think that they are mad. No argument convinces them; on the contrary, they are ready to give every argument to prove that they are not mad.It happened in the second world war, Winston Churchill had gone for a walk in the evening, tired of the whole day’s work, and the tremendous responsibility and tension – because Adolf Hitler was bombing exactly over London. He forgot in his thoughts that after six o’clock he had to go inside the house; an absolute curfew ordered that after six o’clock, nobody should come out of the house. As Churchill remembered it, he saw that it was six-fifteen. And it was not in India where, if you are the prime minister, no law applies to you; it was Britain where it makes no difference whether you are the prime minister or a nobody.He rushed to the closest house because his own house was far away, it would take fifteen minutes…the streets were deserted, he could be caught, and that would become a scandal – that even the prime minister does not follow the rules that he decides for everybody to follow.He knocked on the door. A man opened the door, and he introduced himself saying, “I am Winston Churchill, prime minister of the country, and by chance I forgot to return home in time. Please give me shelter.”Before he could end his sentence, the man, a very strong man, pulled him in. Churchill said, “What are you doing?” The man said, “Shut up! We already have three more Winston Churchills in here.”It was a madhouse!Winston Churchill said, “But I really AM Winston Churchill.” The man said, “Forget all about it. They all say the same thing. Everybody is really Winston Churchill.”He said, “Let me phone my wife, or to the palace.” The man said, “Forget all these things. Just get into your cell so I can lock it. And don’t make any nuisance in the night, because we are tired of these Winston Churchills. Those three are also continually saying, “We want to talk to Buckingham Palace; we want to inform parliament what kind of misbehavior is being done to the prime ministers.”He thought for a moment, and realized the situation – that there is no way; he will have to wait till the morning, unless some officer or doctor, somebody more intelligent then this idiot, comes in.But it was the same story. The jailer came, and he was an educated man. Winston Churchill very politely said to him, “Listen, I’m really Winston Churchill. I’m not joking. And I have too much responsibility, the country is at war, I cannot remain here! I’m needed in my office; every moment is decisive.The jailer laughed. He said, “Just rest. Three others are also continually harassing us that they are responsible for the whole country, that they are to save the whole world.”Winston Churchill thought that now even the last hope…. The doctor came. He looked at Winston Churchill, and Winston Churchill said, “Do you recognize me? Have you seen my picture?”The doctor said, “I have seen your picture, and that’s why I’m wondering…that you look exactly like Winston Churchill.”Churchill said, “I don’t look. I am.”The doctor said, “Forget all about that! Don’t say that, because there are three more. They also look…and if you tell them that they look like Winston Churchill, they become very angry. They say, ‘We are! Don’t insult your own prime minister.’“His family was in search all over the street where he used to go for a walk, and somebody said that they had seen him knock at the madhouse on the corner – that’s how he was found and released. But before getting released he said, “I would like to ask a favor. I would like to see the other three. I have become so interested in them. Once in the night, it came to me, “Perhaps I’m just mad, and they are right.” But then I dropped that idea,” No, I’m certainly Winston Churchill; I’m the prime minister.” But I would love to see them.”So he was taken to see them. They all looked like him – fat, with the cigar. And they all looked at him also, and they all said the same thing. They said, “Boy, you look almost like Winston Churchill – an exact copy of me! How did you manage?”Because he was not a madman, for a moment the idea came to him, “Perhaps I am mad.” But for those three people even that idea was impossible.You say, “The closer I get to you, the madder I become, and I have noticed this phenomenon in other disciples.” You have to come a little bit closer. Just becoming madder is not enough; you have to be really mad! And the moment when you are really mad, you will not say you are mad; your will say, “I am enlightened.” That too happens here; when somebody really gets mad he becomes enlightened. Unless you become enlightened, I don’t take it seriously. Then it is okay, it is normal. Here in this commune of crazy people it is a normal phenomenon, and you have observed rightly.But to be mad by coming closer to me is to attain to sanity in a world which is really insane. Because the world is insane, the sane people will appear as if they have gone mad. The sane people are so few, and they happen once in thousands of years – a Gautam Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu, a Socrates, a Jesus. Centuries pass, and humanity goes on living in a lukewarm madness. But because everybody is in the same boat, nobody recognizes that anybody is doing something insane.Coming closer to me means becoming more sane. It will appear like becoming madder…and even more mad. All these words are very irrelevant. As far as I see, there is a certain similarity and a certain dissimilarity between the sane and the really sane, between the ordinary mad and the madness that comes as a divine gift.The sameness is that both go out of the mind. In fact, we say – in many languages the phrase exists – that somebody has gone out of his mind that means he has gone mad. But Gautam Buddha also goes out of his mind. Just the difference is that: you can go out of mind and fall below mind or you can go out of mind and transcend mind and go beyond.In both the cases you will be out of the mind – that will be the similarity between the ordinary madman and the enlightened man. But everything else will be totally different. The man who has gone beyond the mind has become for the first time sane, intelligent, wise. But to the ordinary humanity, to the normally insane people, both have gone beyond their fold, both will appear as if they are mad, and many of their actions can be interpreted as if they are similar.One great Zen master, Lin Chi, was staying in a temple on a cold winter night. In the middle of the night, the priest suddenly woke up because he saw, in the middle of the temple, a great fire. He rushed there; Lin Chi was sitting by the side of the fire.Lin Chi had come that very evening and he wanted to stay overnight. Knowing him as a great Zen master, the priest had allowed him; but now he was repenting that he had allowed this madman inside the temple because he had burned a big wooden statue of Gautam Buddha, and he was enjoying in the cold night the heat, the warmth.The priest said, “Are you mad or something?” Lin Chi said, “What’s the matter? Why are you looking so angry?”He said, “You have burnt Gautam Buddha! It was our most precious statue; it took years to make it.”He said, “I have burnt Gautam Buddha?” So he took his staff and started searching in the ashes of Gautam Buddha for his bones, which in the East are called flowers.The priest said, “Now what are you doing?” Lin Chi said, “I am looking for the flowers! Gautam Buddha is gone, but at least we can save the bones.”Even the priest had to forget his seriousness and laugh, and he said, “You are really mad. This is just a wooden Gautam Buddha. There are no bones in it.”Lin Chi said, “If that is the case then you have still got two more statues, and the night is long and very cold. Bring one and you can also participate and enjoy. And as far as worship is concerned, one statue is enough; three are not needed.”But the priest, seeing the intentions of Lin Chi, could not allow him to remain in the temple. In the middle of the night, a cold night, he forced him to leave the temple. He said, “I’m afraid if I go to sleep you will destroy another statue. I have heard much about you and I have always thought that you are a little mad, but today I know you are completely gone.”So he threw Lin Chi out of the temple. In the morning he opened the doors to see what had happened to Lin Chi. Just in front of the temple there was a milestone. Lin Chi had collected a few wild flowers, had put those flowers on the milestone and he was doing his morning worship: “Buddham Sharanam Gachchhami.”The priest said, “My God, this is too much! First he has destroyed a precious statue of Gautam Buddha and now he is worshipping before a milestone.” He went and he asked Lin Chi, “What are you doing?”He said, “The real thing is prayer. Whether the stone is carved in a certain form and proportion or not, it does not matter. It is only an excuse. You have your excuses – I have destroyed one, two are still there. Sometime I will see…but for this morning this milestone is as perfect to meditate, to pray with, as any Gautam Buddha.”To any ordinary normal human being, this behavior will look insane. But do you think it is insane or is it super-sanity, super-sensitivity? He is a superman, because he is saving the essential and destroying the non-essential.Don’t be worried about becoming madder by coming closer to me – rejoice! The madder you become, the more blissful you are. And you are seeing the same phenomenon happening in other people. My very being here is to drive as many people mad as possible, because these mad people are the potential for the future.The so-called sane have ruled the world too long, and destroyed everything that was valuable. Now let this new race of the new man, who may look mad to the old, rule over the world. Let these people spread more madness, more joy, more song, more ecstasy and more dance around the earth. That’s the only way to save it from destruction.But old habits die hard. So you are becoming madder, in installments – slowly, slowly. Take a little longer steps. Don’t take me for granted. I am here today, tomorrow…? Only one thing is needed – permission from Rafia! And I can persuade him….Sandra and Simon are arguing furiously over the breakfast table. “Oh, you are stupid!” shouted Simon at his sister. “Simon!” says the father, “that’s quite enough of that. Now say you are sorry.”“All right,” says Simon, “Sandra, I am sorry you are stupid.”Just small steps won’t do; you need quantum leaps!The mind can try to be sane. But it will be very superficial sanity, just skin-deep, or perhaps not even that much; a little scratch and the insane will come out. Real sanity consists only in going beyond the mind and entering into a state of meditation. Thoughts can never become sane. Only a thoughtless silence brings you to the world of sanity.And when silence deepens inside you and goes on opening doors upon doors of your heart till you have reached your very being, don’t stop, because the mind is very old and your meditation will be a very new experience. The old has weight, the old can pull you back again and again. The new experience of meditation and intelligence has to be given time to grow roots, has to be given time to start influencing your actions and your behavior. You should not leave the effort to create your meditation, your silence, your peace and its depth till you are absolutely certain that your mind is under your control and you are not under the control of the mind. That is the criterion of a sane man: the mind is his servant. For the insane man, the mind is his master.Osho,The other morning you said that we are all going to be enlightened and all masters, and I felt simultaneously a great laughter and a tremendous responsibility awakening in me. Is that what you want? Am I listening correctly? Again I feel that I am not receptive enough. Please help me.Sarjano, I said certainly that you are all going to become enlightened, and masters, and you heard me right. Just one thing more I have to add to it. I could say it because enlightenment is your very nature. It is because of language that many problems arise; otherwise I would have said you are enlightened and you are masters – you are just unaware of it.It is as if you have a treasure in your house, but you don’t know where it is. The house is big – many mansions, many rooms; you know certainly the treasure is there, but you are poor, you are a beggar, and who is going to believe you? Even you yourself suspect a thousand-and-one times that perhaps it is all a myth, a dream; there is no treasure. But you have not looked into the house, you have not searched in all nooks and corners; you have not made enough efforts to find it.I have found my treasure! That’s why I am absolutely certain that if my consciousness can give me so much peace and so much silence, so much joy, so much blissfulness, there is no reason why your consciousness cannot do the same. Perhaps you have not looked into the possibility, you have not searched in your own being, you have never gone in; otherwise you are enlightened this very moment.And I could say that not only you all will be enlightened; you all will be masters. All enlightened people have not been masters, but I can say with tremendous guarantee that my people, once they become enlightened, are going to be masters, for the simple reason that I have been preparing you to convey the message. I am giving you all the devices: how to create bridges between you and those who are blind; how to find words which can contain at least a hint of your experience. Talking to you twice every day for almost thirty-five years….The danger is that many of you may become masters before they become enlightened, because they have listened to so much; just a little articulateness and they can pretend to be great masters. A few are doing that already around the world; they have become mini-gurus.But what you heard, you heard rightly. It seems difficult, it seems almost impossible; hence you laughed. The very idea of Sarjano as enlightened will create laughter in everybody. Sarjano, the enlightened master, the piesta seller, the pornography photographer. It certainly…. I can understand why you laughed. You know yourself!But simultaneously you also felt a tremendous responsibility awakening in you, because it does not matter; neither piesta, nor anything else can prevent your enlightenment. In fact, my people are going to be not just like the stone statues of Gautam Buddha, sitting in a lotus posture doing nothing. How many Buddhas like that can we afford in the world? We will need a shoemaker who is enlightened, a piesta maker enlightened – all kinds of people. Your actions don’t define you; your being remains undefined by your actions. Certainly your being defines your actions. When you are enlightened your piesta will have a different tasteIn desperation the young bride finally took pen in hand and wrote to the problem page of a newspaper: “I am married to a sex maniac. My husband never leaves me alone. He makes love to me all night long, while I am in the shower, while cooking breakfast, even while I’m trying to clean the house. Can you tell me what to do?” signed, worn out.“PS Please excuse the jerky handwriting.”But even these people have to become enlightened!My deepest longing is to make all kinds of people enlightened and to make enlightenment a very ordinary, simple and innocent experience – nothing special, nothing holier-than-thou-humble, non-pretending, not claiming spirituality…just being joyous and full of light, radiant with joy, overflowing with love, ready to share their experience in whatever way they can.Sarjano, there is no need to laugh. You are as capable as any Gautam Buddha. And there is no need to be worried about responsibility, because when you become enlightened you also become capable of fulfilling tremendous responsibilities of which you could have never dreamt before.[Suddenly the sound of fire crackers is heard in the distance.]Is this Sarjano making all these firecrackers from his piesta shop? – because I think he is there!

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 35 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Prince Charles, the heir to the English throne, recently spent three days on a small Scottish island with a local family, helping on a croft. Earlier this year, he spent some time in the Kalahari desert with Lawrence Van Der Post. He said on television that he talks to his plants to help them grow. The future king of England seems to be interested in spiritual matters. Have you any comment to make on this?Prince Charles is deeply interested in meditation. He is also interested in exploring the inner world. But in the West, unfortunately, such people are thought to be a little crazy – a little loony.His statements – that he talks to his plants to help them grow – have created almost a scandal all over England. They don’t think that their future king should talk such nonsense – although it is not nonsense. But from a man from the royal family, and particularly the man who is going to be the king, England must be feeling very insecure. His going alone in the desert or to small villages to find peace of mind is very disturbing to the British traditional, orthodox Christian; it is disturbing to his family, to the queen and to his father, Prince Philip.When he was in India, he had specially called Vimalkirti and his wife, Turiya – they both were my sannyasins. Vimalkirti was one of his cousins. Vimalkirti was the great-grandson of the German emperor, and he was directly connected to Prince Philip; Prince Philip was his mother’s brother.He talked for hours about me, about meditation, about what is happening here. Vimalkirti and Turiya both invited him to come; he was very interested, but very afraid of the royal family. He was specially told by Queen Elizabeth not to go to Pune. He went to see the shankaracharya, he went to see Mother Teresa, but Queen Elizabeth was more afraid of Pune than anything.In the East, kings were sent – particularly future kings – to the great seers and mystics to learn the ways of inner life, because a king is not of any worth if he has no contact with himself. If he is just an extrovert, he cannot be a blessing to his people. For years in the East the princes used to sit at the feet of the masters to learn silence, to learn compassion, to learn meditation, to become aware of the mysteries of existence. The king should not only be aware of the mundane world, he should also have his roots in the sacred – only then is he a complete man. And only then can he look after his people in all aspects of life. But in the West, it is totally a different thing.Prince Charles is being thought of as if he is a little crazy, and England is worried because he is going to be the king. He has already started throwing his weight; he insists on his way of life.It is a well-known scientific fact that you can talk to the trees, and you can help them to grow faster, you can help them to bring bigger flowers, juicier fruits; you just have to be in a friendly, loving relationship with them. They are very sensitive people, more sensitive than man himself.The latest research about trees and their sensitivity scientifically proves strange phenomena. Scientists have developed some instruments, something like cardiograms, which can graphically depict the exact emotions of a tree.On a silent and beautiful morning, with the sun rising and the birds singing the graph is very harmonious. Then suddenly, the scientists bring a woodcutter with the intention to cut a tree. And immediately – the man has not started cutting it, he has not expressed his thought even that he is going to cut it – the graph starts wavering, loses harmony, shows fear, anxiety, tension; the tree has lost its joyous ecstatic interiority.It seems that the tree is capable of reading the mind of the man, because he has not said anything. And if the same woodcutter is brought to the side of the tree without any intention to cut it, the graph goes on harmoniously, there is no change. The tree is not worried; the man is not dangerous, he is not going to harm it.Not only that, but when a woodcutter comes with the intention of cutting a tree, a certain tree, other trees surrounding it all start showing anxiety, fear, anguish; their graphs start losing the harmonious beauty. They are not going to be cut, but one of their friends, one of their neighbors, a colleague for years, is going to be unnecessarily killed.It was in the East with Mahavira, that the first insight came into the world that trees are living beings, and they should be treated in the same way. Vegetarianism is just a by-product of that intuition. But it remained a philosophical hypothesis.Then another Indian man, Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, scientifically proved that trees are living beings. He was given a Nobel prize for his great exploration and opened a new door for future explorers. But since then fifty years, or more than fifty years have passed; nobody has gone beyond Jagdish Chandra Bose.But recently, many scientists around the world – in the Soviet Union, outside the Soviet Union – have gone far beyond Jagdish Chandra Bose and his discoveries. The trees are not only alive; they are also conscious in their own way.Man should not think that he is the only conscious and intelligent animal in the world, and he should not think that his is the only type of consciousness that exists. The researchers show that animals have a different kind of consciousness and a different kind of sensitivity.A few birds…particularly bees have been found to have a certain language, and trees have been found immensely sensitive. When the gardener comes to water and to nourish them, the graph on the cardiogram attached to them starts dancing in joy, shows some ecstatic welcome. Perhaps soon we may be able to discover that they have their own kind of language that we don’t understand.But Prince Charles talking to the trees in England will not be acceptable. He is being condemned as a little crazy. Actually, according to me, and according to all the scientific research too, what he is doing is absolutely sane – more sane than your ordinary people are.I had an old gardener who won every year a competition in the city because he used to bring roses so big that people could not believe it. He was a poor man and his secret was that he treated trees not as trees, but as his own children. He would talk to them, he would inform them before-hand, “I am going for a competition; don’t let me down. You have to produce the biggest flower possible.”For almost the twenty years that he was with me, he was winning every year. But his secret was not better gardening; his secret was a deep respect for the plants, bestowing on them a dignity, communing with them as if they also were human beings. He was offered many other jobs by richer people because they wanted to win the prizes.I told him, “You can accept if somebody is giving you more money – don’t be worried.”He said, “That is not the question. The question is that everywhere I will be thought mad. It is only you who has never said to me that what I am doing is nonsense. You have supported me, and in my whole life you are the only person who has.”When I came to Pune, the gardener had become very old, but he was sending messages through sannyasins that he would like to come and take care of my garden. He was worried that nobody else could take care of my garden the way it should be taken care of.What Prince Charles is doing is perfectly right. He should be supported, but he is being condemned all over England. We are so blind toward existence that it is not surprising.Have you ever said, “Hello,” to a tree? You yourself would think that you are going out of your mind. Have you ever touched a tree with love, the same way you would touch your beloved? Have you ever hugged a tree? You are missing a whole world of sensitivity that surrounds you, that is available.Slowly, slowly, you will start feeling that when you say hello to a tree…of course, it cannot respond in language, but it will respond in some way. It may start swaying even though there may be no wind. When you touch it lovingly, just a little acquaintance is needed, and you can feel that on the other side there is not something insensitive, but something which is far more sensitive than people are. The tree will be sending its energy, its warmth to your hand.If you hug a tree, the world is going to think you mad. But all the trees will know that there is still hope for man; there are still sensitive people. And hugging a tree, you will find more sensitiveness, more lovingness, than you can find even hugging your friend or your beloved, because your friend, or your beloved are full of tensions, anxieties, agonies. Trees are absolutely innocent; their consciousness is as pure as the purest sky, unclouded. We are not living in a dead world.Although it has not been discovered yet by science, it is predictable that even in rocks you will find a consciousness deep asleep. Nothing is dead anywhere; it is whole, alive, sensitive. We are unnecessarily confining ourselves to human beings. We should spread our hands in all directions – to the animals, the trees, the birds, the rocks, the oceans…. By this expansion of your experiences, your own consciousness will be evolving more and more. This universe is not a graveyard, it is full of rejoicings; you are just deaf. It is full of beauties, but you are blind. All the birds are living in a different dimension of consciousness; you can have a communication with them.Man’s future evolution is to expand his own consciousness in all dimensions, so that he can find the oceanic life and sensitivity that constitutes the universe. To me, this sensitivity and consciousness that makes up the whole existence is the only God, not to be worshipped, but to be loved.Create more friends, and as your friendship goes deeper into different dimensions, you will find yourself becoming richer and richer; your own heights will start reaching Everest, your own depths will start reaching the Pacific.The new man, of which I consistently dream, is going to deny God and to accept the world. But his world will be full of godliness. The old man has been a worshiper of dead gods in the temples and mosques and synagogues. The new man will find his living god in the trees, in the birds, in the rivers, in the ocean, in the mountains, in the stars. He will transform the whole universe into his temple.Prince Charles is moving on absolutely the right lines. He needs encouragement from every nook and corner because England will not support him; it is one of the most dull countries in the world, the most serious, long-faced, dead in the soul. But he should continue his meditations in deserts, in deep forests, in mountains. Let the whole world call him mad, but the new man will accept him as a pioneer.Osho,I am with Sarjano for a while. Can I survive that?Prem Sandha, it is a difficult job you have taken in your hands. It is almost impossible to survive with Sarjano. But it is not a curse, it is a blessing.You should not make any effort to survive either – merge with him. He is mad, but with a method; he is full of energy and love. Just don’t fight with him – become one with him. The way to survive with Sarjano is to become one with him. But that is the way for everyone who wants to love. Love is basically committing suicide. Two egos have to commit suicide to place them in a position for merging and melting, to create the space in which love can grow.Sarjano is full of energy – sometimes too much! But an understanding woman can help him to be more centered if she can love unconditionally and without asking anything. If she can enjoy his abundance of energy, then there is no problem. But if you want to dominate him, you cannot survive; if you want in some way to be bitchy, you cannot survive.He is not a man who will accept any handcuffs, any curtailment of his freedom. Neither do you have to curtail your freedom; enjoy your freedom and let him enjoy his freedom. Two freedoms can exist together beautifully, but two slave-makers cannot exist together; they are after each other’s necks. Unfortunately, that is the situation in the whole world: people are killing each other in the name of love, destroying each other in the name of love.Love is a creative act. It enhances both. It gives freedom, it gives joy, it gives courage, and nourishment, but that seems to be only theoretical. In actuality, millions of people are suffering because of love. It is very rare to find someone who is growing because of love, who is becoming spiritually strong and integrated because of love.But at least my people should understand it, because I don’t want you to be just like the unconscious crowds that fill the whole earth. I want you to experiment with new ways of living, new styles of living. And one of the most important things for new styles of living is that love should never be used as politics, as an effort to dominate the other.Love should make you humble and simple, innocent, available and open – childlike, with no expectations. Then you can survive even Sarjano, or even nuclear weapons. He is a nuclear person!I love people like Sarjano; they are so full of energy, they don’t know what to do with it. They are running hither and thither for no purpose, just to exhaust their abundance of energy. A right woman can help him to be centered, can help him to transform his abundance of energy into something creative.A man walks into a bar looking for his friend. After finding him, he proceeds to tell the friend how much he hates his own wife.“Why don’t you have her murdered?” asked the friend. “I know a guy called Artie who will do it for you really cheap.” This sounds great to the man. So he goes off to meet Artie who agrees to do the job for a dollar.He asks the man where his wife goes shopping – he plans to do the murder there. So Artie waits outside the supermarket until he sees the woman go in. Then he creeps up behind her and, in a deserted corner, strangles her.When he has finished, he notices two old ladies staring at him, so he has to strangle them too. On his way out of the market, he is caught by the store detective and handed over to the police.The headlines in the newspapers read, “Artie Chokes Three For A Dollar In Supermarket.”But it is not a rare case that husbands hate their wives and wives hate their husbands, although they go on saying, “Darling, I love you.” The more they hate, the more they repeat, “I love you.” They have to repeat it to create a facade to hide their hate.I have heard about a very great surgeon. His friends had arranged a beautiful party and celebration as a golden jubilee of the surgeon’s married life. They all were drinking and dancing and enjoying. Suddenly, somebody looked around; the surgeon was not there, so his most intimate friend and advocate went out in the garden to see where he could have gone. He was sitting under a tree very sad.The advocate said, “What is the matter? Everybody is enjoying, and it is a moment of celebration, and you are sitting here sad.” The surgeon said, “Don’t come near me! I may strangle you. You are the person who destroyed my whole life.”The advocate could not believe this outburst. He said, “What do you mean?” The surgeon said, “You may have forgotten, but remember: twenty-five years ago, I had come to you to ask that if I murder my wife, what will happen? And you said, ‘Never do it because you will get at least twenty-five years in jail.’ I am feeling sad that if I had not listened to your advice, today I would have been a free man.”In the name of love, people have been torturing each other for centuries…men in their own way, women in their own way.Love has not yet entered into the world. It is still in the poems of the poet, in the songs of the musicians, but it has not become part of humanity. I hope that when we get rid of the old man and his whole so-called barbarous attitudes and approaches to life, love will become the very foundation of a new humanity. This love will not be a bondage, an imprisonment, but a tremendous freedom.Unless love becomes freedom, you don’t know what it is. Freedom without love is dry, is a desert. Love without freedom is fake, just a hypocrisy; it does not exist.Love and freedom are two sides of the same coin.It is one flower, and it can blossom only when both are allowed dignity and respect.You can survive Sarjano. He is not a dangerous man. He has a very loving heart. If you can love him, you will find hidden in him one of the most beautiful hearts. There is no question of “surviving” him. You can dancingly live together, helping each other in creativity, in meditation, transforming each other into higher peaks of consciousness – which are our birthright.Osho,At the risk of putting my head inside the lion's mouth, I have a question. You seem to be having at least four egos on toast for your breakfast lately – and here comes mine. When I hear you speak of boredom I look inside, but I can't find it anymore. I remember having it before I met you, but it has long gone. Even in my life with Nityamo, “boredom” is the last word that I would use. We fight, we love, we joke and giggle, we cry, we decide to part at least twice every month – once during my period, and once during hers. Sometimes we have long faces, sometimes we beam with bliss, but boredom? Never! I wonder if I am hiding something? In fact, I am feeling guilty that no boredom is happening. Perhaps I am so boring that I don't realize how boring I am. My life is rich and juicy, my heart is overflowing. I love her topography and geography. My God! Why can't I have a boring life like other people? I must be a freak.Devageet, first I have to remind you: I don’t take any breakfast. Breakfast is a very religious word. It means breaking the fast. I hate all religious words, I hate fasting. That’s why I had to stop taking breakfast too; so you need not be worried about that.You say, “I hear you speak of boredom, I look inside but I can’t find it anymore. I remember having it before I met you, but it has long gone.”That’s how it should be; otherwise, what is the purpose of being with me? Boredom is a virtue for saints, and this is a communion of sinners of all kinds and varieties.If you want to see boredom, you will have to visit heaven. There you will see ancient saints covered with dust, skeletons playing on their harps, “Alleluia”…although you cannot hear anything because when you for centuries go on repeating “Alleluia,” you become bored with “Alleluia,” you become bored with your harp. Heaven is the greatest accumulation of all kinds of antique, bored people. Unless you practice boredom here you cannot enter heaven.Jesus has forgotten the real beatitude: Blessed are the bored for they shall inherit the Kingdom of God. All the nice people you will find in hell – juicy people, poets, singers, dancers, actors, sculptors, mystics. Hell is colorful; heaven is almost like a white-washed graveyard.Here there is no question of being bored. I am making every effort to destroy the very roots of boredom in you. But there is something very complex to be understood: boredom can be destroyed by making you blissful; boredom can also be destroyed by making you utterly retarded. Retarded people don’t feel boredom. Certainly, no retarded people ever approach me. I am not a magnet for them; my charisma is only for the very intelligent, for the very few.Harry and Abe had been friends almost all their lives. Now as their time on earth drew to a close, Abe asked Harry, “Do you believe in life after death?”“I don’t know,” Harry said, “but we should make a pact: whoever goes first will give the other a sign.” Not too long after, Abe died, and Harry waited for a sign. One day the telephone rang.“Hello, Harry,” came the voice.“Abe,” Harry said. “Where are you?”“Well, where I am the grass is green, the air is sweet and pure, there are beautiful mountains. I get up in the morning, have a little grass, make a little love, take a little nap. In the evening, I have a little grass, make a little love, and go to sleep.”“You mean you are in heaven?”“Heaven? What heaven? I am a buffalo in Montana.”Buffaloes are never bored! So there are two kinds of people who are never bored – one is the meditator, and the other is the buffalo type. You will not find more contented, more satisfied saints than buffaloes. They go on eating the same grass; they don’t even change the variety of grass their whole life. And you will never see even a sign of boredom. For boredom, a certain intelligence is needed, and to go beyond boredom, tremendous intelligence is needed.Devageet, you are not a freak, but the reason why you are not feeling bored even in your life with Nityamo is very simple. You say, “We fight, we love, we joke and giggle, we cry, we decide to part at least twice every month – once during my period, and once during hers. Sometimes we have long faces, sometimes we beam with bliss, but boredom? Never!” You don’t have any time for boredom. You are so engaged in tremendous revolutionary activities.That reminds me of the case with Neelam. Her boyfriend says he is utterly satisfied with her. That is the beginning of boredom. She is a silent, peaceful, non-fighting, loving woman. If she also starts throwing things, every night a pillow fight…if she follows your lifestyle then her boyfriend will not be utterly satisfied, and he will not have any time to feel bored or any time to look for another woman. In fact, he will come to the conclusion that one is enough; two will be too much. It is a question of survival.You are not hiding anything, and you need not feel guilty that no boredom is happening. You have got the right woman for you; she will not leave you alone to feel boredom. And it is not true that you are so boring that you don’t realize how boring you are. If you were boring, Nityamo would have escaped. But she’s also not feeling bored – that shows certainly that you both are engaged in a great adventure.I have heard about a neighborhood where every couple was fighting and shouting at each other, but they were very much intrigued by the fact that one Sardarji lived in their apartment building. From the Sardarji’s flat, they never heard any shouting, any fight; on the contrary, every night they heard laughter. They could not believe it – what secret has this Sardar got? He’s enjoying life so much, laughter every night.Finally, the temptation was so much that one day they gathered when the Sardarji was coming out from his office. They surrounded him and said, “Now you have to tell us the secret. You know we all fight, you know we throw things and our women break the pottery, but from your flat always comes a soothing laughter”The Sardarji said, “It would have been better if you had not asked, because the reality is very heavy. The reality is we have decided that she can throw things at me. If she hits, she can laugh, and if I can save myself and she misses the target, then I laugh. So fifty-fifty it goes. Sometimes she hits me, then she laughs; sometimes she misses the target, then I laugh. But as far as you are concerned, you hear laughter every day.”But the same Sardarji was found after ten years standing in the court asking for a divorce. The magistrate said, “How long have you been married?” He said, “Almost fifty years.” The magistrate said, “If you have been married for fifty years, what emergency has arisen so suddenly that you want the divorce?”He said, “The fact is, we used to laugh fifty-fifty,” and he explained their arrangement. “But now she laughs one hundred percent, because during the fifty years, she has become such an expert in hitting me that there is no way to escape. For years I have not laughed. So now it is too much…I want the divorce.”Devageet, life is a very strange thing. Because you are continuously fighting, then making friends, then making love, then deciding to separate, then coming together again…this whole panorama, this whole drama, keeps you so engaged that you don’t feel bored. But if you were totally satisfied, if she was a woman like Neelam – silent, available, not fighting, not creating any trouble for you, not nagging you – you would have become bored.Boredom is a flat life, but when there are so many ups and downs, there is no boredom. Moreover, being with me, I am taking away all your inhibitions, all your conditionings, all your saintliness; I am making you raw and wild. When you are raw and wild, and you don’t live a life of a polished hypocrisy, boredom does not enter in.Primitive people don’t know anything about boredom. It is only the latest trends in philosophy, particularly existentialism, which has made boredom the central theme of thinking. Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber – all these people are engaged in a great intellectual exploration of what boredom is.Once I came home from the university in the holidays, and I had a book on existentialism. My grandfather looked at the contents, and he said, “My God! What kind of philosophy are you learning in the university? There is not even a mention of God, soul, heaven, hell, reincarnation; the contents are anguish, boredom, meaninglessness, futility, suicide. What kind of philosophy are you reading about in the university?”I said, “This is the latest philosophy because man has come to a point where everything has become flat. Nothing is wild anymore, nothing is raw anymore. Everything has become cultured; everybody is a gentleman, every woman has become a lady. It is very difficult to find an authentic woman; they are all ladies. It is difficult to find an authentic man; they are all gentlemen. These gentlemen and these ladies are creating an atmosphere of meaninglessness, of anguish, of boredom.”I am taking away from you all that can create boredom in you. My whole effort is to give you again a natural life – wild, adventurous, dangerous; then boredom cannot exist.The new man will live dangerously.He will live like wild animals, not like tamed animals in a zoo. He will live like trees in a forest, not as trees in a British garden. Even the garden in Britain is boring.My people have to learn to live like a Zen garden, where nothing is symmetrical, where trees are allowed to grow the way they like. The gardeners are not continually after them, pruning them, giving them a shape.One beautiful Zen story is that a king sent his prince, who was going to be the next king, to learn gardening with a Zen master. It took three years, and whatever the prince learned…in the garden of the palace, he had one thousand gardeners; he told them how to do all that he had learned to create a garden. After three years the master would come, and if he was satisfied the prince would pass the examination; otherwise, again another three years.The master came. It was a beautiful garden – one thousand gardeners were working in it. But the prince was becoming afraid because there was no smile on the master’s face, and finally the master said, “Everything is right, but you will have to come back for three more years.”The prince said, “What is wrong? You say, ‘Everything is right,’ then why have I to come back?”The master went out of the garden, brought thousands of dead leaves which the gardeners had thrown out…the whole night they had been cleaning the garden of all the old dead leaves, so when the master came there would be nothing to object to. And the master brought the leaves and threw them on the garden path. The wind started playing with those dead leaves, and there was a certain music of the wind playing with the dead leaves, and the dead leaves moving all over the path.The master said, “Now everything is okay. Without the leaves the garden was looking too man-made; now it looks natural. But as far as you are concerned, you will need three more years, because you have not learned the basic lesson that the garden should not be man-made. Man should help the trees to grow in their own way, in their own individuality.”A Zen garden is a beauty which no other garden in the world can be compared with…suddenly a pond, suddenly old rocks, trees growing in their own way; it is more a forest than a garden. The forest has something of godliness, the garden is too sophisticated. You cannot be bored in a Zen garden; you can be bored in the garden which Europe has invented, that is man-manufactured.A man also should be a little raw, a little wild, ready to live in insecurity, ready to risk, ready to go on the untrodden paths, always ready to take the challenge of the dangerous. Then life is every moment an ecstasy, and boredom disappears.Devageet, you are not a freak. You have relaxed and become wild, unsophisticated, not a hypocrite, authentic, sincere. And to be with me is to live in constant danger.Jayesh is asleep; he came late in the night. He had been thinking for years to come to me, to sit silently, to relax, and to meditate. And the day he reached the commune I was arrested – and he was arrested with me. Since then, for eighteen months he has not been able to sit silently for a single moment. We have been moving around the world, being thrown out from one country to another country, and he says, “My God! Before I came to you, I had time at least to sit silently, and I had come to meditate.” He had to live with me in the jail…but he’s not bored; he’s enjoying the whole trip.A Pole was working at a construction site where the boss left each day at eleven a.m. and was gone for two hours. This became such a regular occurrence that the rest of the workers decided to spend those two hours in the bar across the street, but the Polack decided to head home for some extra nookie with his wife. When he arrived home, he found his boss busy banging his wife in the bedroom. Well he walked right out and headed back to the job. The following day, the Polack was working his ass off when everyone headed across to the bar.“Hey, Ski, aren’t you coming?” asked one of them.“Hell, no!” said the Polack. “I almost got caught yesterday.”

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 36 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,From my early boyhood I was strongly attracted to astronomy and nuclear sciences; it was a search for truth. As a result, I very soon rejected the idea of Christianity. Today I understand that the deeper scientists go into the matter, the more they realize that they are thrown back on themselves, acknowledging that it is man who determines the cosmos to appear according to his own consciousness. That reminds me of what I understand you to be constantly saying. Although these scientists realize that the earth clock shows two minutes to twelve, and although, as scientists, they should not have prejudices, your vision of the new man does not seem to appeal to them. Do they belong to the same category as politicians? Science is so excitingly interesting, but on the other hand I found that it does not transform at all. What is it good for? Beloved Master, am I wasting my time with it? When I see you laughing I melt with joy.Satyam Bhairava, the question you have asked implies many questions. First, are the scientists also of the same category as politicians? In a way, yes. The politician is one whose whole desire is to have power; hence anybody whose desire is to have power, particularly over others – they may be human beings or material objects, it makes no difference…. The politician is struggling to have power over people, the scientist is struggling to have power over matter; but the desire is the same, and the mind is the same. So, in one way, they both are in the same boat. But there are many other aspects in which science is totally different from politics.Politics enslaves living people; hence it is more violent. Science tries to conquer matter; hence it is not a violent search. But science has grown to such complexity that now it is not possible for individual scientists to work on their own; they need immense support from politicians. Their research projects are so expensive that only governments of very rich nations can afford them. So the scientist unknowingly has fallen a victim to the hands of the politicians.Now the scientist works as a servant to nationalism, to communism, to fascism, to capitalism. He is no more an independent seeker; he is part of a certain political ideology. He works and discovers but he has no control over his own discoveries; the control is in the hands of the politicians. They decide in which direction he should work; otherwise they will not financially support any other kind of project – and their only project is war. So thousands of scientists of immense intelligence, talent and genius have become just slaves of a political mechanism which exploits their intelligence in the service of war and death.Science can be of great importance if two things are added to it: one is that it should not only be an objective search, it should also open the subjective doors of consciousness. The scientist should not go on working only on objects. He has to work upon the scientist himself.Up to now the scientist has been denying his own consciousness. It is such an absurd attitude, so illogical and so unscientific, that it brings scientists closer to the so-called, superstitious religions: they believe blindly in a God they know nothing about, and the scientist goes on disbelieving in himself.The superstition is enormous, unbelievable. If there is nobody inside you, if there is no consciousness in you, then who is going to discover the mysteries and secrets of matter, nature, and life? At this point, science has been behaving in an old superstitious way; it has been imitating religions.I have been in contact with many professors of science and not a single one of them was able to give any argument in support of this superstition. They simply go on repeating that consciousness is only a by-product of matter. And whenever I have asked them, “On what grounds are you saying it? Who is the scientist who has proved it? Which are the discoveries which have been made which support the idea?…” It is just because a man who was not a scientist at all, who was an economist, Karl Marx, created this idea that consciousness is only a by-product of matter. He wanted to deny God and he wanted to deny soul; his approach was philosophical.Communism goes on believing in Karl Marx. It can be understood if in the Soviet Union the scientist has been repeating the same as Karl Marx, because to say anything against Karl Marx there is to go against the holy scripture of communism. It is the same as in a fanatic Christian society, you cannot say anything against The Bible. You may be right, that does not matter; it is not a question of being right or wrong. The Holy Bible cannot be contradicted; that is unforgivable sin. But the same is the situation in the Soviet Union as far as Karl Marx and his book Das Kapital is concerned.But in the free world, where people are pretending to have the right of freedom of expression, there too the scientists go on repeating this superstition that consciousness is only a by-product of matter, without any understanding that Karl Marx was not a scientist and his statement is not based on any experiments.Karl Marx was an atheist. Just as there are people who believe in God without knowing anything about God, there are people who do not believe in God without knowing anything about God. They don’t differ basically; their quality is the same.So in one aspect the scientist behaves like a fanatic fundamentalist Christian…. He goes on denying consciousness. And unless science opens up the dimension of one’s own interiority, it will not become a total subject, a whole subject. It will remain partial; its viewpoint will remain only half of the truth.And you should remember that a whole lie is better than half a truth. The whole lie will be detected soon; the half-truth is very dangerous because it has something of truth in it. It can keep people in darkness for centuries.And three centuries have already passed for scientists. They have been working but they have not dared to inquire into the innermost being of man – that is one thing that has to be added to science; then it can become of tremendous importance.To add subjectivity to objective science means adding the methods of meditation to the methods of concentration. The methods of concentration take you out, they are extrovert. Science requires a mind which has the capacity to concentrate. Meditation requires the capacity to go beyond mind, to go into silence, to be absolutely a pure nothingness.Unless science accepts meditation as a valid method of inquiry it will remain a halfhearted search – and because of its halfheartedness, it is dangerous. It can easily serve the purposes of death because it does not believe in consciousness, it believes in dead matter – so it does not matter whether Nagasaki happens or Hiroshima happens, or even if the whole globe commits suicide. It doesn’t matter, because all is matter. There is no consciousness; nothing is lost.The scientist will revolt against the politicians only when the dimension of meditation is added in his research, in his work. Secondly, the scientist has to remember now that he is providing the politicians with self-destructive nuclear weapons. He is behaving against humanity, he is behaving against the new man, the new humanity; he is behaving against his own children. He is sowing seeds of death for all.It is time that scientists should learn to discriminate: what helps life and what destroys life? Just because of their salaries and comforts…they should not go on like slaves and robots working for war and a destruction which is unprecedented.The scientist has to be a revolutionary too. He has to be a spiritual seeker first, and second he has to be a revolutionary. And he has to remember not to serve death, whatsoever the cost. He has not to follow the directions of politicians. He has to decide himself what is helpful to the whole cosmos, what is helpful to the ecology, what is helpful to a better life, to a more beautiful existence. And he has to condemn the politicians if they force him to work in the service of death. He has to refuse totally, everywhere – in the Soviet Union, in America, in China, in every country all over the world.Scientists need a global association of their own which can decide what research should be taken in hand and what research should be dropped.Up to now science has been accidental. People have been just groping in the dark, finding something, becoming great discoverers. Now that time is over. Groping in the dark they have found atom bombs, nuclear weapons; they have done great service!Now it is their responsibility to destroy all the nuclear weapons, all atomic weapons, even though it goes against your so-called nationalism, your so-called communism, your so-called democracy. Nothing matters, because now even the very existence of man is at stake. Just as one day scientists revolted against religion and its dictates, now they have to revolt again against the politicians and their dictates.The scientist has to stand on his own and be absolutely clear that he is not being exploited. He is being exploited everywhere. Just because he is being paid great salaries, given Nobel prizes, great honor, he is ready to sacrifice the whole of humanity – for his Nobel prizes, for all those stupid awards. Scientists should no longer behave like children. These awards and these prizes and these respectable posts are all toys to befool, and even your great scientists are behaving like fools.I would like my people to create an uproar all over the world against scientists who are serving governments and politicians in creating war mechanisms. The masses have to be awakened against these scientists; they have become now the greatest danger, and their association with politicians has to be broken.Science in itself can become both: accepting meditation it can become religion; being rebellious it can create a better life, more affluent, more abundant. It can be the greatest blessing to mankind – outwardly and inwardly. But right now it is one of the greatest dangers.Satyam Bhairava, you are worried and concerned that the scientists are not at all aware of the new man. They cannot be; they are in the service of the old man and the old humanity, the old politicians, the old ideologies. In fact they are preparing a funeral for the new man. They should prepare a funeral for the old man which is already dead! And we are carrying its corpse – it stinks, but we have become immune, because we have been born in a society which has been carrying corpses. We have grown up in a society, in educational institutions…everywhere corpses are worshipped.If there is life anywhere on another planet – and scientists suspect that there is life on at least fifty thousand planets in the whole universe, and there may be planets where science has grown to far higher reaches – they may be able to observe our behavior. And they will be simply surprised: what are our geniuses doing? It would have been better if there were more idiots and fewer geniuses – at least life would have continued. These geniuses are going to destroy the whole of life.The new man can be accepted only if scientists understand that the world does not consist only of dead objects, it also consists of living beings – and not only of living beings but beings who are conscious too. And there is a possibility of growing this consciousness to great peaks.A Gautam Buddha and a Zarathustra are like Everest, Himalayan peaks. They show, they indicate the potential of every human being; just a little effort and you can also reach their heights. You can also reach the sunlit peaks; you need not live always in the dark caves, in the valleys of misery.The dark night need not remain forever.There is a possibility to come out of the dark night into a beautiful morning with birds singing and flowers blossoming.The scientists need a great incentive for meditation. Only then will they be able to see that what they have been doing is against the future of mankind. They are destroying the very hope…while with the same intelligence they could have created a paradise on earth for the new man, for their children and their children’s children to live in a better world, with more health, with more love, with more consciousness.Satyam Bhairava, you are right that science is “so excitingly interesting,” but it can be even more interesting. It has to become religious, it has to become spiritual. It has not to exhaust all its energies on the outer world but has to penetrate into the treasures of our inner being. And you are also right that, “I found that it does not transform anything at all. What is it good for?”It has great potential, but that potential is not yet used. Just as it has been successful in penetrating into the very secret of matter, it has the capacity to penetrate into the very secret of consciousness too. Then it will be a great blessing, a great benediction.As far as I am concerned and my vision for a new humanity is concerned, I see science as having two dimensions: one, the lower dimension, working on objects; and two, the higher dimension, working on consciousness. And the lower dimension has to work as a servant for the higher dimension. Then there is no need of any other religion; then science fulfills totally all the needs of man.But right now you are right that science transforms nothing. It cannot. Unless it approaches consciousness and works out how to develop more consciousness in man – how to make his unconscious conscious, how to transform his darkness into a noontide – it will not be of any great use. On the contrary, it is proving to be one of the greatest dangers.It was Albert Einstein who wrote a letter before the second world war to President Roosevelt of America saying, “I can create atomic energy and atom bombs, and if you don’t have atom bombs I can predict that it is impossible to win against Germany in the war.”Albert Einstein was a German Jew. He was working in Germany, researching under the German government, which was under Adolf Hitler, to create an atom bomb. Just the very idea…if he was not a Jew, the whole history of the world would have been totally different. If Germany could have produced atom bombs, then there would have been no power – neither of America nor of the Soviet Union nor of England – to stand in front of Adolf Hitler; he would have conquered the whole world.But because Albert Einstein was a Jew…he was so important that he was not harassed by Adolf Hitler and his people, but he was seeing that millions of Jews were disappearing, actually evaporating as smoke in the gas chambers of the Nazi government. He would not have been killed because he was so much needed and there was nobody else to replace him, but he became afraid that if Adolf Hitler wins, then all over the world there will not be a single Jew left alive. He was not afraid about his own life; it was safe, because Adolf Hitler needed him.Albert Einstein escaped from Germany, leaving the experiment incomplete. The German scientists did everything, but there was no other Albert Einstein to complete the experiment. And Einstein wrote a letter to the enemy of Germany, to America, saying “I have escaped from Germany and I am ready to make atom bombs for America. Without atom bombs you cannot defeat Germany. And there is also a fear that somebody may be able to complete the experiment that I have left incomplete, because there were many scientists working with me, under me.” Roosevelt immediately invited him and gave him all the facilities possible.Truman was president at the time when the atom bombs were produced by Albert Einstein, and Einstein told Truman, “Now there is no need to use them, because Germany has committed a historical mistake.”This historical mistake has been committed many times. Anybody who wants to fight with Russia and has committed this historical mistake is doomed, because for nine months the whole country is covered with snow. Russia is so vast – it covers two continents, from one corner of Europe to the other corner of Asia. And there are only three months when the weather is clear enough to fight. And Russia has a great enough army to prevent the enemy for three months and wait for the winter.Winter lasts for nine months. Then Russia need not fight; that winter finishes the enemies without any trouble. Nobody can survive the Russian winter, except Russians – it needs a lifelong training. Napoleon got lost, in the first world war Germany got lost, and Adolf Hitler again committed the same mistake.But this time Truman did not even answer the letter of Albert Einstein. The first letter was received with such great joy and he was invited with great welcome, was given all the facilities that he needed, but now the bombs were already in the hands of the politicians. Who cares about Albert Einstein? And he was saying simply, “Nowthere is no need. Germany is finished, and within two weeks at the most, Japan will be finished, because Japan cannot stand on its own. It was the German support…. There is no need to use these bombs.”But Truman was in a hurry to use the atom bomb, because Germany has surrendered and if Japan also surrenders then there is no opportunity to see what great power America has and no opportunity to show the whole world.Nagasaki and Hiroshima were destroyed unnecessarily. Japan was ready to surrender. Preparations were being done on how the surrender should happen; negotiations were going on between the generals. And Truman ordered, “Before the surrender at least we should try out how much power we have. Once the war ends we won’t have any opportunity.”Two hundred thousand people in two great cities died within ten minutes – and not only people but trees, animals, birds, everything alive suddenly became dead.Albert Einstein was so much shocked that before his death when somebody asked him, “If you are born again, wouldn’t you like to be a physicist in your new life?” he said, “Never! If I am born again, I would rather be a plumber than a physicist. Enough is enough. I have seen how I worked day in, day out to create the atomic weapons. They were for an emergency, but once they were created I had no power over them. I had created them, but once they were created, the politicians had the keys in their hands. And my letter was not even answered! I am dying one of the most frustrated men on the earth.”He was one of the most successful men, perhaps the greatest scientist that we have ever known, but his own feeling was far more true. He was a man of conscience; he died almost like a wounded lion, utterly frustrated with politicians and their ugliness, their murderous and criminal minds.Up to now, science certainly has not brought much of a transformation as far as human consciousness is concerned, but it has the potential – just a great awakening is needed.The scientist has to realize his responsibility. He has almost become a god; either he can create or he can destroy. He has to be reminded that he is no longer the old scientist of the times of Galileo, just working in his own house, with a few tubes and a few bottles, just mixing chemicals and experimenting. Those days are gone. Now he has the power to destroy the whole life of this planet or to create a life so beautiful and so blissful that man has imagined it only in heaven; it can be possible here. A few small groups of scientists have started working on those lines. Nobody believes them.In Manali, in one of the press interviews, I was talking about the possibilities, the creative and absolutely new possibilities of doors that science can open. Neelam was there, and she reported to Nirvano in Kathmandu that I was talking “off the wall.” And I can understand that anybody will think what I was saying was “off the wall.” It will appear like that.But just the other day Japan created an artificial island, because in Japan there is so much a shortage of land that it is becoming impossible to expand industries. Japan has become the richest country in the world. It needs more and more land. The old way is to conquer some other country; that is not possible anymore. The fear of a third world war hangs over everybody.Japan has created an artificial island which will be used for industrial development. It will be floating in the ocean. Once it becomes a success, many more artificial islands…and Japan will be creating more earth than God created in those six days.There are tremendous possibilities for science. Once it no longer serves death, it can float cities in the ocean. Japan has also successfully tried to make underground cities, because why go on with the old conception that you have to live over-ground? You can live underground; it is more peaceful there, and you can get the right kind of light, the right kind of oxygen, because everything will be in the hands of the scientist.I was talking about such things in that press interview, and poor Neelam thought that I am talking “off the wall.” Just as underground cities are possible, floating cities in the ocean are possible, under the ocean cities are possible, flying cities are possible….Once science changes its attitude and stops being supportive to politicians for war, so much energy will be released that scientists can do all these things which may appear off the wall to you, but they don’t appear off the wall to me.To me, all that seems to be almost predictable. It is going to happen, because the earth is going to be overburdened with population. It has already reached five billion, and by the year two thousand and ten it will have almost doubled. Ten billion population? – this poor earth, which has been exploited for centuries, will not be able to support it. You will have to create artificial food, perhaps new vegetables, new food.In the Soviet Union they already have new fruits which God had not created in those six days. Just as animals can be created by crossbreeding, they are crossbreeding trees and creating new fruits, giving them the right taste, right juice – fruits which man has never eaten, for which there is no name in the dictionaries. They are being given new names.And man may have to live more and more on chemical food. Perhaps it may be more healthy, because right now ninety-five percent of whatever you eat is roughage; it has to be thrown out of the body. Hardly five percent is used. This is sheer nonsense! This is burdening your digestive system unnecessarily. Why not only give exactly that five percent that your body needs? If your digestive system is not tired, your life’s length will become longer.It is the digestive system that kills you. All the experiments about the digestive system show…. It has been tried on many animals. Animals which were given enough food, as much as they wanted, had only half the life span of animals who were given half the food they asked for. The first group lived ten years, the second group lived twenty years, because the digestive system remained more fresh, younger, untired.And if man’s food becomes more and more chemical, more and more scientific, it will not be digested, it can be directly injected. There is no need to tire your digestive system, and if your digestive system remains stronger, younger, your life will become longer. Scientists say man can very easily live three hundred years, without becoming old.Science has great possibilities, Satyam Bhairava, just we have not yet been able to use those possibilities. And all the scientists are in the service of politicians, of governments – that means in the service of death and war. A great revolution is needed.Just as scientists revolted once against religion, fought against religion, now they have to fight against politics, against nationalism. Their responsibility is great. The new man will need them and their revolution. They are the most important people for the survival of humanity.Osho,I never have sex and I don't feel like having sex. I don't think that I am beyond sex, but I love meditation and dancing much more, although it is difficult to accept this. Sex is not happening, and I like that it is not happening. Osho, does it mean that in order to be a sannyasin, I must have sex? I don't like it if it is not a natural happening, if it is only a sex and mind meeting, and not meditation. I enjoy being alone. I see myself in conflict a lot with this, but I can also accept the way I am. Then it all disappears from the mind, and my heart opens again. Osho, is something wrong with me?Nothing is wrong with you. Repression of sex is evil, but if sex is not a natural desire in you, to force it will be a repression.There are people who are forcing their natural desire for sex in trying to be celibate; they are going against their nature. And if you don’t have any inclination toward sex, forcing it will be going against your nature; it will be the same kind of crime.A sannyasin needs to be natural.You have to listen to your own body, your own instincts, your own intuition, and follow it. You are not to do anything against your nature. If you like to be alone, and enjoy meditating…that’s what everybody else is trying, but first they are trying to get finished with sex so that they can enjoy being alone. You are in a better position, you don’t have to pass through the hell. You have already passed through it somehow; perhaps in your past life. You are out of the hell; now don’t try to get into the dark tunnel again.Even the people to whom I say, “Don’t repress sex,” are not being told to remain always sexual. In fact repression of sex keeps you always sexual. Once you have lived it totally, you are finished with it. And the sooner you are finished the better, because then you can sit silently without being bothered by the need of anybody else as a companion. You are enough unto yourself, and that is the most important thing for a meditator – the enoughness of aloneness.But I can understand your problem. Here you must be seeing everybody bringing problems about sex, about their fights. Somebody is completely satisfied; that is his boredom. Somebody is not satisfied, he wants more satisfaction; that is his problem. Somebody is not feeling boredom; that is his problem. Listening to all these problems, naturally anybody will get worried: what is my problem? If you don’t have any problem, it certainly means something is wrong with you!Nothing is wrong with you. Just enjoy being yourself, your meditation, your silence, and let these people pass through their darkness. One day they will all come out of the tunnel; then you can greet them. But just seeing that everybody is in the tunnel, fighting, shouting…. Sitting outside the tunnel in the light, in silence, don’t be worried that “Something seems to be wrong with me. Everybody is in the tunnel; what am I doing here? All the meditators are in the tunnel. Nobody is meditating…but they have all come here to meditate; only I am meditating.”“My wife is a typical Jew,” complained the man to his companion. “She only makes love doggy-style.”“Doggy-style?” said his companion, “I don’t believe it!”“It is true. I sit up and beg, and she rolls over and plays dead.”Let them play whatever style they want; you simply don’t get distracted from your meditation. You are perfectly right. And all these people are trying to reach to your position. You don’t have to descend into their troubles, into their problems.You are blessed. It rarely happens, what is happening to you. It happens only because of your past life; there is no other explanation. In your past life you must have been meditating; you must have been with a master; you must have come to a point where sex became meaningless, where the need of the other dropped, when you became enough unto yourself and your loneliness changed into aloneness; hence in this life you are carrying all that you have achieved in your past life.It is because of such experiences that all three Eastern religions accepted the idea of reincarnation. The three other religions, which were born outside of India, have no explanation for such an experience. Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism – all three religions cannot explain your situation. But Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, have a very logical scientific explanation: that you are carrying a quality that you achieved in your past life.Nothing is lost. Once you have achieved it, it goes on with your consciousness into new lives, into new bodies.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 37 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The other morning you were talking so beautifully about two meditators being together in love. For me, sitting with you every day is so fulfilling that my desire to be with someone has almost disappeared. This is happening to me every time I am around you. Today though, the fear arose that I am too miserly with my love and therefore avoiding a relationship. Beloved Osho, is this possible?One has to be very much aware of the mind creating problems which do not exist in reality. Mind is almost a problem-creating factory; whatever you do, whatever happens to you, mind is going to raise problems about it. That’s its old strategy to disturb you.If you are feeling perfectly okay, then listen to the heart, not to the mind. One has to learn the knack of not paying too much attention to the mind, trying in every possible way to listen to the heart.Your question is that for you, sitting with me every day is so fulfilling that your desire to be with someone else has almost disappeared.It is how it should be. The desire for the other is not something great. It is poverty of the soul. You cannot be alone; hence, the desire for the other arises. Because you cannot feel peaceful, silent, centered, fulfilled, contented, just by being yourself, the desire arises to be with someone; perhaps someone can give you what you are missing.Nobody can give you what you are missing. Most probably you will meet another beggar, just like you, who has been in search of someone who can give him fulfillment, contentment, blissfulness. And when two beggars start begging from each other it is really a pitiable scene, but it is being repeated by millions of people around the earth every day. Because you are brought up by these beggars, among these beggars, when for the first time you start getting out of this begging, the mind wants to pull you back. It raises questions, doubts; it persuades you with beautiful names.For example, now your mind is saying, “Today though, the fear arose that I am too miserly with my love and therefore avoiding a relationship.” If you have love enough it will start showering on others by itself. You cannot contain it; it becomes an overflowing, so there is no need to worry about it.Nobody can be miserly with love.Let me repeat it: nobody can be miserly with their love. Either one has love – then it starts overflowing in its own time; you don’t have to push it, you don’t have to force it – or one has not. When one has not, one can only pretend. Millions of people are doing that. Everybody is pretending to love and they have not known what love is.Love can be known only as a fragrance of meditation, not before it. You have not known even the flower. You are not acquainted with the fragrance. Once the flower opens up, it is beyond the capacity of the flower to be miserly about fragrance – what can it do? The fragrance will go with the winds, it will spread all over.The flower cannot be miserly, neither can love be, because love also is a flower that grows in your meditation…. So you just enjoy being alone; this is your meditation. And the spring will come, it always comes. Trust existence. The flower will blossom, and love will flow from you.Nobody can be miserly about love; that is an impossibility, for the simple reason that love follows a totally different economics. In the ordinary economics, if you go on giving you go on becoming poorer; one has to be a hoarder to remain rich. Love is not part of these mundane economics. The more you give, the more you have; if you don’t give it you will not have it. In giving it grows, in sharing it becomes more and more purified, more and more beautiful, more and more a blessing.But mind will go on creating a thousand and one questions. Don’t listen to your own mind! That is part of the disciplehood. When I am here, listen to me. If you are going to listen to your own mind, then there is no need for you to be here. You already have a master within you who will guide you to hell….While on vacation, Ronald Reagan asks for a girl for the night. Three gorgeous girls are sent up to his room – a blonde, a brunette and a redhead.He says to the blonde, “I’m the president of the United States. How much to spend a night with you?”“Four hundred dollars,” she replies.“Too much,” says Reagan.He asks the brunette the same question, but just then the redhead runs in and says, “Mr. President, if you can raise my skirt as high as your taxes and screw me the way you are screwing the people of America, you can have me for nothing.”You are in a very harmonious state. The mind will try to disturb it, and your harmony is so new and the mind so old and so strong that if you don’t stop it from disturbing your harmony, it is going to be disturbed. All that mind wants is to disturb your meditation because they are enemies. Mind knows perfectly well that if meditation grows, mind has no place in your life; it will be reduced from being a master to a servant.Just try to feel…if you are feeling good, if you are feeling at ease, at home, then tell the mind to shut up! Take the reins into your own hands.Becoming a meditator means an effort to get out of the slavery of the mind and to become the master, which you would naturally have been if the society had not turned things upside down. You were born with your meditativeness as the master, and the mind just as a servant, but that is not convenient for an insane society. To make you also insane, the easiest way is to make the master the servant and the servant the master; then everything in you is messed up.The new man I have been talking about will be a master of his own self. And the strangest phenomenon is that when you are the master, the mind functions far more efficiently than it functions when it is a master, because naturally it is destined to be a servant. As a servant it is perfect, but when it pretends to be the master, it cripples you. It does not know how to be the master – that’s one thing – and it does not allow the master hidden deep inside you to have any say in your life. This is one of the psychological sicknesses of mankind.The new man will be healthy, and his health will consist of everything being in its own place. Then only can we create an orchestra, not a crowd of noises.Osho,When you spoke about Sharda, the wife of Ramakrishna and her immense love toward him, I noticed that I felt guilty and sad. It seems that I cannot love a man at all. Out in the world the relationship with my boyfriend was so juicy, and seemed to be the only way to stay alive, whereas here there is a never-ending conflict. The conflict I feel is of longing to be alone, feeling totally contented within myself – yet I do not want to lose my boyfriend, out of the fear of being lonely and vulnerable. I am so puzzled. Please, would you comment?Shantidevi, man is asleep. It has to be repeated again and again, to remind you that you are still in the middle – neither asleep nor awake. You can go either way: you can take a turn and pull the blanket over yourself and go to sleep, or you can jump out of the bed and take a cold shower and be alert and awake. But you have to understand what is meant by spiritual sleep.You say, “When you spoke about Sharda, the wife of Ramakrishna and her immense love toward him, I noticed that I felt guilty and sad.” Why should you feel guilty and sad? You can have immense love, just like Sharda, but you have to know much more about Sharda.She was a meditator, and after Ramakrishna died she became, without any declaration, without any announcement, naturally the head of the order that Ramakrishna had created. The disciples of Ramakrishna became disciples of Sharda. She was no ordinary woman in love with a man. Ramakrishna was not a man for her; Ramakrishna to her represented life, consciousness, and its highest flight.Rather than feeling guilty and sad and wasting your time and energy, use the same energy for being a meditator, so love can grow out of your meditation. I teach you the real love, not the phony love that you find all over the world.Everybody is saying to everybody else, “I love you,” but on the whole there seems to be no love in the world. People are simply like parrots, repeating the words “I love you.” They don’t know even the meaning of what they are saying.Do you have the quality of love? Do you have that richness? Do you have that fulfillment out of which love arises?Love does not arise in a desert.It is a flower, it needs a garden.Have you planted a garden in your being?We are gathered here to become gardens. You come here as deserts, but the most unbelievable phenomenon is that even a desert can hallucinate that it is a garden, that it is an oasis.You say, “It seems that I cannot love a man at all.” Who is asking you to love a man? You can love trees and they are far better people. They don’t feel jealous, they will not create trouble for you, they will not become an anxiety. You can love the clouds, you can love the stars….Man is such a tiny part in this whole universe. Why are you after this tiny part? Leave it alone, let the poor fellow live! You can love the whole universe; just exclude man – for the time being, at least. When you become so capable of loving that you can love even man, then it will happen on its own accord.And Ramakrishna was no ordinary man. Through his eyes the whole universe looked into you; through his hands the whole existence made gestures significant and meaningful to you; through his words the whole spoke. He was so simple, so egoless, just a hollow bamboo – which can be made into a flute without any difficulty. And you can sing a song; the song will be yours, he will be only the vehicle…. And he allowed the whole universe to sing as many songs as possible through him.You can also find a man…but for that you will need a sensitive heart, open and available, and you will have to drop all this garbage of being guilty and sad.People think that they already know how to love. They have taken it for granted that they know how to live. This is one of the greatest fallacies. Neither do you know how to love, nor do you know how to live. All that you know is how to go on toward the graveyard. From the cradle to the graveyard you are a perfect pilgrim; otherwise you know nothing. You will have to learn. You have the possibility to learn, but the possibility becomes dormant because of your idea that you already know.You say, “Out in the world the relationship with my boyfriend was so juicy.” You cannot deceive me. I have known thousands of boyfriends and thousands of girlfriends, and how juicy their relationship is…unless you decide to call poison, juice – then it is a different matter. And if it was juicy outside in the world, what is the trouble? Here are juicier people!Outside in the world there are Christians and there are Hindus and there are Mohammedans, there are Jews and there are Buddhists, and they are all against what you call “being juicy.” They want you to be dry bones.But illusions can be created very easily. One strategy of the mind is that it always looks at the past and chooses a few beautiful moments out of thousands of ugly situations, and then magnifies them and starts believing in them; that’s why everybody thinks his childhood was great. Ask any child, and he is in a hurry to grow up, because he can see the grown-up people are living juicy lives.I used to live by the side of a post office and every morning very early, when it was almost dark, I used to go for a walk. One day I saw a small boy with a mustache – I could not believe it.I said, “This is something impossible!” The boy started hiding behind trees, but I followed him and got hold of him. He said, “Don’t tell anybody.”I asked, “But why are you having this false mustache.?”He said, “I would love to grow up. I have got a cigarette also. When I see people with a mustache and a beard and having cigarettes, I feel so sad. How long is it going to take, this miserable boyhood? Nobody takes any notice of me, but if I start doing anything, everybody stops me saying, ‘you are still a child; don’t do that!’ I cannot even ask questions because I am a child – ‘When you will grow up you will know.’“Then I realized that he was the postmaster’s son. He said, “Don’t tell my father; otherwise I am going to be given a good lesson. He beats me.”I have known thousands of children and I have inquired of them, “Are you feeling great that you are a child?” They were all feeling miserable about being still a child; yet these same children in their old age will remember their childhood as really golden. They will make it golden.You are saying that outside your boyfriend was so juicy. If he was so juicy, why have you come here? People start thinking of meditation if their life is not juicy. If their life is already juicy, who bothers about meditation and God and truth?I don’t think that you have ever known anything juicy; it is an ego fulfillment to exaggerate your past. And if you know how to make a relationship juicy…. Here there are many people from the same outside world. They have not come from other planets; they have also lived very juicy lives outside. But it seems strange: the moment they come here all their juiciness disappears; because here my insistence is to be sincere with yourself – don’t deceive. Outside they were deceiving.You are saying “…and seemed to be the only way to stay alive.” Then have you come here to commit suicide? If that was the only way to be alive and you think it was so juicy, what accident happened? Did your ship get wrecked, and you landed in this desert? Just stop exaggerating – that is a childish approach toward life.Look at things straight, as they are. Nobody leaves juicy places. One gets so caught because juicy places are sticky too; there is not much juice but there is much glue. So whenever you have a juicy relationship, in fact it is nothing but a very glued relationship. You can call glue “juice,” that is another thing. Only the words differ, but the reality will be the same.Meditation and the search for truth, or the search for oneself, starts only because you find life is not juicy. It is a vast desert. Only once in a while do you see an oasis somewhere, but by the time you reach there, there is no oasis. All oases prove mirages. Frustrated, you start searching for something deeper than life makes available to you.You are saying, Shantidevi, “…whereas here there is a never-ending conflict.”Conflict with whom? Have you forgotten to create juice? Or have you become aware it is not juice, it is glue? The first thing is to be clearly aware about your situation, howsoever bad it may be. Don’t exaggerate and don’t hide it; if you hide yourself then it is impossible to transform you. You will have to put away all your masks, because masks cannot grow. Only your original face can grow.“The conflict I feel is one of longing to be alone, feeling totally contented within myself – yet I do not want to lose my boyfriend out of the fear of being lonely and vulnerable. I am so puzzled.”I can see you are puzzled, but your puzzle is your own creation. First, you want to be alone – why? Life is so juicy with the boyfriend, so live it! Why do you have a longing to be alone? Life with the boyfriend cannot be juicy, that’s why.“…feeling totally contented within myself” – so you don’t like juice. You want to feel totally contented within yourself – what about the juice of the boyfriend? Just be real, authentic; say that you have been living in a hell. But even people who live in hell pretend that they are living in heaven.I have heard that the people who live in hell have changed the board on which it was written, “This is hell.” They have written, “This is heaven.” At least that much gives great consolation. And the people who are living in heaven, I have heard, are continually asking for a holiday from this continuous repetition of hallelujah, playing on their harps before a dodo God. He must be a dodo, always listening to hallelujah, for eternity. Perhaps this hallelujah has killed him and he is just a corpse sitting there.Your so-called saints want holidays; where will they go for holidays? There is only one place where they can go, and that is to hell – and that’s where they go, because there they find restaurants and discos and juicy people! Hell is full of juice – people are almost swimming in it. You just have to be clear why you want to be contented. What was wrong in your love relationship? Was there not contentment?And then comes the fear, “Yet I do not want to lose my boyfriend.” You want your boyfriend also in your pocket while you are meditating, so that he cannot escape. While you are totally contented, the boyfriend has to remain in your pocket. What kind of boyfriend do you have? Is it a teddy bear?Your whole puzzle is very simple to solve. The first thing: you have to forget and drop the idea that you know what love is, that you know what a juicy relationship is. Be alone, be meditative, be contented, and out of this contentment will flow the juice. Then there is a possibility of having a love which will be a joy, a constant joy.Non-meditators cannot love, they can only pretend. But because man is so asleep, he goes on believing in his own pretensions, he goes on believing in his own dreams.A racing car driver picked up a girl after the race and took her home. Later that night, after a passionate bout of lovemaking, the man drifted off into sleep. He awoke suddenly, with a very angry woman astride him, smacking his face.“What is the matter?” he asked.“You were talking in your sleep,” she shouted. “You were feeling my tits and saying, ‘What perfect headlights,’ and you felt my legs and said, ‘What a smooth finish.’“Well what’s wrong with that?” the driver asked.“Nothing,” cried the woman, “but when you felt my pussy and yelled, ‘Who left the garage door open…?’“People are asleep, talking in their sleep – “I love you”. Meditation is an effort to be awake, to be alert, to be conscious. Anything else should follow, but cannot precede it: love can follow it, friendship can follow it, worship can follow it, prayer can follow it, gratitude can follow it. But everything has to follow only when you have attained an integrated consciousness; otherwise you are having only dreams, nightmares, and you are believing in them as if they are real.Shantidevi, as you are already here, have a taste of meditation and aloneness. Don’t be afraid that you will lose the boyfriend. There are so many boys; if you lose one you get one dozen – they are queuing! And if you are meditative, contented, silent, you are bound to find a man of the same qualities, because we can relate only with people with the same qualities, who speak the same language. And a love affair after meditation can become a tremendous help to both, for their spiritual growth.Drop the fear about losing the boyfriend. These boyfriends are so stupid that even if you want to lose them it is very difficult. You can ask my people here. It is so difficult to lose a boyfriend or a girlfriend; they cling. I have told you the reason: what they think is juice is not juice, it is glue. And here in this place, everything is German; if it is Indian glue you can escape, but the German glue…you are finished!There is an ancient story…man asked God, “God, why did you make women so pretty?” “So you will like them,” God answered.And man asked God, “Why did you make women so soft? “So you will like them,” God answered again.“And why,” asked man again, “did you make them so stupid?”And God answered, “So they will like you.”There is no worry at all!Osho,The other night when you were talking about your vision of a modern commune, and your offer to Gorbachev to establish a model commune in Russia, I was deeply touched. After your commune dissolved one and a half years ago, I went back into the world and got quite a bitter taste of life in Western society: power, money, frustration, compensation. Your vision of a commune seems to be the answer for mankind – to find a fulfilling way to live; your view is so vast, so clear. But looking at my own reality, I still discover possessiveness, narrow-mindedness, unlovingness, greed, lack of humbleness, desires, jealousy. I felt ashamed listening to your words because the gap between your vision and my reality is so huge. Beloved Master, sometimes I think that you have too positive a picture of us. Or are you simply supporting the good seed? Do you really see a chance that, one day, we will live according to your vision?Your question is significant because you say, “Looking at my own reality, I still discover possessiveness, narrow-mindedness, unlovingness, greed, lack of humbleness, desires, jealousy.” Just one thing you have forgotten – that none of these things is you.You are the awareness of all these things: possessiveness, jealousy, greed. Who is being alert? Certainly jealousy cannot be alert about itself, neither can possessiveness be alert about itself.There is, behind this whole drama, a witness. That is my hope and that is your hope – and it is the hope for the new man and for the new humanity. If you can be aware of these realities it is not a difficult thing to drop them, because you are not them; they are separate from you. You have learned them in a society which is greedy, in which if you are not greedy you cannot survive.In a commune where there will be no possibility for greed – because with no money to accumulate, nobody poor, nobody rich, you will easily forget all about greed. Why are you possessive? – because you are in a society where everybody else is possessive. You cannot protect yourself if you are not possessive; you will be destroyed by the other possessive people.All these things: possessiveness, unlovingness, greed, lack of humbleness, desires, jealousy are a by-product of living in a world which is full of these things, which requires everybody to have all these poisonous attitudes.In a commune you cannot be greedy, because there will be no support for greed. There will be no question of imitating anybody. There will be no question of ambition because people will be respected as they are. There will be no requirement that they should be presidents and vice presidents, prime ministers, and then they should be respected; they will be respected as they are. Whatever they are doing, if it is creative and is needed by the society, they will be honored. Narrow-mindedness is created by your religions, by your political ideologies. These are all learned things nurtured in you. They are not part of your consciousness, they are not part of your being.So I am not being too optimistic and I am not taking a too positive view of you. I am simply realistic. I know why you are what you are – because you are living in a wrong world, and to exist you have to be wrong.If you are allowed to live in a sane commune where people are naturally humble because humbleness is respected, where the egoist will be sent to a psychiatric hospital, where people are non-possessive because all their needs are fulfilled, and all the opportunities they need are given to them…why should they worry about hoarding for tomorrow?They know that they need not be worried; they are not alone. Five thousand people are taking care of them, and if they can create today a beautiful life, they will be able to create an even a better life tomorrow. The fear of the future will disappear. Possessiveness is out of fear for the future, because if you don’t possess, what are you going to do tomorrow? What are you going to do in your old age?In a commune the older people will be loved and respected for their experiences. The older people will become the teachers, the guides. Old age will not be thought of as something ugly, but as something immensely graceful. One has gone beyond all childish and all youthful foolishnesses; one has come to be very centered and silent, and a life-long meditation….Every commune will have its own old people who will be almost Gautam Buddhas, sources of wisdom who can teach you life, who can teach you love, who can teach you how to grow old beautifully and gracefully, and who can teach you how to die – because when they die they will die with such a grace and such joy. That will be their last gift to the commune.I am not taking a positive side only. You are corrupted by the society because the society is corrupt, and it is simply a survival measure to be corrupted in such a society. All that you need is a better atmosphere – more loving, more healthy, more sane, more in tune with nature. All these things, which religious founders have been trying to get people to drop, people cannot drop, because if they drop them, the whole corrupted mass around them will destroy them. So they listen to Gautam Buddhas, to Jesus Christs, and they know what happens to a Jesus Christ: if you follow his teachings, soon you will be on the cross. You can understand that his teachings are beautiful, but the society is so ugly, you cannot live those beautiful teachings.All religions have failed, because they have not been able to create a culture which is supportive of the great teachings. It is not only not supportive, it is against.The commune is a totally new concept. It is an effort to change the whole atmosphere in which these poisonous mushrooms grow. And once your whole atmosphere is different, you will find different people arising, totally different people arising – because then love will be needed to survive, meditation will be needed to survive, compassion will be needed to survive.A commune is a transformation, a total transformation. The old society was very schizophrenic. On the one hand it worshipped people who were teaching things which were not possible for ordinary human beings to follow – because the whole society was against them. So man was living in a schizophrenia: he knew what was right and he was doing what was wrong, so he was feeling continuously guilty, ashamed of himself.I want a totally new order in which man’s dignity is not hurt, and all these things that have been taught by great teachers need not be taught at all.We should create real values. Rather than telling people not to be possessive, we should create a commune where possessiveness is useless. Anybody who possesses will be thought stupid, idiotic; he will lose his respect and his dignity. And what would he possess? Once money is removed, you cannot possess. You cannot possess milk, you cannot possess fruits. If you have too much milk you will have to share; if your trees are giving too many fruits, you will have to share. You will really enjoy children coming to your garden and stealing fruits. You will give them chocolates also, as a reward – “come again, because the trees are too heavy with fruits.” And what are you going to do with so many fruits? You cannot sell them.What has been taught by the founders of religion was illogical. What I am trying to do is a double process – changing the individual through meditation, and changing the society through the commune.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 38 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,There arises great darkness in me and I wish to trade in this intolerable Agama and start afresh so that somehow I wouldn't grow with my personality so inseparably glued to myself. I remember there was once innocence and I had a sense of myself. Try as I might, I can't recover it, can't separate off the witness, can't trust in my seeing. So long ago I took a shortcut and now I can't remember where I left the honesty and the innocence and the love, for the false, the trying, the stupid. How can I find my way back?Prem Agama, your story is everyone’s story. Everyone has gone astray. Everyone has lost himself. Perhaps it is part of human growth to be lost, to forget the way back home, to search for it, because unless you go astray, there is no need for search. Unless you lose the way, there is no question of finding it. Unless you forget yourself, you will never realize yourself; hence it is not against your spiritual growth.It is part, an absolutely intrinsic part, that you should be lost in darkness, in agony, in suffering. But there is no need to remain in the dark night of the soul. One need not make a house in suffering and misery, in ignorance, in dishonesty, in a false and phony life. One has to use this opportunity. Yes, I call it a golden opportunity, knowing perfectly well that it is painful. But all birth is painful, and a spiritual birth more so.You should not settle in suffering, in misery, in pain. You should continue to search. The question is not of finding the right way. Every way is right if your search is deep, your hope enormous, your trust infinite. Then wherever you are and whatever path you follow, you will reach the ocean – just as every river reaches the ocean, passing through the mountains, through the valleys, through strange lands, strange people, without any guide, without any map, without anybody to indicate the right direction.Every river, small or big, reaches to the ocean. It seems a deep thirst, an intense longing, makes every way the right way.All ways are going toward the ocean.You just have to be patient enough, trustful of existence.And your remembrance will be of enormous value: one day you knew yourself, you were not yet gone astray, you had not moved on the paths of desire and ambition. You were still within yourself, sincere, honest and innocent. You know that the space you are searching for again is not imaginary. You have known it, you have been it; it is only a question of how to enter that space again.The logical way is to find the right path. And there comes one of the greatest problems for every spiritual seeker, because every path leads you away from yourself. Every path indicates toward some goal, somewhere else.Hence the question is not of finding the right path; the question is of finding the right consciousness, awareness. And strangely, immediately the whole problem changes.It is a dream you can go far away, you can visit some faraway star. But when you wake up you will wake up in your own room, in your own home. The question is not to find a right path from the faraway star to come back home.You are already there, you have just forgotten it.That is the meaning of one of the most beautiful words – which has been contaminated by religions. That word is sin; its root meaning is forgetfulness. If forgetfulness is the sin, then awareness is the only virtue.You are asking, “There arises great darkness in me and I wish to trade in this intolerable Agama and start afresh, so that somehow I would not grow with my personality so inseparably glued to myself. I remember there was once innocence and I had a sense of myself. Try as I might, I can’t recover it, can’t separate off the witness, can’t trust in my seeing. So long ago I took a shortcut and now I can’t remember where I left the honesty and the innocence and the love, for the false, the trying, the stupid. How can I find my way back?”Just by being awake! Shake yourself, slap yourself – but wake up. Jump out of the bed – but wake up.Your suffering is a dream, your darkness is a dream, your going astray is a dream. That’s the meaning of the word maya. Man lives in illusion. The way out of illusion does not exist, because the way out of illusion will be another illusion.You have simply to wake up.There is no way, no bridge.One state is of unawareness, another is of awareness. And from unawareness to awareness the distance is nil…just a little effort, a little jogging.A man walks into a bar and orders a glass of beer, which he swallows down in one gulp. Immediately he orders another, and again swallows it down in one gulp. Still thirsty, he orders a third and a fourth. By this time he needs the bathroom. The bartender tells him, “down the corridor and first on your right.” The man stumbles down the corridor, misses the turn, goes through another door and falls straight into the swimming pool. When he finally comes to the surface, he yells out to the surprised attendant, “Wait, for God’s sake don’t flush!”Agama, you are where you have always been; you have not moved even an inch away from your innocence, or your being, or your sincerity. It is not possible in the very nature of things to go away from oneself, just as you cannot run away from your shadow. The faster you run, the shadow runs faster; the slower you go the shadow goes slower. But you cannot run away from it.If this is the case with your shadow, what about your innermost being? How can you go away from it? Wherever you are, it will be in the innermost shrine of your consciousness – always intact, uncorrupted.So all that is needed is to sit silently, to close your eyes and to look into yourself. You will find again the same space, that you remembered with such great passion, with such great love. It is still there. And the same is the case with everybody else.Osho,I believe it was Sartre who coined the term “existential nausea” to describe severe alienation. I like to think that what I am feeling is morning sickness – in anticipation of the birth of my self-realized being. It seems ironic to me that, although I have experienced exquisite mystical insights, I still fall into pits of depression and alienation where words and actions seem only to emphasize a futility in human endeavors. Worse still is a deep shame that I am full of doubts when so many lovely flowers have been presented to me from the hands of existence. Words really don't compensate for the alien gap, but just hearing the tenderness of your voice soothes the blown-out craters on the dark side of my moon. Would you speak on alienation?The philosophy of existentialism has given a few new words tremendous emphasis. One of those words is alienation – to feel alien to oneself.Man has always felt that he does not know himself. It is not something new; just the name is new and the emphasis is new. Twenty-five centuries ago Socrates was telling people, “Know thyself.” He was saying, “You are a stranger to yourself. You don’t know your being; you don’t know all the dimensions of your being. You don’t know, why you are here. You don’t know from where you have come, you don’t know where you are going. And most important, you don’t know whether you are or not.”It happened…George Bernard Shaw was traveling from London to a small town in England. The ticket checker came into his compartment. He looked in all his pockets, in the suitcases, but he could not find the ticket. The ticket checker told him many times, “Don’t get so worried. You are a world-famous figure, I know you. You must have forgotten the ticket somewhere. When I come on the next run, I can see it. There is no hurry.”He was trying to console the agitated George Bernard Shaw, but George Bernard Shaw was perspiring. Listening to his words he became very angry and shouted, “Shut up! I am not looking for the ticket for you. Now the problem arises, where am I going? Can you tell me?”The man said, “How can I tell you?” George Bernard Shaw said, “Then don’t talk nonsense. I am not worried about you; I am worried about where I am going. Now what will happen to me?”Everybody is going somewhere, certainly. And nobody is going to ask for your ticket, but still…those who are intelligent are themselves bound to inquire “Where are we going?”But all these questions are secondary. The basic question is “Who am I?”This strangeness about oneself, this ignorance about oneself, if felt deeply creates in existentialist terms a nausea. One starts feeling nauseous. One is here, one is going somewhere, one is coming from somewhere…there seems to be no meaning in all this. And there are so many worries, so much suffering, so much anguish to go through for what?Existentialism is a negative philosophy. But the modern man needs it, just as a shock. Existentialist ideas cannot be fulfilling; they cannot remove the nausea, they can only deepen it. They cannot destroy your alienation, they can only make it sharper. They cannot take away meaninglessness from your life, they can only write it in bold letters. They can surround you with a feeling of sickness. If death is the end, then life is nothing but sickness – sickness unto death. But existentialism can help intelligent people not to be satisfied with nausea, but to inquire.There have been people who have found themselves. Their serenity is a proof of it, their fragrance is evidence of it, their rejoicing is an argument which cannot be refuted. A Gautam Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Chuang Tzu, a Bodhidharma – nobody can deny their grace. Nobody can deny that these people have gone beyond worries, beyond anxiety.These people have found something which fills their life with songs of joy. They have found some treasure which is inexhaustible and makes them dance in utter gratitude. Their very presence has convinced millions of people that life need not be a sickness unto death; on the contrary life can become such a dance that death becomes the ultimate culmination of the dance. Life can be transformed so deeply that even death disappears as darkness and becomes a dawn, that even death is no more an end but a new beginning.Existentialism has paralyzed immensely, terribly, the intelligentsia of the Western world. The impact of the existentialists has been great. And the conclusion of their philosophy is nothing but suicide, which can relieve you from all nausea, all alienation, all meaninglessness, all anguish, all suffering.There has never been such a negative philosophy in the whole history of man. There have been atheists, who denied God, but they denied God to support life. They denied God so man can be absolutely free, without anybody dominating him and dictating to him and giving him commandments. Atheists were humanitarians; they raised man as the highest value. To the theists they looked negative because they were negating God, but nobody has seen that they were affirming life.In fact, compared to atheists the theists are negative, because they deny life, they negate life, they teach people to renounce life for a fictitious god, for a hypothetical god for which they don’t have any proof, any argument. But theists have been thought of as positive thinkers, and atheists as negative thinkers. This evaluation is totally wrong, according to me. Atheists are very positive; theists are absolutely negative.But the existentialists have far transcended the theists and their negativity; they were at least affirming a fictitious god. Atheism was denying only a fiction. Existentialists are denying the fiction of god and they are also denying the reality of life; not only denying, but giving it such condemnatory colors that it seems it is a calamity to be born, it is a punishment to be born…that life is not a joy, but simply another name of hell.Existentialism has to be understood very deeply, because philosophically it may become the cause of the third world war. It has destroyed all that was beautiful in life. It has negated everything that was valuable – love, silence, meditation, joy. It has erased them all. Life is only a sickness, and we are clinging to life because we are afraid to die. It is not that we love life; we hate it – but at least it is known. Who knows, death may be far worse. It is better to remain with the known, although it is miserable.They have created the philosophical background for people like Ronald Reagan to destroy the whole humanity. If existentialism is true, then there is no harm in destroying the whole humanity; in fact it should be taken as a blessing that all sickness disappears, all that is ugly disappears.And all is ugly according to the existentialists. There is not even a single thing which can be appreciated.Unless the West becomes aware of meditation, unless meditation penetrates the Western intelligence, there is a danger. The politicians are creating weapons to destroy, and the philosophers are creating readiness to be destroyed, willingness to be destroyed. It is the greatest conspiracy against life between politicians and philosophers.And these existentialists…. One wonders! I have written letters to Jaspers, to Jean-Paul Sartre and they didn’t even have the courage to answer. I asked them, “If your philosophy is right, you should commit suicide. Why are you living? For what? Waiting for death?” According to them, life is nothing but a waiting room and the train that will come, its name is death.Neither Jaspers nor Jean-Paul Sartre ever replied. All these philosophers, from Soren Kierkegaard to Marcel, were living perfectly happily, enjoying Nobel prizes and preaching a philosophy which is itself really sick.Life is not sick. It is the wrong glasses they have on their eyes. Just today I heard some news. A man shot his wife in New York. The police came, and the man was absolutely unafraid. He said, “Yes, I have killed my wife.” But his son said, “Father, she’s not my mother and she’s not your wife.” He said, “My God, I forgot to put on my glasses!” He killed some other woman, thinking that she was his wife.Existentialism is giving wrong glasses to people. It is the most anti-human, anti-life ideology ever preached.Prem Padmini, you need not be caught into these sick ideologies. I am here to open new windows for you, and you can see with your own eyes the immense beauty of life, the great blissfulness of life…the tremendous silence which is a song without sounds, and a dance that goes on eternally in the trees, in the rivers, in the mountains, in the stars.The whole existence is full of rejoicing; you just need to open your windows. Your darkness is your own creation, your alienation is your own creation; otherwise you are not a stranger to yourself. You are not a stranger to the trees, to the rivers, to the mountains.It is our existence; we are part of it.Our heartbeat is part of the universal heartbeat.And it is not a dead universe; it is immensely intelligent, conscious, sensitive. It is divine in its every dimension. But you have to learn to participate in the dance.You are sitting like a cripple, and because of your crippledness – which is just your idea; you are not crippled, you have just been told that you are crippled, you cannot dance, you will fall, so sit silently – you are not participating in the dance that is going all over the place.The cripple automatically becomes a critic. He starts hating that which he cannot do. He starts calling the dancers stupid, mad, insane – “What is the point of all this dance? what is the meaning of all these songs and music? It is just noise and nothing else.So as not to see one’s crippledness, one starts condemning those who are not influenced by crippled philosophies and religions.Be a participant! In the beginning it may be a little difficult, but step by step start moving a little.A husband asks his wife which she likes most, Christmas or sex. “Christmas,” she says. “Why is that?” asks her husband. “Is it more romantic?” “No,” she answers, “but it happens more often.”Now, if Christmas happens more often, then life will look like a nausea, a sickness.Participate in the small joys of life, and it will open its great treasures. It contains immense riches, but it needs you to explore them. It gives you challenges, because it is one of the parts of understanding that what you find with great difficulty you enjoy more. That which is very arduous brings great rejoicing; that which is obvious, freely available, will not give you joy.Life follows that principle, it keeps its treasures hidden. But it goes on challenging you, calling you. You have to become pilgrims, seekers, searchers. And all the doors are inside, so you don’t have to go to the Himalayas. You have just to go inward. The deeper you go in, the more you know that life is not alien; it is your very heart. You are not separate from it. You have always been part of it, in some form or other, and you will remain always part of it.You belong to this eternal celebration.Existentialism is one of the most dangerous approaches to life – far more dangerous than your religions, because your religions are very poor in arguments. Existentialism is very rich in arguments, so convincing that once you are caught in its trap, you cannot escape. Just remember one thing: not a single existentialist philosopher has committed suicide. That destroys their whole philosophical approach.Only once before in the past in Greece there was a great philosopher, Zeno. He was not teaching so many ugly things, and making man really feel nauseous, but he was certainly teaching that life has no meaning and only cowards go on living because they don’t have the guts to commit suicide. He himself lived a long life of ninety years, and thousands of people committed suicide under his influence. When he was dying, one young man asked, “Just one question more: how come you managed to live ninety years while your followers, particularly young people, have committed suicide according to your philosophy?”He said, “I had to live to teach the philosophy. It was such a suffering to live, but I had to suffer for the sake of humanity.”Philosophers can be very cunning. Now this is cunningness, pure and simple. But at least he accepted one thing – that he lived to teach his philosophy. Jaspers and Jean-Paul Sartre and Marcel did not even answer my question. They could have at least said, “We are suffering greatly, but because we want to awaken humanity to the reality, which is nauseous, we are somehow managing to remain alive.” Even that much they were not courageous enough to accept. And strangely enough, when Marcel was given a Nobel prize, he accepted it. Life is a nausea. What is a Nobel prize? A cancer? Happily, he accepted.These are just intellectuals playing games with words, mind games; but they don’t know anything of meditation. If they had known just a little bit of meditation not only would their life have been richer, they would have changed the whole West, particularly the Western youth, into a happier, a more radiant, alive generation.But all that they have created is a subtle willingness for suicide, a deep acceptance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If life is such, then to destroy it is not evil; then Adolf Hitler is a great prophet and he helped six million people to be relieved from a life which was nausea. He was the greatest servant of the Jews: without him, six million Jews would still be suffering from nausea, anguish, anxiety, meaninglessness. Adolf Hitler is a great savior. And now he has come in a far greater form as Ronald Reagan. Perhaps Ronald Reagan will prove the greatest savior of humanity by destroying all life.Existentialism has to be fought, it has to be destroyed by the roots, because it is in favor of death and against life – and without knowing life. And to know life there is only one way, the way of meditation.Osho,Why is it that my valleys are deeper than my mountains are high?It is unfortunate that your valleys are deeper than your mountains are high, but the responsibility is yours. You are digging your valleys every day deeper and you have not made any effort even to climb the mountains. To make them bigger is a totally different thing; you have not even climbed them. You are going deeper into your valleys, and digging them more and more. Most of the men in the world are gravediggers; they go on digging their own graves.An old man was dying, a very rich old man. His four sons, who were all rich in their own right, had gathered to say good-bye to their father. They were sitting around him. The youngest son said “We should arrange a Rolls Royce to take him to the graveyard. That was his lifelong desire, to ride in a Rolls Royce, but he was so miserly, he could not manage it. At least we should give him a chance. He will be dead, but his spirit, his ghost, may enjoy the trip. And it is not very costly because it is one way.”But the second son, elder than the first, said; “You are forgetting our family heritage. What difference does it make to a dead man whether you take him in a Rolls Royce or in a four wheel Ford truck? It makes no difference to him but to us it will make a difference. At least I am not going to contribute if a Rolls Royce is brought; I will contribute at the most for a Ford truck. A dead man is a dead man. He knows nothing about where he is sitting. It will do, and we will take him in the nighttime, so nobody knows and nobody sees.”The third brother said, “You are all being too extravagant. What is the need of a Ford truck? Just a bullock cart…and one of my servants has a bullock cart, so we need not even pay anything. A dead body will enjoy the bullock cart and the open air more than any Rolls Royce.”The eldest brother said, “You all seem to have gone wrong, you have all gone insane; it is sheer wastage. We should put him, in the deep darkness in the middle of night, by the side of the road where people throw all their garbage, so in the morning the corporation truck will take him away. They do the same with all the beggars, and a dead man, whether he was rich or a beggar does not make any distinction. There is no problem; a dead man is a dead man, it is just a corpse.”Just then the old man tried to sit up. He was still alive and listening. He said: “My sons, just help me to find my shoes.” They said, “What are you going to do with your shoes? Are you going to die with your shoes on?” He said, “I have still a little life left. I can walk to the graveyard. In the night, who is going to see? And you are four; you can dig the grave and I will help as much as I can in my old age. Then you can take my shoes back, because they are almost new. I have used them only for ten years; they are good enough for you and your children.”You ask, why your valleys are deeper. Instead of digging your valleys, learn the art of climbing the mountains. Reach to the sunlit peaks of the mountains. Certainly valleys are more secure, more cozy, more comfortable, less risky. Climbing a mountain…if you really want to climb a high mountain like Everest it is dangerous. But the more dangerous it is, the more alive it makes you.Friedrich Nietzsche used to keep a small card on his table. He had written on it himself, “Live dangerously!” Any visitor was bound to see it and ask him “What does it mean?” He said, “That is my whole philosophy, because I have found that the more dangerously you live, the more deeply you live.”As you live more dangerously, you really live. A few moments of dangerous living, as if you are walking on a razor’s edge, are more precious than a long life without any danger, without any risk, comfortable and cozy, everything insured, everything secure.The way of the sannyasin is really the way to live life dangerously.A young man asked his friend, “How come that old maid keeps getting the best-looking boys for each dance ?” “That is easy,” his friend replied. “When she was young she gave it away, later she sold it, and now that she is rich, she is buying it back!”She really lived, in every possible way. Most people are avoiding living.George was a sprightly eighty-eight year old when he married Ruby, a lusciously ripe eighteen year old. As they prepared for bed on their wedding night he asked her, “Tell me, sweet child, did your mother tell you the facts of life?” Blushingly she murmured, “No.”“That’s too bad,” George said, “because I’m afraid I have forgotten them.”Now it is too long…eighty-eight years old, but still trying his best – not accepting old age, not being worried about death, and although he had gone senile, still ready to live. But most people, even when they are young, are living reluctantly, resisting life, afraid of life, feeling guilty to live because that’s what they have been told, that’s how they have been prepared. Their whole conditioning is so life-negative that even if they want to live, their guilt does not allow them to live.As far as my people are concerned, my single-pointed, unconditional advice is to live as intensely as possible, as totally as possible, because that is the only way to know the godliness of life, to know its divine fragrance, its divine taste. And the most strange fact is, the people who live totally, fully, transcend the very desire to live a mundane kind of life. They move beyond the mundane to another dimension, another sphere: the sacred.Live as a Zorba; then it will be possible for you to live as a Gautam Buddha. Zorba has to be the foundation of your life, and Gautam Buddha your highest peak. Live without any fear, because there is no god you have to be afraid of. And there is no heaven where your tortures will be rewarded, and there is no hell where your joys will be punished. This moment is all. Always remember in whatever moment you are that it is all.One day one of Mulla Nasruddin’s friends asked him if he could borrow his donkey to carry some vegetables to the market. “No,” said Mulla Nasruddin, “that’s not possible, because my donkey is not here, and what’s more, he is sick.” At that moment, his donkey appeared from around the corner calling, “Heehaw, heehaw.”“You said your donkey is not here, and that he is sick,” accused Mulla Nasruddin’s friend, “and here he is and yelling ‘heehaw, heehaw,’ as well as can be.”“Who do you believe, “asked Mulla Nasruddin, “my donkey or me?”If you believe me, then there is no problem; then the sunlit peaks are very close by. But if you believe religious donkeys of all kinds and all sorts – Hindu shankaracharyas and Ayatollah Khomeiniac and pope the Polack – then I am helpless. Then you have to go on digging your valleys deeper.Just trust what I am saying, because I am not saying anything based on any scripture. I am saying only things based on my own experience; hence what I am saying has an authority – which these shankaracharyas cannot have; they are only representatives, they don’t have their own experience…these popes cannot have; they are only elected people. It is a very strange world, where religious leaders are also elected, elected by all kinds of idiots, elected by the followers.I am not elected by anybody; neither am I representing anybody. I am simply telling you what my experience is; hence I have an authority that these people cannot have. I don’t want you to believe it; I want you to trust it. And I make the difference, because by believing you will remain just a follower; by trusting you will come to the same status and the same space in which I am living.Believing is cheap.To trust means you are accepting a challenge to climb the sunlit peaks of mountains.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 39 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The other day, I found myself upset, impatient, and irritable. When will I grow up? When will we all come to the responsibility of just being the you in us: that gracefulness that we all know ourselves to be? I feel that the time is ripe to stop whining about misery, and misunderstandings, pain, and discomforts. Could it be that as a disciple, I simply take you, your presence, your answers, your insights, and your grace for granted, as a way to avoid just stepping into myself, into the devotee?It is natural to be impatient. And a great understanding and awareness is needed not to be impatient, because impatience is not going to help; on the contrary, it is one of the great hindrances. You have to understand impatience as your enemy. You want the vast and the mysterious to open its doors, without much effort on your part. It is not possible. There are a thousand and one doors, and only one is right; you will have to knock on all the wrong doors to find the right one. Either in scientific research, or in a spiritual seeking, patience is absolutely necessary.I am reminded of Edison who invented the first electric bulb. He worked on it for three years. All his colleagues and his disciples slowly, slowly left. They were impatient, they wanted it to happen immediately, and they could not believe the patience of Edison.Every day, Edison would come fresh, young, excited, and they would say to him, “We have experimented in so many ways, and we have failed in every experiment. Why not change the subject? We should work on something else.”Edison would say, “Who told you that we have been failures? Each failure brings us nearer to success because there must be only a limited number of doors. We knock on one door, and it is not the right door – but it is not a failure. One door, a wrong door, is eliminated; success is closer. We knock on another door; it is not the right door. But we are even closer to success – two doors are eliminated. Soon we will be knocking on the right door.But the patience that he had is part of a very intelligent and very genuine seeker. After three years, in the middle of the night, he knocked on the right door. For the first time, the human eyes….He was alone, all his colleagues had left; he was tired, utterly exhausted, and thinking himself almost mad. He was alone when he discovered the electric bulb. It had taken three years. Day and night he had been thinking only of one thing – from where to approach this? And when the room was lighted up with electricity, he was sitting there in utter wonder. He was the first man to see something which had never existed before. He could not take his eyes off the electric bulb.It was getting late, and finally his wife shouted from the other room, “Put that stupid light off!” She was not aware that it was electricity. She said “Come back, and go to sleep.”He said, “It is not the stupid light that you are acquainted with; it is what my three years of patience has created. You should come here and see!”Because of his patience – he has a uniqueness in the whole history of man – he discovered one thousand inventions. Anybody else could have done it, but nobody had that quality of patience. There were many intelligent researchers, but they would go a little way and have a few failures…and start moving into another direction.Jalaluddin Rumi, one of the most important Sufi mystics, one day took his disciples to a nearby farm where the farmers were trying to dig a well. They had made eight holes, and now they were working on the ninth; on each one they had gone only so far, and then seeing that there was no water, they dropped that project and started in another place. They had destroyed the whole farm.Jalaluddin Rumi had taken his disciples for a specific purpose – to see how impatience is idiotic. If these people had put all the energy that they had used in destroying the whole field with several holes into digging a single hole, they would be bound to find water. But these are not the kind of people who are going to find water.He was telling his disciples, “You should not be impatient. Put your total energy, your total trust, one pointedly, arrowed toward one goal. When the master is with you – who has traveled the path, up and down many times, and who knows that the path is going to lead you to your cherished dream – don’t feel dejected, don’t feel impatient, don’t start new projects again and again. That way nobody has ever been able to find anything.”You say, “The other day I found myself upset, impatient, and irritable!”You cannot suddenly find yourself upset, impatient, and irritable. You must have been always impatient, upset, and irritable. Perhaps the other day you came to a peak of realization; you realized that these great qualities are in you. But they must have always been there; they cannot come suddenly. You must have become accustomed to them.“When will I grow up?” What is the hurry? And what are you doing by growing up? Even if you grow up today, what will you do? You will get even more upset and impatient and irritable, thinking, “My God, there was a goal, now even that is finished. Now my life is absolutely meaningless.”Growing up comes by itself. You have to work, but not directly on how to grow up soon; you have to work more on meditation, more on silence, more on love. And the total result is growth. The growth itself is not something separate; it is the whole synthesis of all great qualities. You have to work on those qualities.In my childhood – and perhaps in India in everybody’s childhood – it must have happened…I used to plant mango seeds. My impatience was so much that I could not even sleep the whole night – I wanted to see what had happened in the night. In the morning, I would dig them up again, and see whether anything had happened or not. Nothing had happened!The mango seed, when two leaves start growing in it, can be taken out, and it makes a very good whistle. My interest was not in the mangoes, my interest was in getting more whistles. But even that needs patience – just those two leaves. But impatience was such that it was even impossible to get those two leaves to grow. Every morning I would dig up the seed to see what was happening, and that would destroy the whole thing.Growth is something that happens by the side. You meditate, you sing, you dance, you rejoice, and suddenly, one day you will find those two leaves of the mango are growing above the ground – so fresh, so beautiful. Growth is a finding on the margin; you cannot make it a goal. That’s what is making you so upset, impatient, and irritable! You have made growing up your goal. Now what can you do? Get stretched on a traction machine?“When will we all come to the responsibility of just being the You in us: that gracefulness that we all know ourselves to be?” Any question about when shows that you have not understood my emphasis on the present moment; you have not understood my approach of here and now. Enjoy this moment, and forget the lot! And growth will come suddenly one day, not as a reward, but as a shadow of your living moment-to-moment, joyously.“When” always takes you into the future, it always thinks of tomorrows. And the basic spiritual insight of thousands of years is that tomorrow never comes. This very moment will become another moment, your today will continue to remain today, the tomorrow will come in the form of today. But our whole system of thought is goal-oriented. We are always living in the future, and nobody can live in the future; or we are living in the past, and nobody can live in the past either.The only way to live is to enjoy this moment, to cherish this moment, to make it as beautiful as possible. And out of this moment will come the next moment, out of this moment will come your whole future. This moment contains the whole eternity – past and future.You are saying, “I feel that the time is ripe to stop whining about misery, and misunderstandings, pain, and discomforts. Could it be that as a disciple, I simply take You, Your presence, Your answers, Your insights, and Your grace for granted?”Do you really feel, that “the time is ripe to stop whining about misery, and misunderstandings”? And what are you doing in your question? What is this about being “upset, impatient, and irritable,” and “when will I grow up”? If it is not whining about misery, and pain, and discomforts, then what is it? You have not felt that the time is ripe – you have only thought. Thinking is of no help. Thinking is a cheat. It talks great things, it gives you big promises, but the goods are never delivered.Remember a clear-cut distinction between thinking and feeling: those who are feeling “the time is ripe” are not whining about any misery. They are enjoying the ripe time, and by enjoying, they are making it riper.Of course, it is true – at least about you – that you have started taking my presence for granted. That is the natural habit of the mind. It starts taking for granted things which it will repent only when it has lost them.There is a beautiful Sufi story…. A very rich man, super-rich, became bored with life because he had known all the pleasures, all the joys that money can purchase, but they were not truly satisfying. He was still thirsty, he was still hungry for something authentic. He was inquiring from sages and saints, and all that they could say…he had tried their rituals, worship, prayer and nothing worked.One saint out of desperation…because this man was torturing him continually again and again about his misery – “Time is passing, life is limited, and what kind of saint are you? You cannot show me the right path. And I have twenty-four hours to devote to it; I don’t have to work to earn money or anything, I don’t have children, and I have earned so much money that it is enough for ten lives at least.” The saint sent him to a Sufi master who was thought to be a little bit insane, and to whom many sages were sending their disciples when they wanted to get rid of them. But that insane Sufi master only looked insane; he had a super-sanity.The rich man took a big bag, filled it with diamonds and rubies and emeralds and sapphires; and went to the Sufi who was sitting under a tree. He told the Sufi his whole story…that he was very miserable, he had everything that the world can afford. “I have brought, just to give you a proof, this whole bag worth millions. All I need is peace of mind.” The Sufi said, “I will give it to you. Get ready!”The rich man thought, “This man seems to be strange. I have been to so many saints – nobody was so quick, and nobody promised to give it to me. They all said, ‘Go through this ritual, this worship, this prayer, this meditation. Work it out yourself.’ This is the only man…perhaps, they are right that he is insane. He is saying, ‘Get ready. Don’t waste my time!’ “So hesitatingly he said, “Okay, I’m ready.” But he was very afraid – although he had come to get peace of mind. And when the man said he was ready, the Sufi master took hold of his bag, and ran.It was a small village with small streets with which the Sufi was perfectly acquainted. And the rich man had never run. He ran behind the Sufi master shouting, “I have been cheated! This man is not a sage. He’s not insane, he’s very cunning.” But he could not get hold of the Sufi because he was going so fast and taking so many turns in the village. The old man was fat – huffing, puffing, perspiring, crying – and the whole crowd was laughing. He could not understand why these people were laughing, and nobody was helping! But the village knew that that man was not insane – he was super-sane. He had his own methods.Finally, the rich man reached to the same tree. The Sufi had reached far ahead; he was sitting with the bag there. And the rich man was shouting, abusing.The Sufi said, “Stop all this nonsense! Take this bag.” The man took the bag immediately, and the Sufi asked, “How are you feeling?”He said, “I’m feeling great peace.”The Sufi said, “That’s what I was telling you. If you are ready, I can give you peace immediately. Have you got it?”He said, “I have got it!”“Never again ask anybody about it!” You have started taking for granted all your riches. I gave you a chance to lose them, and suddenly you became what you really are – a beggar. And these very precious stones which have lost their value to you are again precious.” But it happens. The people who live in palaces start taking those palaces for granted; the people who are rich never think about the miseries of poverty. The people who have got a master start taking him for granted – that there is nothing to be done; you only have to ask the question and your master is there to answer it.But my answers cannot be of any help.My answers are only a provocation and an invitation, a challenge to work through the misery and the darkness toward the dawn, toward light.I can show you the way, but I cannot walk for you.And if you start taking me for granted, then don’t be miserable; take your misery also for granted. Accept that you are a miserable person, that it is your destiny. You don’t take your misery for granted, but you can take your master for granted. You don’t take your problems for granted, but you take my answers for granted.So you have to be clear, very clear. In your whole question, only your last line is true, and authentic: “As a way to avoid stepping into myself, I have started taking you for granted.”It is a very easy way to ask a question, to get an answer, and out of the answer, make a few more questions for tomorrow…and you remain the same. My answers are remedies; they are medicinal. You have not just to create more questions out of them; you have to make an effort to live those answers. Out of living those answers, your questions will disappear.And my answers are simple. I am not requiring you to grow into some self-torturing saint; I am not asking you for any ascetic disciplines. I am simply asking you to relax, to trust existence, to find a few moments of silence and peace which are absolutely available to everybody – whoever closes his eyes, relaxes his body, sits silently.The silence I’m talking about is not some acquirement or achievement. It is a discovery. It is already within you – just the mind has to be quiet so that you can hear the music of silence that surrounds your whole being, so that you can smell the fragrance of your being itself. And once you have known it, then you can repeat it as many times in the day as you like, whenever you have time. Even sitting in a train or in a bus, you can just close your eyes and move inward. It is only a question of taking the first step, then everything else becomes easy. But remember to be patient.A Polack air cadet is taking his first sky diving jump. “What happens if the parachute does not open?” he asked his instructor. “Don’t worry,” replies the instructor. “There is only one chance in a thousand that it will happen, and you have a spare parachute too.”“But,” replies the anxious student, “what if that one does not open either?”“There is only one chance in a million that that will happen,” the instructor assures him and adds, “and then the ambulance is there on the field to pick up the pieces.”The nervous cadet boards the plane which takes off. At ten thousand feet he jumps out of the plane, and pulls the cord of his main parachute. It does not open.“Shit!” he says, and then pulls the cord of his reserve chute which also refuses to open. “I knew it,” he says to himself. “And I bet with my luck, the ambulance won’t be there to pick up the pieces either.”Just don’t be so miserable! Most probably, the first parachute will do. If everything goes wrong, then even with your luck, you will find the ambulance to collect the pieces.Osho,Michael was helping Patrick check to see that his car indicators were working. He put his head out of the window, and yelled, “Yes, Patrick, they are…No, they're not…Yes, they are…No, they're not. “ Osho, no I'm not…Yes I am…No I'm not…Yes I am. Recently I've noticed those spaces in between, and now they seem to be coming more and more in every way.One advertisement for beer claims to “Reach the parts that other beers can't.” Parts of me that just a few weeks ago I didn't know existed are beginning to feel spacious, light, and grateful. I am beginning to feel the flow and the pace of existence, to relax into it, and to trust it. Will you please comment?The workings of the mind are just like that – split between yes and no, between to be or not to be. The mind cannot have one voice; it is always balanced by its “against” voice. That is simply the nature of the mind: it is split, it is schizophrenic. In a more philosophical way, they call it dialectical.But my whole teaching is to go beyond the mind, not to be bothered with it. Neither its “no” is of any meaning, nor even its “yes.” The only use of the mind is to use it as a stepping-stone, to go beyond it. Don’t try to solve problems of the mind, they are insoluble. You will get into a thick forest, and find it almost impossible to find the way back home.The mind is a PolackHow do you make a one armed Polack fall off a flagpole?Answer: You wave to him.Why did the Polish Government import five hundred million tons of sand from Saudi Arabia?Answer: They wanted to drill for their own oil.Did you hear about the Polish lesbian?Answer: She likes men.The mind is certainly part of Poland.One contemporary logician has invented a word, po. And my suspicions are that he has taken that word po from Poland; otherwise, there is no way he could manage this word po. He has invented it because his philosophy needed it. He says that Aristotle has given us a philosophy of yes and no; either something is right or something is wrong, either something is black or white – a very simple duality. Either you believe in God or you don’t.But what about things when the real answer is neither yes nor no? For example, God. To say “yes” is wrong because you have not experienced it; to say “no” is wrong because you have not explored it. So neither yes is applicable, nor no.According to this man’s logic, when somebody asks you, “What about God?” you have to say po. Po is noncommittal; it does not mean yes, it does not mean no. It simply means, “I don’t know.” But rather than accepting the ignorance, it gives you a good feeling to say po. You put, in fact, the other person in a state of ignorance because he cannot understand – “What is po?” He has never heard the word.My suspicion is that he has got this po from Poland. There is no other way to get it. But even with po, mind will not be the solution. You can go on repeating po but you will remain as poor, as ignorant, as miserable as before. This po is not going to transform anything in you.Only one thing can transform, and that is going beyond the mind, going beyond thinking, and coming to a space where the sky is absolutely without clouds. And then no question arises, and no answer is needed.People think that Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Zarathustra, or Lao Tzu have found the answer. They are wrong. They have lost both – the question and the answer. They have found a silence, undisturbed either by questions or by answers.When I said this to Tibetan Buddhist lamas, they were shocked because they were thinking Gautam Buddha had found the answer. I said, “If you find the answer, you are still inside the mind, you are still very close to the question.” Gautam Buddha has gone beyond the question and the answer. He has found silence – indestructible.Philosophy finds answers, religion finds a state which is far beyond questions and answers. Questions and answers look childish, look like toys to play with.Ten years ago an anthropology student spent some time studying rural regions of Kashmir. One day he was driving down the road when he saw a man on a donkey, while his wife walked ten yards behind him. “Why do you do that?” he asked. “It is our age-old tradition,” the man replied.Recently, the student, now a reporter, was sent back to Kashmir by his newspaper. By a strange coincidence he found himself on the same road, with the same man he had seen ten years before. But this time the man’s wife was walking ten yards ahead of him. The man on the donkey was exactly ten yards behind the wife.“What happened to the traditional custom?” asked the reporter. “Has the tradition changed?”“No, “ said the man. “The tradition has not changed, but now, you see, there are land mines.”Mind is very cunning. It will use traditions, it will use religions, it will use philosophies – just to survive. It will give you all kinds of questions, and all kinds of answers – just to survive. But any question raised by the mind is as futile as any answer found by the mind.Mind is an exercise in utter futility.Only very few people in the world have been able to find the truth that the mind is our only problem.If we can go beyond mind into silence, into utter and profound silence – undisturbed by anything, not even a ripple of thought – then we have found it…not the answer, but something existential, a transformation, a mutation, a revolution in ourselves which destroys all questions and all answers, and leaves us in utter serenity, in a tremendous beatitude.Meditation is nothing but annihilation of the mind.Meditation is not the training of the mind: Meditation is simply cessation of the mind.Just cease to be a mind, and you will find a pure being, unpolluted and pure from eternity to eternity.Little Ernie was always saying things that got him into trouble. One day his mother was having a friend to lunch who was bringing her new baby who had no ears.Ernie’s mother called him and said, “Ernie, don’t you say anything about the baby. In fact, don’t even speak at all.”“Okay,” said Ernie.The friend arrived with her baby. Ernie looked at him, took his hand, and said, “What beautiful little hands he has.”“Ernie,” warned his mother.“And what beautiful brown hair he has.”“Yes,” said the proud friend.“Has he got good eyesight?” asked Ernie.“Ernie!” yells his mother.“Why?” asked the baby’s mother.“Because,” says Ernie, “he will never be able to wear glasses.”The mind is so cunning; it goes on round about, but comes finally to some trouble, to some problem. You can repress its one question by one answer, but it will create new questions which will be nothing but echoes of the repressed question.A seeker of truth is a seeker of the beyond. The beyond is our home.The mind can be Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan; the beyond is just pure, without any objective. To me, the future man, the new man will live in the beyond.Living in the beyond does not mean that you cannot use your mind; in fact, on the contrary, only those who live in the beyond are capable of using their mind as an instrument. Mind goes on torturing those who have not moved into the beyond; it is a nightmare. And they cannot use the mind because they are not above it.Be a witness to the mind.In your witnessing, the beyond will open its doors.

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The Golden Future 01-40Category: OSHO’S VISION FOR THE WORLD

The Golden Future 40 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I visited Sarjano's pizza parlor yesterday, I found him sobbing by a huge vat of spaghetti. He said that, in spite of your assurances, he feels it is all hopeless. He said, “I can-a never get-a enlightened-a. I'm-a too much-a attached-a to my past-a.“ I tried to cheer him up by saying that you were helping us to return to the source, and where there is sauce there must be spaghetti. But he was inconsolable. Beloved Master, please, can you help?Maneesha, Sarjano need not become enlightened – he is already. Those who have been to his place have tasted enlightenment in his spaghetti.It is true, he is too much attached to the past-a. I would like to suggest to him that in our place he should change these names a little bit – because I am against the past, I cannot allow any past-a here. So I have to rename his pasta; it will be called from tomorrow: futura. And his pizza should be called presenta. The language should be meaningful. Pizza reminds one of pee – that’s why I have never been calling it pizza. I have been always calling it “piesta” just to avoid that pee.And Sarjano need not worry about enlightenment; those who are with me are already enlightened. They may recognize it, they may not recognize it – just out of humbleness….A very large elephant was moving sedately through the African jungle when he caught sight of a mouse. He stopped in astonishment; he had never seen a mouse before. “My God,” he said, “you are small!” “Yes,” said the mouse, “I have been ill lately.”Following an ancient custom, the rabbi of the local synagogue prostrated himself before the Ark of the Lord, “Oh Lord, forgive me, for I am as nothing.” Then the cantor followed, “Oh Lord, forgive me, for I am as nothing.” A little old man praying nearby in his tobacco-stained shirt and old shoes called out, “Oh Lord, forgive me, for I am as nothing.” The disgusted rabbi said to the cantor, “Look who thinks he is nothing!”In the society where everything turns into ego, even humbleness – which should be egolessness – becomes a subtle ego in itself. But my people are not egoists; hence they need not be humble either – because humbleness and ego are two extremes of the same energy. My people are simple, they are just exactly in the middle; they follow the golden mean.Nirvana, enlightenment, kaivalya, moksha, all great experiences, are not to be proclaimed. People will recognize them just by your joy, by your playfulness, by your presence. And Sarjano is playful, joyous – sometimes a little too much. Once in a while he goes to the extreme, but most of the time remains “normally mad.” I am going to visit his place one day. I have heard too much about it. He and Kuteer are both doing great things there.Sarjano has made a great futura for me, a huge wristwatch with numbers and hands. He must have devoted so much time and so much love…and it came with the message: “Osho, I can only offer you this kind of watch.” You can see his humbleness, his love. He is one of my most beloved disciples.You all have to remember that I have changed the names…. We are thinking about the new man and we are thinking about the future of humanity – and this is the last talk of this series. It is perfectly the right and ripe time to give Sarjano’s creativity new names: futura and presenta.Osho,You've been talking about love and freedom, and my girlfriend has gone off with another man. I look inside to see if there is anything resembling love that will willingly give the other freedom, and I can't find anything except this black misery, which I am surprised to find myself enjoying. Do I have any of the new man in me or is it all old?These are the blessings I have been talking about every day. After all, your girlfriend has left you. It happens only to very fortunate people and you know it!You say you are enjoying it; it is just out of old habit that you are calling it “black misery.” You don’t see the contradiction: it is a pure white blessing, not black misery. It is black misery to the man with whom your girlfriend has gone! You should now pray and meditate for that poor fellow. Your girlfriend has done enough for you; now she will do the same to the other fellow.You say, “I am surprised to find myself enjoying it.” Everybody will enjoy it, because everybody is tortured with our so-called relationships. They start very beautifully, very sweet, but they end up very soon in utter misery, in absolute darkness, and there seems to be no end to the night. That’s why my vision of a new man is that he will only relate with others, but there will be no relationship as such – no binding for tomorrow, no contract for the future. Today is enough unto itself; enjoy it. If tomorrow you find yourselves still together, it is good. If you find yourselves separating, separate with gratitude, because for one day you have given great joy and blissfulness to each other, and it is good that before things become bitter you should separate. At least in your memory those beautiful moments will always remain – fragrant, fresh, alive.Wealthy Hymie and Becky are sitting in their luxurious New York penthouse watching television when there is a knock on the door. Hymie opens it and is confronted by a hooded six-foot burly figure. “Please,” says Hymie, “take my money, anything, but don’t hurt me.” “Sir,” said the hooded figure, “I am a rapist, not a thief.” “Thank God,” says Hymie and calls over his shoulder, “Becky, it is for you.”Three months later, same scene: same knock on the door, same hooded figure, but this time Hymie closes the door on him saying, “I have already given.”Life could be a real excitement, an ecstasy, but because of our ugly heritage it turns out to be a hell. And it is not enough that you change the woman or the man. Within a few days, the second man or the second woman will again end up in the same dark space.Perhaps existence has a different design for man, and we have not listened to it. That different design is that we should remain strangers, meeting and separating without creating any kind of imprisonment for each other, any contract for the future, any promises. Without promises and without any contracts – if we can live life moment to moment and allow change, without any reluctance, without any resistance to it happening, joyously, life can become a celebration.But man has listened more to stupid priests, ignorant philosophers, criminal politicians, rather than listening to his own heart and listening to existence itself in deep silence and meditation. Unless man follows his nature, his existence, his own heart without any inhibitions, life is going to remain gloomy; it cannot release the tremendous blissfulness it contains in itself.The new man has to prove that we can live without any religion and without any morality, that we can live without any God and without any priests, that we can live simply according to our own heart, wherever it leads, just like a white cloud floating in the sky with no direction, with no goal, enjoying every moment wherever it is.The old man was goal-oriented; hence religions became relevant, moralities became prevalent. The new man is going to be absolutely without any goals, totally in tune with the present moment, not listening to any dictates of God – which are all fictitious.A little boy was sitting on the curb, crying, and an old man was passing by and came over to him. “What is the matter, little boy?” he asked. “Why are you crying?” “I am crying because I can’t do what the big boys do,” he said. The old man sat down on the curb and cried too.Moses came down from the mountain where he had been negotiating with God on behalf of his people. He called all the people together to give them the message from God. “Well”, he said, “I have got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, I have got him down to ten commandments. The bad news is, adultery is still in there.”Osho,I was traveling in the Himalayas for seven weeks. The day I was to return to Pune, you answered a question I had sent in eight weeks before, about feeling hopeless. While you were answering it, I was receiving the answer experientially, waiting on the Varanasi train platform for twenty-eight hours. Each hour it was announced that the train would arrive in one hour; but each time there was no train – only more people, more heat, more noise, more smell, and more flies. I finally truly gave up hope, put my straw hat down over my eyes, and cried. When I looked up again, the flies looked psychedelic with the sun shining through their wings, the sound of the trains and the chai wallahs were music to my ears, and my heart was full of love for everyone. Osho, your sense of timing is uncanny. How do you do it?Prem Indivar, it is a secret, but one day I can whisper it in your ears – just you have to keep the promise not to tell it to anyone else. You have to continue to say, “He has not said it to me yet.” And they will understand that I have already said it.A man was standing exactly where you have been on the Varanasi station, seeing the train off, and he observed someone near him shouting at one of the departing passengers, “Good-bye, your wife was a great lay! Your wife was a great lay!” He was stunned.After the train pulled away, he went over to the man who had done the shouting and asked, “Did I hear you correctly? Did you tell that man his wife was a great lay?” The other man shrugged his shoulders. “It is not really true,” he said, “but I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”“What is the difference between America and England?” asked the teacher. “I know,” said Hymie. “America has Ronald Reagan, Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, and Stevie Wonder. England has Margaret Thatcher, no cash, no hope – and no wonder.”So don’t be worried about what happened on the Varanasi station platform. This is usual in this country. I have been traveling for many years around the country; I must have waited on every platform. A few incidents will help you:One day, for the first time in my life, I found the train coming exactly in time. That is absolutely a unique occasion in India. It simply does not happen. I was so much amazed and felt so grateful that I went to the driver to thank him and I told him, “This is my first experience that the train has come exactly in time. You must be the best driver in the country.”He said, “Don’t make me feel ashamed.”I said, “Why?”He said, “This is yesterday’s train. It is exactly twenty-four hours late!”Just at that time, when he told me that it is twenty-four hours late, I said, “My God.” The stationmaster was standing by my side. I asked him, “If trains are going to be late – and I have been traveling for twenty years – then what is the point of publishing timetables?”He said, “You are a strange man. Without timetables how will we know how much the train is late?”I said, “That’s right; I had not thought about it.”He said, “Everything would get mixed up. The timetable is published so that you can know how much the train is going to be late.”On another junction, just as you are saying…the train was announced again and again, “one hour late…two hours late.” I could not believe it when I heard that it is one hour late; then it became two hours late, then it became four hours late. I said, “My God, is it coming this side or is it going the other way? If it was one hour late, how it can be suddenly four hours late now?”I went to the stationmaster and I asked, “In which direction is the train going?”He said, “Don’t be angry. It is just to protect our lives that we cannot declare that it is forty-eight hours late; people will kill us. So we declare in installments; it keeps people calm and quiet that “just one hour more…okay two hours more…and by these installments we manage forty-eight hours.”I said, “I can understand your great compassion; otherwise there would be many heart attacks, heart failures…if you start declaring it exactly right.” I have seen trains coming sixty hours late and I have been sitting on the platform for sixty hours, but it was always “two hours more…two hours more.” It can happen only in this country, which has learned to live patiently – nobody bothers. People accept it as if it is determined by fate; you cannot do anything about it.But you went through a really beautiful experience – it was because of your patience. You say the moment you covered your face with your straw hat and cried…. It must have cleaned your eyes and it must have softened your heart, and when you looked again, the flies had a psychedelic color – their wings in the sun rays were tremendously beautiful. The noises on the platform suddenly became an orchestra. It was patience and it was crying that gave you a very new experience.Ordinarily man has been brought up with the idea that crying is only for women, not for men, although nature has made tear glands of equal size behind the eyes of men and women, both. It is absolutely certain that nature intends men also to cry and weep and have tears. You may not have cried in your whole life. Crying was such a new experience to you, so relaxing, creating a kind of let-go, that everything around you which was disgusting just a few moments before became beautiful.Crying is certainly one of the most important things for everybody to learn. There may be millions of people who have never cried. They don’t know the joy of it, how it relaxes, how it cleanses your eyes – not only the outer eyes but your inner vision – and how it makes trees look more green, the sound of words more clear. The noises in a marketplace certainly start changing into a harmony because you are in a harmony.You dropped the hope, you cried over it, you became innocent like a child. You should learn something from that experience. The platform of Varanasi station turned, for you, into a religious experience.Osho,Why is it that whenever I come to ask a question, questions of great significance, that I knew were there before, elude me. I would like to ask about enlightenment and meditation, but when I get down to writing them, the questions lose all reality for me. The significance and depth of things always frightens me. Could it be that I am avoiding the deep treasures of my being?The questions about enlightenment and about meditation are not yet your deep search. You are not avoiding anything through them. On the contrary, when you try to write the question about enlightenment or meditation it loses all reality to you because it has no reality for you – it is a borrowed question. You hear so much about enlightenment here, about meditation; naturally you become curious. But curiosity is not inquiry, and unless a search becomes so authentic that it becomes a question of life and death, the question cannot have reality. You can ask it, but it will remain phony – to you and to me.I can see through your questions, because my basic effort is not to answer the question but to answer the questioner. And in an effort to answer the questioner, I have to destroy the question. All my answers are an effort to destroy your question.I am not giving you the answer.I am simply taking away the question, so you can be more empty, more silent, so that you can find the answer yourself.My answer cannot be your answer.My experience cannot be your experience.The teachers in the schools, in the colleges, in the universities, give you answers relevant to your questions; they are not concerned with the questioner at all. It may be anybody, X, Y, Z. Their answer will remain the same if the question is the same. But my answer will not remain the same if the questioner is different, because no two persons can ask the same question. Their words may be the same, the construction of their questions may be the same, but the meaning cannot be the same – because the sources out of which those questions are arising are different.It is perfectly right to understand that enlightenment and meditation are still not your authentic search. Rather than borrowing those questions from others, look into yourself. Find out your own questions. They may not be very big and great; they may be mundane. Somebody’s girlfriend escapes, somebody’s boyfriend is pretending that he is paralyzed. They may be stupid, they may be absurd, but they will be real and I would like to answer them, because I can destroy them and bring you out of an absurdity, of some mundane situation….Yes, one day it will be possible for you to ask questions of a higher reality – about enlightenment, about meditation, about consciousness, about being, about the ultimate – but they have to come from your innermost core; otherwise answering them is simply wasting not only your time, not only my time, but everybody else’s time unnecessarily.It is perfectly right that you should start asking what is significant to you. Here, nobody is going to laugh at your question, nobody is going to ridicule you, nobody is going to condemn you, because this is a gathering of seekers to help each other – fellow travelers. If somebody falls, all the hands around him should help him to be again on his feet. It is not a question of laughing; it is a question of your love, of your compassion, of your fellowship.A Jewish matron, showing off to her friend at an art gallery, was pointing out the paintings, “That’s a Rembrandt,” she said.“It is a Velasquez, Madam,” corrected the guide.“Then that is a Goya.”“A Rubens, Madam.”“A Turner.”“No, Madam, a Constable.”“Well, that is definitely a Picasso,” she said.“No, Madam, it is a mirror.”Your questions have to be authentically yours, they have to mirror you. Don’t pretend that you know about Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya…just a cheap mirror will do; just look at your own face. Questions should come from your own reality; then they can be dissolved, and you can be put on a journey of transformation.A man stalking through the jungle, hunting wild animals, suddenly stumbles across a beautiful woman lying naked in the forest. She says to him seductively, “I am game,” so he shoots her.People have to behave according to their own understanding. Now that idiot shot the beautiful woman because he understood only one meaning of the word game; his understanding was that of an ignorant hunter. But one cannot do otherwise.You have to act according to your own reality.Even your questioning is a significant act. Don’t borrow your questions; don’t take them from the atmosphere. If everybody else is interested in a certain thing, it does not mean you have to be interested also. This is not a crowd. Here we respect the individual.And that is my message for the new man: that he will be an individual, not a cog in the wheel. He will not belong to any crowd – political, religious, social, racial, national. He will not belong to anyone.He will be alone, standing like a beautiful Himalayan peak in his own individuality. He can have friends, he can have fellow travelers, fellow seekers, but he cannot belong to any ideology – which forces him to be blind, to be a believer, which forces him to toe the line of a certain concept.He will keep himself absolutely free from the crowd; he will not be a sheep, he will be a shepherd. Everyone will be a shepherd – not only Jesus Christ…!

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God is Dead Now Zen is 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

God is Dead Now Zen is 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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On their first meeting, Seigen asked Sekito, “Where do you come from?” and Sekito replied, “I come from Sokei.”Seigen held up a whisk and said, “Did you find this over there?”Sekito replied, “No, not only was it not over there, but it was also not in the Westland.”Seigen asked, “You reached the Westland, didn’t you?” to which Sekito replied, “If I had reached, I could have found it.”Seigen said, “Not yet enough – speak further.”Sekito replied, “You should also speak from your side. How is it you urge only me?”Seigen said, “There’s no problem for me in answering you, but nobody would agree with it.” Seigen continued, “When you were at Sokei, what did you get there?”Sekito replied, “Even before going to Sokei, I hadn’t lost a thing.”Then Sekito asked, “When you were in Sokei, did you know yourself?”Seigen said, “How about you? Do you know me now?”Sekito answered, “Yes, I do. How can I know you any further?” He continued, “Osho, since you left Sokei, how long have you been staying here?”Seigen replied, “I do not know either. And you, when did you leave Sokei?”Sekito said, “I don’t come from Sokei.”Seigen responded, “All right – now I know where you come from.”Sekito said, “Osho, you are a great one – do not waste time.”Friends, a new series of talks begins today: God Is Dead, Now Zen Is the Only Living Truth. The series is dedicated to Friedrich Nietzsche, who was the first man in the history of mankind to declare, “God is dead, therefore man is free.”It was a tremendous statement; its implications are many. First I would like to discuss Nietzsche’s statement.All the religions believe that God created the world and also mankind. But if you are created by someone, you are only a puppet, you don’t have your own soul. And if you are created by somebody, he can uncreate you any moment. He neither asked you whether you wanted to be created, nor is he going to ask you, “Do you want to be uncreated?”God is the greatest dictator if you accept the fiction that he created the world and also created mankind. If God is a reality, then man is a slave, a puppet. All the strings are in his hands, even man’s life. Then there is no question of any enlightenment. Then there is no question of there being any Gautama the Buddha, because there is no freedom at all. He pulls the strings, you dance; he pulls the strings, you cry; he pulls the strings, you start murders, suicide, war. You are just a puppet and he is the puppeteer.Then there is no question of sin or virtue, no question of sinners and saints. Nothing is good and nothing is bad because you are only a puppet. A puppet cannot be responsible for its actions. Responsibility belongs to someone who has the freedom to act. Either God or freedom can exist. Both cannot exist together. That is the basic implication of Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement: “God is dead, therefore man is free.”No theologian, no founder of religions thought about this, that if you accept God as the creator, you are destroying the whole dignity of consciousness, of freedom, of love. You are taking all responsibility from man, and you are taking all his freedom away. You are reducing the whole of existence to just the whim of a strange fellow called God.But Nietzsche’s statement is bound to be only one side of the coin. He is perfectly right, but only about one side of the coin. He has made a very significant and meaningful statement, but he has forgotten one thing, which was bound to happen because his statement is based on rationality, logic and intellect. It is not based on meditation.Man is free, but free for what? If there is no God and man is free, that will simply mean man is now capable of doing anything, good or bad; there is nobody to judge him, nobody to forgive him. This freedom will be simply licentiousness.There comes the other side. You remove God and you leave man utterly empty. Of course, you declare his freedom, but to what purpose? How is he going to use his freedom creatively, responsibly? How is he going to prevent freedom being reduced to licentiousness?Friedrich Nietzsche was not aware of meditation. That is the other side of the coin. Man is free, and his freedom can only be a joy and a blessing to him if he is rooted in meditation. Remove God – that is perfectly okay, he has been the greatest danger to human freedom – but give man also some meaning and significance, some creativity, some receptivity, some path to find his eternal existence. Zen is the other side of the coin.Zen does not have any God, that’s its beauty. But it has a tremendous science to transform your consciousness, to bring so much awareness to you that you cannot commit evil. It is not a commandment from outside. It comes from your innermost being. Once you know your center of being, once you know you are one with the cosmos – and the cosmos has never been created, it has been there always and always, and will be there always and always, from eternity to eternity – once you know your luminous being, your hidden Gautam Buddha, it is impossible to do anything wrong, it is impossible to do anything evil, it is impossible to do any sin.Friedrich Nietzsche became almost insane in the last phase of his life. He was hospitalized, kept in a mad asylum. Nobody bothered about what had happened to such a great giant. He had concluded, “God is dead,” but it is a negative conclusion. He became empty, his freedom was meaningless. There was no joy in it because it was only freedom from God, but for what? Freedom has two sides: from and for. The other side was missing. That drove him insane.Emptiness always drives people insane. You need some grounding, you need some centering, you need some relationship with existence. God being dead, all your relationship with existence is finished. God being dead, you are left alone without roots. A tree cannot live without roots, nor can you.God was nonexistential, but it was a good consolation. It used to fill people’s interior, although it was a lie. But even a lie, repeated thousands and thousands of times for millennia, becomes almost a truth. God has been a great consolation to people in their fear, in their dread, in their awareness of old age and death and the beyond – the unknown darkness. God has been a tremendous consolation, although it was a lie. Lies can console you. You have to understand it. In fact, lies are sweeter than the truth.Gautam Buddha is reported to have said: “Truth is bitter in the beginning, sweet in the end, and lies are sweet in the beginning, bitter in the end” – when they are exposed. Then comes a tremendous bitterness, that you have been deceived by all your parents, by all your teachers, by all your priests, by all your so-called leaders. You have been continuously deceived. That frustration brings a great distrust in everybody. “Nobody is worthy of trust.” It creates a vacuum.So Nietzsche was not insane in this last phase of his life, it was the very conclusion of his negative approach. An intellect can only be negative, it can argue and criticize and be sarcastic, but it cannot give you any nourishment. Nietzsche could get no nourishment from a negative standpoint, so he lost his God and he lost his consolation. He became free just to be mad.And it is not only Friedrich Nietzsche, so it cannot be said that it was just an accident. Many intellectual giants find themselves in mad asylums or commit suicide because nobody can live in a negative darkness. One needs light and a positive, affirmative experience of truth. Nietzsche demolished the lie and created a vacuum in himself and in others who followed him.If deep down you feel a vacuum, utter emptiness with no meaning, it is because of Friedrich Nietzsche. A whole philosophy has grown in the West. Nietzsche is the founder of a very negative approach to life.Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre and Marcel, Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger – all the great giants of the first half of the twentieth century – were talking only about meaninglessness, anguish, suffering, anxiety, dread, fear, angst. In the West, this philosophy has been called existentialism. It is not. It is simply nonexistentialism. It destroys everything that has consoled you.I agree with the destruction because what was consoling man were only lies. God, heaven, hell – all were fictions created to console man. It is good they are destroyed, but you are leaving man in an utter vacuum. Out of that vacuum existentialism is born, that’s why it talks only about meaninglessness: “Life has no meaning.” It talks about no significance: “You are just an accident. Whether you are here or not does not matter at all to existence.” And these people call their philosophy existentialism. They should call it accidentalism. You are not needed; just by accident, on the margin, somehow you have popped up. God was making you a puppet, and these philosophers from Nietzsche to Jean-Paul Sartre are making you accidental.And there is a tremendous need in man’s being to be related to existence. He needs roots in existence, because only when the roots go deep into existence will he blossom into a buddha, will he blossom into millions of flowers, will his life not be meaningless. Then his life will be tremendously overflowing with meaning, significance, blissfulness; his life will be simply a celebration. But the conclusion of the so-called existentialists is that you are unnecessary, that your life has no meaning, no significance. Existence is not in need of you at all.So I want to complete Friedrich Nietzsche’s work; it is incomplete. It will lead the whole of humanity to madness – not only Friedrich Nietzsche, but the whole of humanity. Without God, you are certainly free – but for what? You are left with empty hands. You had empty hands before also, because the hands that looked full were full of lies. Now you are absolutely aware that the hands are empty and there is nowhere to go.I have heard about a very famous atheist. He died, and his wife brought the best clothes, best shoes, before he was put in the coffin – the best tie, the costliest possible. She wanted to give him a good farewell, a good send-off. He was dressed as he had never dressed in his whole life.And then friends came, and neighbors came. And one woman said, “Wow! He’s all dressed up and nowhere to go!”Because he was an atheist: he did not believe in God, he did not believe in heaven, he did not believe in hell. Nowhere to go, and completely well-dressed! But this is the situation any negative philosophy is going to leave the whole of mankind in: well-dressed, ready to go, but nowhere to go. This situation creates insanity.It was not an accident that Friedrich Nietzsche became insane, it was the outcome of his negative philosophy. Hence, I call this series, God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth.I absolutely agree with Friedrich Nietzsche as far as God is concerned, but I want to complete his statement, which he could not do. He was not an awakened being, he was not an enlightened being.Gautam Buddha also does not have a God, nor does Mahavira have a God, but they never went mad. All the Zen masters and all the great Tao masters – Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu – nobody went mad, and they don’t have any God. They don’t have any hell or heaven. What is the difference? Why did Gautam Buddha not go mad? And it is not only Gautam Buddha. In twenty-five centuries hundreds of his people have become enlightened, and they don’t even talk about God. They don’t even say that there is no God because there is no point. They are not atheists. I am not an atheist, neither am I a theist. God simply is not there, so there is no question of atheism or theism.But I am not mad. You are my witnesses. It does not create a vacuum in me; on the contrary, there being no God, I have gained the dignity of an individual who is free – free to become a buddha. That is the ultimate goal of freedom. Unless your freedom becomes your very flowering of awareness, and the experience of freedom leads you into eternity, leads you into the roots, into the cosmos and existence, you are going to be mad. Your life will be meaningless, with no significance. Whatever you do does not matter.Existence, according to the so-called existentialists who are all following Friedrich Nietzsche, the founder, is absolutely unintelligent. They have taken away God, so they think – according to their logic it seems apparently true – that if there is no God, existence also becomes dead, with no intelligence, with no life. God used to be the life, God used to be the consciousness; God used to be the very meaning, the very salt of our being. When God is no longer there, this whole existence becomes soulless, life becomes just a by-product of matter. So when you die, everything will die, nothing will remain. And there is no question of being good or bad. Existence is absolutely indifferent, it does not care about you. God used to care about you. Once God is removed, a great strangeness starts happening between you and existence. There is no relationship, existence does not care, cannot care because it is not conscious anymore. It is no longer an intelligent universe, it is simply dead matter, just as you are. And the life that you know is only a by-product.A by-product disappears immediately when the elements that were creating it separate. For example, some religions believe that man is made of five elements: earth, air, fire, water, sky. Once these five elements are together, life is produced as a by-product. When these five elements separate in death, life disappears.To make it clear to you…In the beginning when you learn to ride a bicycle, you fall many times. I have also learned, but I did not fall while learning because first I watched the learners – and why they fall. They fall because they don’t have confidence. To be on two wheels you need tremendous balance, and if you hesitate… It is just like walking on a tightrope. If you hesitate, just for a moment, those two wheels cannot keep you up on your seat. And those two wheels can remain in balance only at a certain speed, and the learner is bound to move slowly. Obviously, it seems to be rational if you are a learner, you should not go with great speed.I watched all my friends learning to bicycle, and they always said, “Why don’t you learn?”I said, “I am watching first. I am watching why you fall, and why after a few days you stop falling.”And once I got the point, the first time I went as fast as possible! All my friends were puzzled. They said, “We have never seen a learner go that fast. A learner is bound to fall a few times, then he learns how to balance.”I said, “I have been watching and I got the clue. The clue is you are not confident, not alert that a certain speed is needed to keep the bicycle moving. You cannot stop it and sit on top of it without falling, a certain momentum is needed. So you have to go on pedaling.”Once I knew exactly what the problem was, I simply went so fast that my whole village wondered, “What will happen to him because he does not know…and he is going with such speed!”It was difficult for me to stop because I was concerned that if I stopped, the cycle was going to fall. So I had to go to a place where there was a huge bodhi tree near the railway station, almost three miles from my house. For three miles I rushed so fast that people gave way, stood aside. They said, “This is absolute madness!”But my madness had a method in it. I was going directly to that tree because I knew it had become hollow. So I rode my bicycle into the hollow tree so that the front wheel was inside the tree. Then I could stop, there was no problem of falling.One villager who was working in his field saw this. He asked me, “This is strange. If there is no tree like this one, how are you going to stop?”I said, “Now I have learned how to stop, because I just did it; I will not need a tree anymore. But this was my first experience. I had not seen those people stopping, I had seen them falling. I had no experience of stopping, that’s why I was racing so fast to reach the bodhi tree.” One part of it had become completely hollow, and it was a huge tree so I knew that that would be the right place to put my wheel inside for the tree to hold it.But once I had stopped, I had learned how to stop.When it came to learning to drive… Majid will be surprised that the name of the man who was teaching me driving was also Majid. He was a Mohammedan. He was one of the best drivers in the city, and he loved me very much. In fact, he chose my first car. So he told me, “I will teach you.”I said, “I don’t like to be taught. Just drive slowly so I can see and watch.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “I learn only by watching. I don’t want any teacher – ever!”He said, “But it is dangerous. A bicycle was okay. At the most you could have hurt yourself or somebody else – but not much. But a car is a dangerous thing.”I said, “I am a dangerous man. Just drive slowly and tell me everything about where is the pedal, where is the accelerator, where is the brake. Just tell me. And then slowly move, and I will be walking by your side, just watching what you are doing.”He said, “If you want it this way, I can do it, but I am very much afraid. If you do the same thing with the car as you have done with the bicycle…”I said, “That’s why I am trying to watch more closely.”And once I got the idea I told him to get out. And I really did the same thing as I had done with the bicycle. I went so fast, and Majid, my teacher, was running behind me, shouting, “Not that fast!” But I knew: once I know it… And in that city there were no limits on speed. On Indian streets you cannot go beyond fifty-five. There is no need to put a board in each place that the speed limit is fifty-five miles per hour. You cannot go above fifty-five anyway.But that poor fellow was very much afraid. He came running… He used to participate in races. He was a champion of the state, and there was every possibility that he would become the champion of the whole of India, and perhaps someday he would have participated in the Olympics. He was a very tall man, perhaps seven feet, with long legs. He tried hard to follow me, but soon I disappeared from his vision.When I came back, he was praying – he was a Mohammedan – under a tree, praying to God for my safety. And when I stopped by his side – so close that he jumped, he forgot all about the prayer – I said, “Don’t be worried. I have learned the whole thing. What were you doing here?”He said, “I followed you, but soon you disappeared. Then I thought, ‘The only thing is to pray to God to help him, because he knows nothing about driving. He is sitting in the driver’s seat for the first time, and he has gone nobody knows where.’ How did you turn? Where did you turn back?”I said, “I had no idea how to turn because you were just moving straight and I was walking by your side. I had no idea, so I had to go around the city. I had no idea how to turn, what signals to give, because you had not given me any signals. But I managed. I went around the whole city so fast that the traffic simply gave way. And I came back.”And he said, “Khuda hafiz.” It means, “God saved you.”I said, “Don’t bring God in.”Once you know that a certain balance is needed between the negative and the positive, then you have your roots in existence. It is one extreme to believe in God. It is another extreme not to believe in God. You have to be just in the middle, absolutely balanced.Atheism becomes irrelevant, theism becomes irrelevant. But your balancing brings a new light, a new joy, a new blissfulness to you, a new intelligence which is not of the mind. That intelligence which is not of the mind makes you aware that the whole existence is tremendously intelligent. It is not only alive, it has sensitivity, it has intelligence.Once you know your inner being is balanced and silent and peaceful, suddenly doors that have been closed by your thoughts simply open, and the whole existence becomes clear to you. You are not accidental. Existence needs you. Without you, something will be missing in existence and nobody can replace it.That’s what gives you dignity, that the whole existence will miss you. The stars and sun and moon; the trees, the birds the earth – everything in the universe will feel a small place is vacant which cannot be filled by anybody except you. This gives you a tremendous joy, a fulfillment that you are related to existence and existence cares for you. Once you are clean and clear, you can see tremendous love falling on you from all dimensions.You are the highest evolution of existence, intelligence, and it is dependent on you. If you grow higher than the mind and its intelligence, toward no-mind and its intelligence, existence is going to celebrate: one man has again reached to the ultimate peak; one part of existence has suddenly risen to the highest possibilities of the intrinsic potential in everybody.There is a parable that the day Gautam Buddha became enlightened, the tree under which he had become enlightened, suddenly started moving without any wind. He was amazed because there was no wind, no other tree around was moving, not even a single leaf was moving. But the tree under which he was sitting was moving as if it was dancing. It does not have legs, it is so rooted in the earth, but it can at least show its joy.It is a very strange phenomenon that certain chemicals which make you intelligent, which give you a better mind, are found in the bodhi tree in greater amounts than in any other tree. So it is not just a coincidence that the tree under which Gautam Buddha became enlightened is still called according to his name. Bodhi means enlightenment. And scientists have found that the tree has more intelligence than any other tree in the world. It has that chemical in such overflow.When Manjushree, one of Gautam Buddha’s closest disciples, became enlightened, the story is that the tree under which he was sitting suddenly started showering flowers – and it was not the season for the tree to bring forth flowers.It may be just a parable. But these parables indicate that we are not separate from existence, that our joy will be shared even by the trees, even by the rocks, that our enlightenment will be a festival for the whole of existence.It is meditation that fulfills your inner being and takes away the vacuum that used to be filled by a great lie – God. And many lies have grown around him.If you remain with the negative, you are going to be insane sooner or later because you have lost all contact with existence, you have lost every meaning, every possibility of finding meaning. You have certainly dropped lies, which is good, but that is not enough to find the truth.Drop the lies and make some effort to go inward to find the truth. That is the whole science of Zen. That’s why I have entitled the series, God Is Dead, Now Zen Is the Only Living Truth. If God is dead and you don’t come close to the experience of Zen, you will become insane. Your sanity depends now only on Zen; that is the only way to find the truth. Then you are absolutely related with existence and you are no longer a puppet, you are a master.And a man who knows his relation, his deep relation with existence, cannot commit anything against existence, against life. It is simply impossible. He can only pour as much blissfulness, as much benediction, as much grace as you are ready to receive. But his sources are inexhaustible. When you have found your inexhaustible sources of life and its ecstasy, then it does not matter whether you have a God or not. It does not matter whether there is a hell or a heaven. It does not matter at all.So, when religious people read Zen, they are simply puzzled because it is not talking about anything they have been taught from the very beginning. It is talking about strange dialogues which have nothing – no place for God, no place for paradise, no place for hell. It is a scientific religion. Its search is not based on belief; its search is based on experience. Just as science is objectively based on experiment, Zen is based subjectively on experience. One science goes outward, another science goes inward.Nietzsche has no idea how to go inward. The West has been a wrong place for people like Friedrich Nietzsche. If he had been in the East, he would have been a far greater master, a man of absolute sanity. He would have been in the same category, in the same family, as the buddhas.But unfortunately the West has not learned the lesson even now. It goes on working so hard on the objects. Even one tenth of our energy will be enough to find the inner truth.Even an Albert Einstein dies in deep frustration… The frustration was so great that before he died he was asked, “If you are born again, what are you going to be?”He said, “Never again a physicist. Rather, I would like to be a plumber.”The greatest physicist the world has known dies in such frustration that he does not want anything to do with physics, anything to do with science. He wants a simple job, just like a plumber.But even that is not going to help. If physics has not helped, if mathematics has not helped, if such a great intelligence as Albert Einstein dies in frustration, being a plumber is not going to help. Still you are outside. A scientist may be too deeply involved, a plumber may not be that much involved, but he is still working outside. Being a plumber is not going to give him what he needs. He needs the silence of meditation. From that silence flowers meaning, significance, a tremendous joy that you are not accidental.I say to you that what I am teaching you is authentic existentialism, and what in the West is thought to be existentialism is only accidentalism. I am teaching you how to come in contact with existence, how to find out where you are connected, wired with existence. From where are you getting your life moment to moment? From where is your intelligence coming? If existence is unintelligent, how can you be intelligent? Where will you get it from?When you see the roseflowers blossoming, have you ever thought that all this color, all this softness, all this beauty was hidden somewhere in the seed? But the seed alone was not enough to become a rose; it needed the support of existence – that is the soil, the water, the sun. Then the seed disappeared into the soil and the rosebush started growing. Now it needs air, it needs water, it needs the earth, it needs the sun, it needs the moon. All these together transform the seed which was almost like a dead piece of stone. Suddenly, a transformation, a metamorphosis.These roses: these colors, this beauty, this fragrance, cannot come from them unless existence has them already. It may be hidden, it may be covered in a seed, but anything that happens means it was there already, maybe as a potential.You have intelligence…I have told you the story of Ramakrishna and Keshav Chandra Sen. Keshav Chandra was one of the most intelligent people of his time. He founded a religion just on his intellectual philosophy, Brahma Samaj, “The Society for God.” He had hundreds and thousands of intelligent people, a very intelligent group, as his followers. And he was puzzled that this uneducated Ramakrishna, who had not even completed the primary school… In India, primary school, that is the lowest school, is for four years, and he has done only two years, only half. Why were thousands of people going to this idiot? That was what was in Keshav Chandra Sen’s mind.Finally he decided he had to go and defeat this man – because he could not think that this man would be able not to be defeated by argument. It was impossible for Keshav Chandra’s mind to think of that. “This idiot from a small village is collecting thousands of people every day! From far and wide people are coming to see him and touch his feet.”Keshav Chandra and his followers informed Ramakrishna: “I am coming on such and such a day to challenge you on every point in which you believe. Be ready!”Ramakrishna’s followers were very much afraid. They knew Keshav Chandra was a great logician: poor Ramakrishna would not be able to answer anything. But Ramakrishna was very joyful. He danced. He said, “I have been waiting all this time. When Keshav Chandra comes, that will be a day of great joy.”His disciples said, “What are you saying? That will be a day of great sadness because you cannot argue with him.”Ramakrishna said, “Wait! Who is going to argue with him? I don’t need to argue. Let him come!”But his disciples were shaky, very shaky, very much afraid that their master was going to be defeated, completely crushed. They knew Keshav Chandra. In that century, there was no parallel to Keshav Chandra’s intelligence in this country.And Keshav Chandra came, with one hundred of his topmost disciples to see the argument, the debate, the challenge. And when Keshav Chandra came, Ramakrishna was standing on the road to receive him, far away from the temple where he used to live. He hugged Keshav Chandra. Keshav Chandra felt a little embarrassed, and that embarrassment went on growing.Ramakrishna took Keshav Chandra’s hand in his hand and took him inside. He said, “I have been waiting and waiting for years. Why did you not come before?”Keshav Chandra thought, “He seems to be a strange man, seems not to be afraid at all.” He said, “Do you understand? I have come here for a discussion.”Ramakrishna said, “Of course.”So they sat near the temple by the side of the Ganges, a beautiful place under a tree.And Ramakrishna said, “Start!”So Keshav Chandra asked him, “What do you say about God?”Ramakrishna said, “Have I to say anything about God? Can’t you see God in my eyes?”Keshav Chandra looked a little puzzled. “What kind of argument is this?”And Ramakrishna said, “Can’t you feel God in my hand? Come closer, boy.”And Keshav Chandra said, “What kind of argument…?”He had been in many debates, he had defeated many great scholars, and this villager… In Hindi the word for idiot is ganwar, but it actually means the villager. Gaon means village, and ganwar means from the village. But ganwar is used as stupid, retarded, idiot.Ramakrishna said, “If you cannot understand the language of my eyes, if you cannot understand the energy of my hand, then you are enough of a proof that existence is intelligent. From where have you got your intelligence?”This was a grand argument. He was saying, “If you have got this great intelligence – and I know you are a great, intelligent person, I have always loved you – tell me from where it comes. If existence is without intelligence, you cannot get it – from where? You are the proof that existence is intelligent, and that is what I mean by God. To me, God is not somebody sitting on a cloud. To me, God simply means existence is not unintelligent. It is an intelligent universe, and we belong and we are needed. It rejoices in our rejoicings, it celebrates our celebrations, it dances with our dance. Have you seen my dance?” And he started dancing.Keshav Chandra said, “What to do!”But he danced so beautifully. He was a good dancer, because he used to dance in the temple sometimes from morning till evening – no coffee break! He would dance and dance till he fell on the ground.So he started dancing with such joy and such grace that suddenly there was a transformation in Keshav Chandra. He forgot all his logic. He saw the beauty of this man, he saw the splendor of this man, he saw a joy which he had never felt.All that intellect, all those arguments were just superficial. Inside there was utter emptiness. This man was so overflowing. He touched the feet of Ramakrishna and said, “Forgive me. I was absolutely wrong about you. I know nothing, and I have been just philosophizing. You know everything, and you are not saying a single word.”Ramakrishna said, “I will forgive you only on one condition.”Keshav Chandra said, “Any condition from your side. I am ready.”Ramakrishna said, “The condition is that once in a while you have to come to discuss with me, to debate with me, to challenge me.”This is the way of a mystic.Keshav Chandra was completely finished. He became a totally different man; he started to come every day. Soon his disciples deserted him: “He has gone mad. That madman infected him so much. There was only one madman, now there are two. He is also dancing with him!”But Keshav Chandra, who had been a sad man – grudging, complaining about everything because he was living in a negative space –suddenly blossomed. Flowers came to his being, a new fragrance. He forgot all logic. This man helped him have a taste of something that is beyond mind.Zen is the method to go beyond mind. So we will be discussing God and Zen together. God has to be negated, and Zen has to be planted the deepest in your being. The lie has to be destroyed and the truth has to be revealed. That’s why I have chosen God and Zen together. God is a lie, Zen is a truth.The first question:Osho,Is God really dead? The very idea of his death creates intense anxiety, fear, dread, and anguish.The way I look at things, God has never been there, so how can he be dead? He was never born in the first place.It was invented by the priests, and it was invented for exactly these reasons: because man was in anxiety, man was in fear, man was in dread, man was in anguish. When there was no light, no fire – just think of those days of humanity – with wild animals all around, and the dark night, the intense cold, no clothes, and the wild animals searching for their food in the night, and people were hiding in their caves, sitting on the trees just to avoid them. In the day, at least they could see that a lion was approaching, they could make some effort to escape. But in the night, they were completely in the hands of the wild animals.And then they found that a time comes… People become old for no reason, and one day somebody dies. They could not understand what was happening. This man was talking, breathing, walking, was perfectly okay. Suddenly he was no longer breathing, he was no longer talking. It was such a shock to the primitive man that death became a taboo: don’t talk about it. Even talking about it created fear, fear that sooner or later you would be standing in the same queue – and the queue is becoming smaller and smaller every moment. Somebody dies and you come closer to death; another dies, you come even closer to death.Even to talk about death became a taboo, and not only to ordinary primitive people, even to the most sophisticated. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, could not tolerate the word death. No one was allowed to mention the word in front of him, because just the mention of the word death and he would fall into a fit, he would become unconscious and start foaming. Such was the fear of the man who founded psychoanalysis.Once Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, another great psychoanalyst, were traveling together from Europe to America to deliver lectures on psychoanalysis to many universities. And on the deck of the ship, Carl Gustav Jung mentioned death. Immediately Sigmund Freud fell on the ground.And that was the reason Sigmund Freud expelled Jung from the psychoanalytic movement and he had to found another school. He called it analytical psychology. Just a different name, but it is the same process. But the reason for his expulsion was the mention of death.Two things have been taboos in the world, and those two things are two polarities of the same energy. One is sex, which has been taboo, “Don’t talk about it,” another is death which is taboo, “Don’t talk about it.” And both are connected: in the beginning is sex, in the end is death. It is sex that brings death in.Only one animal does not die, that is the amoeba. And you know that perfectly well because Pune is so full of amoebas. I have chosen this place specially because amoebas are immortal beings. And their immortality depends on the fact that they are not sexual beings; they are not the by-product of sex, so there is no death. Sex and death are absolutely connected. Just try to understand.Sex brings you into life, and life finally ends in death. Sex is the beginning, death is the end. In between is what you call life.The amoeba is a non-sexual animal, the only celibate monk in the whole world. It reproduces in a very different way. God must be immensely happy, if he’s there, with the amoebas. They are all saints. They simply go on eating and becoming fatter and fatter, and at a certain point they divide into two. When one amoeba becomes so fat that it becomes impossible for him to move he divides in two.This is a different way of reproduction. But because there is no sex involved, there is no male, no female. Both the amoebas start eating again. Soon they will be fat enough to divide again. So they create by a very mathematical method. There is no death. An amoeba never dies – unless murdered. He can live from eternity to eternity if medical science does not murder him. But their immortality is because they are not the by-product of sex. Any animal which is born of sex is going to die, he cannot be immortal in the body.So these two things have been taboos in the world: sex and death. Both have been kept hidden.Nobody talks about sex. I have been condemned all around the world, simply because I talk about every taboo without any inhibition, because I want you to know everything about life from sex to death. Only then can you rise beyond sex and death. In your understanding you can start approaching something which is beyond sex and beyond death. That is your eternity, that is your life energy, pure energy.By sex your body is born, not you. By death your body dies, not you. So it is absolutely unnecessary to make those taboos. Religions have a great investment in creating anxiety, fear, dread and anguish in you. And nature was already producing it.Religions, and particularly the priests all over the world, whatever their denomination, have exploited man’s fear, have given him God – a fiction, a lie, but at least it temporarily covers the wound. “Don’t be afraid, God is taking care of you. Don’t be in any dread or anxiety, there is God, and everything is okay. All that you have to do is believe in God and believe in the representative of God, the priest, and believe in the holy scripture that God has sent to the world. All that you have to do is to believe.” And this belief has been covering your anxiety, fear, dread, anguish.So when you hear that God is dead, the very idea of his death creates intense anxiety. That means your wound has been uncovered. But a covered wound is not a healed wound. In fact, for the healing process it has to be uncovered. Only then, in the sun’s rays, in the open air, will it start healing. A wound should never be covered because in covering it you start forgetting about it. You want to forget about it. Once it is covered, not only do others not see it, you yourself don’t see it. And under the cover it goes on becoming a cancer.Every wound has to be healed, not covered. Covering is not the way. God was the cover, that’s why the very concept that God is dead creates fear. Whatever comes to your mind – intense anxiety, fear, dread, and anguish – these were the things the priests were covering with the word God. But by their covering, they have stopped man’s evolution toward buddhahood, they have stopped man’s healing process, they have stopped man’s search for truth. A lie was handed to you as truth. Naturally you need not search for truth, you have it already.It is absolutely necessary that God should be dead. But I want you to know my understanding. It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead. I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction.Certainly it has given consolation, but consolation is not the right thing. Consolation is opium. It keeps you unaware of the reality, and life is flowing past you so quickly – seventy years will be gone soon.Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes: you cannot see the truth. The very desire to find the truth disappears.But if all the belief systems are taken away from you, in the beginning it is certainly bitter. I know that the fear and anxiety which you have been suppressing for millennia but which are there, very alive, will surface immediately. No God can destroy them. Only the search for truth and the experience of truth – not a belief – is capable of healing all your wounds, of making you a whole being. And the whole person is the holy person to me.If God is removed and you start feeling fear and dread, and anxiety and anguish, that simply indicates God was not the medicine. It was just a trick to keep your eyes closed. It was a blinding strategy to keep you in darkness, and to keep you hoping that beyond death there is paradise. Why beyond death? It is because you are afraid of death, so the priest creates a paradise beyond death just to take away your fear. But it is not taken away, it is only repressed in your unconscious. And the deeper it is repressed the more difficult it is to get rid of it.So I want to destroy all your belief systems, all your theologies, all your religions. I want to open all your wounds so they can be healed. The real medicine is not a belief system; the real medicine is meditation.Do you know that both the words come from the same root: medicine and meditation? Medicine heals the body, meditation heals your soul. But their function is the same – healing.Once you drop God, you are certainly free. But in this freedom you will be filled with anxiety, fear, dread, anguish. Unless you start moving inward to find your authentic being, your original face, your buddha, you will be trembling, your whole life will be destroyed. You may become insane the way Friedrich Nietzsche became insane.And he is not the only person who became insane. There are many philosophers who have committed suicide because they found there is nothing in life, and they never looked inward. Because they found there is no meaning, no sense, “Why go on living?”One of the great novels, perhaps the greatest novel in all the languages, is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s, The Brothers Karamazov. It is far more important to read than the holy Bible, or holy Koran, or holy Gita, or all three combined. The Brothers Karamazov has such a deep insight into everything. But Fyodor Dostoevsky went mad.He created the greatest novels in the world, but he himself lived a very miserable, very sad, very afraid life. He was not a man of joy, but he had tremendous intellectual insight into every problem that man is bound to face. He has tackled all the problems. The Brothers Karamazov is such a big novel that nowadays nobody reads it; people like just to watch the television. It is perhaps nearabout one thousand pages – and with intense argument.The youngest brother – there are three brothers – is very pious, believing, God-fearing. He wants to become a monk and move to a monastery. The second brother is absolutely against God, absolutely against religion, and in a discussion with his younger brother they are continuously discussing all these problems. He says, “If I ever meet God, the first thing I am going to do is to give him the ticket back, and tell him, ‘Keep it. I don’t want your life. It is meaningless. Just show me the way out. I don’t want to be in the world. I just want to get out of existence; death seems to me to be more peaceful than your so-called life. Just take the ticket back. I don’t want to travel in this train. And you never asked me. It is against me, you have forced me on this train, and now I am suffering unnecessarily. I had no freedom of choice. Why did you give me birth?’”That’s what he says he is going to ask if he meets God: “On what grounds did you give me birth? Without my permission you created me. Now this is perfect slavery. And, without asking me, one day you will kill me. You have planted every kind of sickness in me, you have planted every kind of sin in me. I am condemned, and you are the reason.”Who has planted sex in you? It must be God, who created man and who told Adam and Eve to go into the world and multiply: “Create as many children as you can.” Obviously he has made them sexual, and he created the couple.Ivan Karamazov, the atheist brother, says, “If I find him…” and who knows, he may still be living and Friedrich Nietzsche may be wrong, “…then I am going to kill him. I will be the first to make the whole of humanity free from this dictator who on the one hand implants sex, violence, anger, greed, ambition – all kinds of poisons – in man, and on the other hand, his representatives go on hammering you that, ‘Sex is sin, you should be celibate.’ Strange!”George Gurdjieff used to say, “All religions are against God.” There is meaning in his statement. He was not a man to make any statement without a deep, intense understanding. When he says all religions are against God, he is saying God gives you sex and religions teach you celibacy. What do they mean? God gives you greed and religions teach you no greed. God gives you violence and religions teach you no violence. God gives you anger and religions say no anger. It is such a clear-cut argument, that all religions are against God.Ivan Karamazov said, “If I meet him anywhere I am going to kill him, but before killing him I am going to ask all these questions.”The whole novel is a tremendous argument. The third brother is not their real brother. He is born of a woman who was not the wife of their father, who was only a servant. So the third brother is kept almost out of the eyes of society, so he remains retarded. He is almost like an animal: he eats, drinks, and lives in a dark place in the vast palace of the Karamazovs. Certainly his life is absolutely meaningless.And Ivan Karamazov said, “Think about our cousin-brother, illegitimate, who God also created. What is the meaning of his life? He cannot even come out in the sun, in the air. Our father keeps him shut in darkness. Nobody ever comes to see him, nobody ever comes to greet him. Nobody is his friend in this whole earth. He knows nobody else. He cannot speak well because he has never spoken to anybody. His whole life is just like an animal: eating, drinking, sleeping; eating, drinking, sleeping… He will never know any woman, he will never know any love. What will happen to his sex instinct?”It is a very intense argument about all the problems human beings will face, any intelligent man is going to face. Ivan is bringing all those problems: “What do you say? What does your God say about my cousin-brother? What is his meaning? Why has he created him this way? If anybody is responsible, he is responsible, and I am going to take revenge. Just let me find him! And I hope,” Ivan Karamazov says, “that Nietzsche is not right, that he is not dead. Otherwise I will miss the chance to murder him. I want to murder him so that the whole of humanity becomes freed from him.”But once you make humanity free, freedom for what? For fear? For death? For suicide? For murder? For theft? Freedom for what?One of the existentialist novels says that a young man is brought before a court because he has killed a stranger on the beach. He has not even seen his face. The stranger was sitting looking at the sunset and this man came from behind, pushed a knife into his back and killed him. And he has not seen who he was.It was a very strange case. You don’t kill like that unless you have some enmity, some anger, some revengefulness. But they were not even known to each other, they were not even friends. You can kill friends – and friends are killing each other – but he was not even a friend, what to say about an enemy, because you can make somebody an enemy only if you make him first your friend. That step is necessary: first friend, then enemy. You cannot make somebody an enemy directly. Some acquaintance, some friendship is needed to become an enemy.The court was at a loss. The judge asked the man, “Why did you kill a stranger whose face you had not seen, whose name you did not know?”The man said, “It does not matter. I was feeling so bored I wanted to do something, something that would get my photograph in all the newspapers. It has come; I feel a little less bored. And anyway there is no meaning in life. What was that idiot doing? What was he going to do if I had not killed him? Just repeat the same things that he has done already many times. So what is the fuss? Why have I been brought into the court?”The magistrate seems absolutely puzzled. There is no eyewitness except this man himself who says, “I have killed that man, but without witnesses you cannot punish me. I may be lying – who knows? – but there are no witnesses.”Then circumstantial witnesses are brought into the court. One neighbor said, “This man is strange. His mother died on a Sunday, and when he was informed he said, ‘I always knew that woman would only create trouble. On Sunday – it is a holiday! Couldn’t she die on Saturday or Friday? But I knew perfectly well from the very beginning that that woman, who has been a torture my whole life, was going to destroy one of my holidays. And it has come true.’” And when asked, “Why are you feeling so angry?” he said, “I am feeling angry because I have purchased two tickets, one for my girlfriend and one for myself, and we were going to the movies, and this woman could have died any other day. What is the point of dying on a Sunday? I don’t understand at all. But I know her mind.”Another man came and said, “He buried his mother and then he was dancing in a disco that very evening with a very young, beautiful woman. And when asked, ‘Your mother has died just this morning. It does not look right that you should dance in the evening in the disco,’ he said, ‘What do you mean? Now every time I will dance it will be after the death of my mother, so what does it matter whether it is twelve hours, six hours, twelve days, fifteen days, five years? It will always be after the death of my mother. So when I look at the facts, do you want me never to dance because my mother has died?’”He is absolutely logical, but inhuman.So these witnesses went on saying about him: “This man is strange. He can do anything, without relevance.”But the man said, “I don’t see any relevance in life itself. What is the crime in killing a man? I am simply freeing him from bondage. I am not committing a sin, I am not committing a crime. I am simply helping a man who was too cowardly to commit suicide.”A negative philosophy will bring these results. A negative philosophy basically will lead humanity into madness, and its ultimate conclusion can only be to commit suicide.A great negative philosopher of Greece, Zeno, actually preached his whole life that suicide is the only way out. And you will be surprised, thousands of his disciples committed suicide because he was a very convincing man.And he lived up to the age of ninety. When asked, just before his death, “It is a very strange thing, thousands of young people have committed suicide because of your philosophizing: ‘Life is meaningless, of no significance. It is cowardice that people are living. They cannot gather courage enough to take a jump and be finished. Don’t be a coward. Only suicide can prove that you are not a coward.’”He was very convincing. It seems convincing if somebody says to you, “Only suicide can prove that you are not a coward; otherwise what is the point of living? What have you done up to now? You have lived half of life. What is the result? What is the outcome? You will live the same way the remaining half, and will die like an animal. At least have the dignity to commit suicide!”That man was saying that birth was not in your hands, but at least don’t let death also be your master. Be master of your death, commit suicide! His arguments are very profound. He was saying, “You were helpless as far as birth was concerned. You could not do anything, it had to happen. But about death there is a possibility: either you die like an animal, or you commit suicide like a man. Suicide gives the dignity to man that he is free to choose his death.” And he convinced many young people and they committed suicide.Just before he died, at the last moment, somebody asked him, “Thousands of people have committed suicide according to your philosophizing and argumentation, why have you not committed suicide? Why have you lived a long life? You are ninety.”The man said, “I had to live, just to teach my philosophy. It was a burden, but out of compassion I had to live. Otherwise, who was going to teach it? The only right approach toward life is death. I have suffered my whole life. You call me long-living: I have suffered my whole life, I have dropped my own dignity by not committing suicide because I had to take care of my fellow citizens, particularly my disciples. Now I am perfectly happy that they have all committed suicide. Now I can die in peace, I have done my work.”Negative philosophy is going to bring such conclusions. Zen is the only living alternative, positive alternative, because it gives you a sense of direction, a sense of fulfillment, a sense of eternity, and a sense of going beyond birth, death, body, and being one with this beautiful existence which is immensely intelligent.The second question:Osho,Is it possible for man to live without God?Yes. In fact, it is only possible for man to live without God. A man with God does not live, he hesitates on every point of living, he is just half-hearted.He is making love and worried about hell. Now, how can he love a woman when the Bible goes on saying that the woman is the gateway to hell? And he is making love, and he is thinking about the Bible and the sermon on Sunday that says: “The woman is the gateway to hell. What are you doing?” So neither can he love, nor can he live without love. God has put man in a very schizophrenic state, half-hearted in everything.You are earning money, and on the other hand you know that it is a sin, you are greedy. If you don’t earn money you are starving, and the whole nature makes starvation repellent to you, forces you to earn something to feed yourself. Nature pulls one way, God and his representative pull you the other way. You are in a strange position.In Hindi we have a beautiful proverb. In India donkeys are used by the washerman to carry clothes to the river. And then, after washing, he again puts the clothes on the donkey and takes them to every house from where he has collected them in the morning. So the proverb is: “Your life is just like a washerman’s donkey.” Neither is he ever at the house nor ever at the river: always in between, going from the house to the river, going from the river to the house.“The washerman’s donkey” simply means schizophrenia. You are always half in every act, but because the whole humanity is schizophrenic you don’t realize it. You love, but you hate the same person you love. Who has created this hate? Because this is the woman you love, and this woman is going to be the gateway to hell, you are bound to hate her too. So you love and you hate. You make friends in the evening; by the morning you become enemies. You go on moving away and you go on coming together. This goes on continuously – the washerman’s donkey.You are asking, “Is it possible for man to live without God?” It is only possible to live totally, to live meditatively, to live fully without God.Sigmund Freud’s statement is worth remembering. He worked on sex his whole life because “sex was the root of all the problems.” But he never understood that it is not sex that is the problem, it is the suppression of sex that is the problem. The priest is the problem, the God is the problem, the holy scriptures are the problem. Sex is not the problem.Sex is such a simple thing. All the animals are enjoying sex, and none of them goes to the psychoanalyst’s couch. I have never met any animal going to the psychiatrist because he is feeling schizophrenic. They are all living and enjoying. There is no problem.The pagans lived very joyously before religions, particularly Christianity, destroyed them from the earth. They had no idea of any sin. They loved women, they danced, they drank, they played music. Their whole life was sheer joy.Sigmund Freud has one statement which I was going to tell you: “The priests cannot destroy sex.” But they have succeeded in poisoning it. They could not succeed in destroying sex, otherwise there would have been no humanity. Sex is there, but they have destroyed the joy in it, they have made it a great sin. So you are committing the sin, and you think the woman is the cause.The reality is totally different: it is God. But God is only a fiction so he cannot do anything. The priest is the representative, is the spokesman of God – who goes on creating all kinds of guilt feelings in you. Those guilt feelings don’t allow you to live: everything is wrong, everything is a sin.So to your question, “Is it possible for man to live without God?” I say unto you, it is only possible for man to live if he is without God. But this is only half. The fictitious God has to be replaced by an actual experience of truth in meditation; otherwise you will go insane.The third question:Osho,All the religions are based on God. Their morality, their commandments, their prayers, their saintliness – everything points toward God, and you say that God is dead. Then what will happen to all these great things that are dependent on the concept of God?All those things that are dependent on the concept of God are bogus. Hypocrites are created by all those things. Your morality is not real: it is imposed out of fear, or out of greed. A true morality arises only in a meditator’s consciousness. It is not something imported from the outside, it is something arising in your very being. It is spontaneous. And when morality is spontaneous, it is a joy, it is simply sharing your compassion and love.All the qualities which are dependent on God will disappear with God disappearing. They are very superficial.You all have back doors. At the front door you are one person, at the back door you are a different person. Have you ever watched it? At the front door you are a great Catholic, so religious, so pious, so prayerful, that anybody can think you were a saint. But this is only in your sitting room. From the back door you are only as human beings are supposed to be, with all their instincts, with all their sex, with all their greed, with all their anger. Just look at your God itself. Different religions have different ideas, but all ideas prove one thing: that God is the original sinner.The Hindu God created woman and became infatuated with his own daughter. And the woman became afraid, so she became a cow and God became a bull. She rushed away and became somebody else, and God followed her. That’s how all the species have been created by Hindu theology: it was God following the woman into different forms. The created being was always the female, God was always the male. That’s why there are so many millions of species. The woman may have become a female mosquito, God became a male mosquito…but he went on and on, perhaps he is still going on.Do you think this God is a moral god? And the same is true about all gods of all religions. The Jewish God says in the Old Testament, “I am a very jealous God. I am not the one who is going to forgive you, I am a very angry God. You should not worship anybody else except me. And remember I am your father, not your uncle.” What kind of God? – jealous, worried that you may worship another god. And finally he says, “I am your father, remember; I am not your uncle” – because uncles are always nicer people than fathers.A German Catholic theology professor, Uta Ranke-Heinemann, recently made the following comment: “The majority of Catholic bishops in the US are sexually disturbed. We must assume that German bishops will soon be calling a commission to see if they are sexually disturbed also.” The Bamberg church historian, professor George Denzler, stated: “The pope is responsible for a very painful, very terrible sexual morality.”And a German Protestant pastor, Helga Frisch, said, “When celibacy was introduced in the tenth century, the priests killed the pope’s ambassador and threatened to murder the archbishop. I am amazed that priests today don’t resort to similar tactics.”There is a morality which is imposed from the outside which is never in tune with your heart. And there is a morality that comes from within you: it is always in tune with your heart and in tune with the heart of the universe. That is authentic morality.I don’t give you any discipline, any morality. I simply give you a clarity of vision. Out of that clarity whatsoever comes is good, is divine, is moral.Now the sutra…A little biographical note:Sekito Kisen was born in China in 700 and was to die ninety years later. Known also as Shih-Tou, Sekito was a contemporary of Ma Tzu. But where the latter was part of what was to become the Rinzai line of Chinese Zen, Sekito was in the Soto line.These are the two lineages of Zen: Rinzai Zen and Soto Zen. Both are the same, they just come from different masters. There is nothing basically different.But there have been so many masters, it is really amazing that there are only two lines. There could have been a thousand lines, but Zen is only given to the disciple if he is ready. Sometimes the master never finds a single man who can carry the lineage, so that line is simply finished, comes to a full stop.So, many, many masters have lived, and their line will go for two generations, three generations, and then it will stop – because it is not a question of following, it is a question of a direct transfer between the master and the disciple. Unless the master chooses to transfer, that line is broken.Only two lines are living still. One is Rinzai Zen – we have talked about almost all the masters of the Rinzai Zen sect. This Sekito Kisen belongs to the Soto line. You will not see any difference. There cannot be any difference between two enlightened people.It is said that between Ma Tzu and Sekito, Zen took flight.Ma Tzu was a very strange master – you already know about him. He walked just like an animal on all fours, never stood up on his legs – not that there was any problem, not that he was a hunchback. He just walked on all fours because he said that is the most relaxed position. It is, because man is standing almost against nature. No animal stands on two legs, because when you stand on two legs your heart has to pump against gravitation toward the head. This cuts your life in half.You could live one hundred and forty years if you walked like Ma Tzu. But please don’t do it because what will you do living a hundred and forty years? When you are walking like an animal, your blood flow is horizontal, and you are not putting extra stress on the heart. Ma Tzu would have never had a heart attack; that would have been impossible. No animal ever has a heart attack; it is only man because he has gone against nature.He used to walk on all fours. That is the whole theory of Charles Darwin, of evolution: that man once was an animal. What kind of animal? Maybe there are differences, but one thing is certain: at one time he used to walk on four legs. There were no heart attacks! Just see how healthy animals are – except in a zoo; in a zoo they become more human. See the animals in the wild…Just nearby, a few hundred miles away, there is a beautiful lake, Tadoba. It is a forest reserve: a very big forest surrounding the lake with only one government rest house. I used to go there many times. Whenever I was passing by, I would stay in that rest house for at least one or two days. It was so lonely, so utterly silent, and the forest is full of thousands of deer.Every evening when the sun sets and darkness descends, thousands and thousands, line upon line of deer will come to the lake. You just have to sit and watch. In the dark night their eyes look like burning candles, thousands of candles moving around the lake. The whole night the scene continues. You get tired, because there are so many deer; they go on coming, go on coming. It is such a beautiful experience.But one thing I wondered… They are all alike. Nobody is fat, nobody is thin, nobody seems to be sick, hospitalized. They are so full of life and energy. You cannot beat a deer if you run by his side. No winner in the Olympic races can run the way a deer can run because he has such thin legs and such a proportionate body. And he jumps big hedges without any trouble. And his running is a beauty to see. Just the deer’s muscles, their movement, is so healthy that man looks almost sick.This was the trouble that arose by standing up. Your life has been shortened, your heart is continuously under stress because it has to pump against gravitation. It was not made for that.So Ma Tzu was a very strange man, perhaps there has never been another man so strange. A unique master in himself, he walked on all fours and always looked like a tiger. Whenever he looked at somebody, people started trembling deeply. He was a dangerous man. He was very healthy, he was bound to be, he was almost like a bull. Just the horns were missing, otherwise…Between Ma Tzu on one side, Rinzai Zen, and Sekito on the other side, Soto Zen, Zen took great flights. Both were very powerful people, great masters.As a young boy, Sekito took a stand against an old custom of sacrificing a bull as a means to placate evil spirits; he made a habit of destroying the shrines devoted to such spirits, and would release bulls from their enclosures so they could escape.At the age of twelve, Sekito met master Eno. Eno predicted that Sekito would follow the dharma, and advised him to become a monk and go to master Seigen. After Eno left his body, Sekito went to Seigen.This is just a small biographical note about Sekito.Now begins the sutra:On their first meeting, Seigen asked Sekito, “Where do you come from?” and Sekito replied, “I come from Sokei.”…Where Eno, his old master lived, who has sent him to Seigen because his death was imminent, and who said, “I will not be able to see your enlightenment, but you are bound to be enlightened. Just go to Seigen.”This is the beauty of Zen, no competition at all. The whole thing is that everybody should become enlightened. Where he becomes enlightened is not important. Who is the master who makes him enlightened is not important. Seeing death coming, Eno said to Sekito, “You are bound to become enlightened, but my death is very close by. It is better you go to Seigen.” And Seigen was his competitor.Eno lived in Sokei. So when Seigen asked, “Where do you come from?” Sekito replied, “I come from Sokei.” In other words he is saying, “I am coming from Eno, your competitor master. He has sent me here.”Seigen held up a whisk and said, “Did you find this over there?”Sekito replied, “No, not only was it not over there, but it was also not in the Westland.”The Westland in Japan is India. “What you are asking me for was not in Sokei, it was not even in India where Gautam Buddha was born and where Mahakashyapa started the Zen tradition. What is it that was not even with Buddha or with Mahakashyapa or with Bodhidharma?”Seigen asked, “You reached the Westland, didn’t you?” to which Sekito replied, “If I had reached, I could have found it.”“Only I was missing, otherwise it was everywhere. It was not there because I did not go there.” He is talking about his own being. It was inside him, not in Sokei, and not even in India.This is a great dialogue. He is saying, “If I had gone there, it would have been there. It is within me.” But he is not directly indicating that it is within him. That is the way of Zen dialogues – nothing direct, everything very indirect. And you have to catch the knack of following the indirect indications of what they mean.Seigen said, “Not yet enough – speak further.”Seigen is testing Sekito: whether to accept him as a disciple. Certainly he must be a man of tremendous possibilities, otherwise Eno – his competitor master – would not have sent him to him.The competition between masters is a very strange phenomenon.There is an ancient story in India that there were two sweet shops. They were competitors to each other and were always quarreling because the street was small – as in the past all the streets were very small. Just sitting in their shops they could talk to each other, and there were always arguments.One day things came to such a head that they started throwing sweets at each other. A whole crowd gathered, and they were jumping and catching the sweets and enjoying. The fight went on till both their shops were completely empty. And the whole city enjoyed it because they got all the sweets.This story is told to indicate that when two masters fight it is just throwing sweets at each other. The disciples enjoy it. All of their disciples, both sides, eat the sweets that the masters are throwing at each other.The competitor masters were not enemies. They were using different methods, but they were working for the same truth from different angles. When Eno thought that his death was coming close, he could not see anyone better then Seigen, even though Seigen was his lifelong competitor. That was immaterial: he is the best man, Eno knows him. His whole life they have been fighting and arguing, dialogue upon dialogue, pulling each other’s legs. And they lived close enough, not far away.Seigen said, “Not yet enough – speak further.” You have not said enough. You are very intelligent – just speak a little more.Sekito replied, “You should also speak from your side. How is it you urge only me?”“You know perfectly well where I am coming from. I come from Eno – you were equal competitors; neither could defeat the other – and I am his best disciple. So don’t just ask me to speak; you have to speak from your side too. I represent my master here. He has sent me. I owe everything to my master. So it is not going to be a one-sided dialogue. You also have to say something.”This is a beautiful illustration that even disciples have a dignity. Although he has come to be a disciple to Seigen, that does not mean one has to lose one’s dignity, one’s individuality; that one has to surrender. No master would like a man who has no dignity. This proves that the man has his own integrity.Seigen said, “There’s no problem for me in answering you, but nobody would agree with it.” Seigen continued, “When you were at Sokei, what did you get there?”He has just made very significant statement without making it look important. He is saying, “There is no problem for me in answering you, but nobody would agree with it.” If a master really speaks his mind, if he really speaks that which is beyond the mind, nobody is going to agree with him – only a few masters, and they are very few, very rare.And he said to Sekito, “You will not agree with it. You are not yet enlightened. You are not yet in that space. You can intellectually argue with me but you cannot understand my answers. Remember, I am ready to answer any question you have, but nobody is going to agree. At least you are not going to agree. Perhaps your master would have agreed, but it is very rare to find another enlightened man to talk with me – where agreement is possible beyond intellect. So it is better, rather than me saying anything, that you tell me. What did you get when you were at Sokei with Eno? What have you got?”Sekito replied, “Even before going to Sokei…”…and this is a very beautiful statement; very deep and profound.Sekito replied, “Even before going to Sokei, I had not lost a thing.”So there is no question of getting anything from Eno, I have everything within me.A great thinker, Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher, was on his deathbed – this is just a few years back – and the rabbi came and said to him, “Have you made peace with God?”Martin Buber’s last words… He opened his eyes and he said to the rabbi, “I have never quarreled with him. What question is there of making peace with God?”And he died.That’s what Sekito is saying: “Even before going to Sokei, I had not lost a thing” so there was no question of getting anything there. “I am carrying everything within me.”Then Sekito asked, “When you were in Sokei, did you know yourself?”Because of his statement that he had not lost anything even before he went to Eno, to his place in Sokei, Sekito asked:“When you were in Sokei, did you know yourself?”Seigen said, “How about you? Do you know me now?”Sekito answered, “Yes, I do. How can I know you any further?” He continued, “Osho, since you left Sokei, how long have you been staying here?”Seigen replied, “I do not know either. And you, when did you leave Sokei?”Sekito said, “I don’t come from Sokei.”He has changed his statement completely. First he said he came from Sokei. That was just a superficial answer to ‘From where do you come?’” Now things are getting deeper. Sekito said, “I don’t come from Sokei.” He means that he is coming from eternity. Sokei was just one of the stops on the way; he has not come from Sokei, he’s coming from eternity. There have been many stops; Sokei was one of the stops.Seigen responded, “Alright – now I know where you come from.”Sekito said, “Osho, you are a great one – do not waste time.”He was saying, “You are unnecessarily wasting time in checking me – whether I am of any worth or not – but before you accept me as a disciple, I have accepted you as a master.” That’s why he has suddenly started calling him Osho. He is saying whether you accept me as a disciple or not does not matter. I have accepted you as my master. “Osho, you are a great one – do not waste time.” – “Let us begin the real work.”That is the honest seeker’s response. Don’t waste time in this dialogue and answering and questioning. Just let us begin the real work. And the real work is following the inner path to your very center.Taneda wrote:Searching for what?I walk in the wind.He is saying, “I don’t know what I am searching for. How can I know before I have found it? Truth is just a word. How can I say what I am searching for before I have found it? You cannot say what you are searching for.”This is a very strange but beautiful statement. He is saying before you find the truth, you cannot even say you are searching for truth. You are simply searching, you don’t know for what, because if you had known, there would have been no need to search. So you are just groping.Taneda is perfectly right. A seeker is simply groping in the dark, hoping some way must be there. Existence cannot be so cruel.“Searching for what? I walk in the wind.” I am just flying everywhere, walking in the wind. But I don’t know what I am searching for. I will know only when I have found it.He is saying anybody who is searching for something is believing in something before he has found it, and that is wrong. That’s what all the religions are doing, creating beliefs before people have even found anything. Before they have known anything they have been turned into believers, into faithful ones, and their whole search has been destroyed.I don’t tell you what you are searching for. I simply show you the way. I simply insist, “Go on, go on, go on.” You are bound to find it because it is there somewhere inside you. If you search deep enough, with urgency and totality, you are bound to find it. And you will know only by finding what you were searching for. This is a totally different, diametrically opposite standpoint from all the belief systems of the world.A question from Maneesha:Osho,Is not the fantasy of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God simply a covert expression of man's will to power?Maneesha, it is both. First, it is a deep fear of life and death, a fear of ignorance, a fear of not knowing oneself. But out of this fear also arises a desire for power. In fact, the desire for power is always based on an inferiority complex.That’s why I say all politicians and all so-called great religious leaders are suffering from an inferiority complex. That inferiority complex is a torture to them. They want to be on some great pedestal with great power. That power will help them to get temporary relief from their inferiority complex. Now they know they are known worldwide, now that millions of people are following them, how can they be inferior? They can convince themselves: “If I have so much power, how can I be inferior?” But it does not matter whether you have power or not. Your inferiority cannot be dissolved by power, it can only be covered by it.So on the one hand God is covering fear, dread, death, and on the other hand to be a believer in a God who is omnipotent, all-powerful, omnipresent, omniscient, all-knowing, to have belief in such a God helps you somehow to be identified with the God. You are a Christian, you identify yourself with Christ – and he is the son of God. You have come very close as far as a relationship is concerned. You believe in Krishna and he is the reincarnation of this God, the perfect reincarnation. Believing in him you have come very close to power. You may not have power, but you believe in a person who has power. So it is also a longing for power. But why do you want power? – because you feel weak, you feel powerless, you feel inferior.So religions create inferiority, they create fear, they create greed, and out of this creation you are ready to accept a God as all-knowing, everywhere-present, all-powerful. And you are so close to him in your faith, in your belief, in your prayer that you are also sharing some of God’s power. You become a mini-god. But it is all psychological sickness, and God is not the cure.It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh – laughter is a better cure than God.It is little Albert’s first day at school, and as soon as his mother brings him to the classroom and leaves, Albert bursts into tears.Despite the combined efforts of Miss Mammary, his teacher, Mr. Smelly, the principal, Miss Needle, the school nurse and even Leroy, the janitor, Albert just goes on crying and crying. Finally, just before lunchtime, Miss Mammary gets fed up.“For heaven’s sake, child,” she shouts. “Just shut up! It is lunchtime now, and in a couple more hours you will go home and see your mommy again!”At once, Albert stops crying.“Jesus Christ!” he exclaims. “I thought I had to stay here until I was sixteen!”Paddy and Seamus are walking home from the pub through the park one day, in deep, philosophical discussion. For over an hour, they have been talking about whether God Almighty rules over their lives or not, when Paddy gets fed up and says, “Ah, God can’t tell me what to do – I am going to the beach for a holiday!”“You mean,” replies Seamus, “that you are going to the beach – God willing?”“No!” snaps Paddy, stubbornly. “I am going to the beach, God willing or not!” But just at that moment, there is a loud crash of thunder in the sky. Seamus covers his head in fear, and falls to the ground.When he opens his eyes again, he looks around, and finds that Paddy has been changed into a slimy, green frog.For seven weeks, Paddy, the frog, is forced to live in the park pond, and every day Seamus brings a handful of dead flies for him to eat.Finally, after his penance is completed, Paddy is changed back into his old self. He immediately walks home and begins packing his bags.“Hey, Paddy!” cries Seamus, with surprise. “My God, you are back! But where are you going now?”“Like I said,” shouts Paddy, “I am going to the beach!”“You mean,” replies Seamus, “that you are going to the beach – God willing?”“No!” shouts Paddy, furiously. “I am going to the beach or I am going back to that goddamn frog pond!”Sir Loin Salami, the chief executive of Sir Loin Pork Sausages Incorporated, calls his clerk, Muffin Snuffler, into the office. “Let us get straight to the point, Snuffler,” snaps Sir Loin. “Your work has been lousy lately. You are late every day and your accounting errors are ridiculous. You have been working for me for fifteen years, Snuffler, but recently you don’t seem to know a pork sausage from a bunch of bananas!”“Well, sir,” replies Muffin, “I have tried not to let it affect my work, but things have been going very badly for me at home.”“Oh, I am sorry to hear that, Snuffler,” apologizes Sir Loin. “I hope I am not interfering, but if you tell me what is on your mind, perhaps I can help?”“That’s very kind of you, sir,” sniffles Muffin. “You see, I have been married for two years, and about six weeks ago my wife started to nag me constantly. You know: Nag! Nag! Nag! I just don’t know what to do. She is driving me nuts.”“Ah,” cries Sir Loin. “I am sure that I can help you. You see, Snuffler, women need to feel that they are wanted. You have probably been neglecting her needs. For example, when I get home from work, I embrace my wife, kiss her passionately, remove her clothing piece by piece and carry her upstairs to bed.”“That sounds great!” cries Muffin.“It is, Snuffler,” replies Sir Loin. “Why don’t you give it a try? Take the afternoon off; she won’t be expecting you, and the element of surprise will make it even better!”“That is really kind of you, sir,” says Muffin. “What is your address?”Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, close your eyes, and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to go in. Gather your life forces – your totality is needed – and rush toward your very center of being with absolute consciousness, and with an urgency that this moment could be your last moment on the earth. Only such urgency can bring you to the deepest center of your being.Rush faster and faster, deeper and deeper.As you are coming closer to the center, a great silence descends over you, almost like soft, cool rain. You can feel it, it is tangible.A little closer and you find all around you flowers of peace blossoming.A little more… And a great ecstasy makes you drunk with the divine.Just one step more and you are at the very center of your being. For the first time you see your original face. Your original face is the face of the buddha.I use the word buddha as a symbol of total awakening, of absolute enlightenment. A great luminosity will surround you, a strange light that you have never seen before.The only quality you have to remember at this moment is witnessing. That constitutes the buddha’s whole being.Witness that you are not the body.Witness that you are not the mind.Witness that you are only the witness.To make this witnessing deeper, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax…Let go, but keep remembering you are a buddha. The buddha consists only of one energy, and that energy is witnessing.At this moment you start melting like ice in the ocean. Gautama the Buddha Auditorium is becoming an ocean of consciousness. Ten thousand buddhas are disappearing into the ocean.All separation is illusory, only oneness is the truth.You must be the most blessed people on the earth, because everybody is worried about trivia. You are searching for the ultimate, the eternal, and you are very close to it.A great blissfulness settles in your very center, flowers start showering on you. The whole existence is rejoicing with you.Gather all these experiences. You have to bring them to your day-to-day ordinary life – the peace, the serenity, the silence, the ecstasy, the music, the dance. Your life has to become a constant ceremony. Only then are you whole.And don’t forget to persuade the buddha to come a little closer. He has come very close. It is your nature.These are the three steps of meditation.First, the buddha comes behind you like a shadow, but very solid and golden, with great splendor, and creating a new atmosphere around you, of benediction, of compassion, of bliss.Second step: you become the shadow and the buddha is ahead of you, and your shadow is slowly, slowly disappearing.The third step: you have disappeared into the buddha, and only the buddha is there, you are not. When this happens you are at the highest peak of existence, you have come home, you have arrived.Now there is nowhere to go. You become one with existence itself.That’s why I call my philosophy more authentically existential than the negative philosophies of the West. I am trying to bring the West and the East together.My whole effort is to make man richer, outward and inward, in a tremendous balance. This balance is Zen.And remember: God is dead, and now Zen is the only living truth.You are the pioneers of a new age, of a new man, of a new humanity!Before Nivedano calls you back, persuade the buddha because this is the fundamental step. He has to become your shadow.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back…but come back as a buddha, with the same grace, with the same silence, radiating the same joy.Sit for a few seconds, just to remember the golden path you have traveled, and the experience of the beyond that has come so close, the mystery of your inner world, the space infinite, the time eternal.And feel the presence of the buddha behind you.This makes Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement complete. Without Zen it is incomplete and will drive people insane. With Zen it becomes complete and will drive people to the uttermost sanity possible to human beings.

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God is Dead Now Zen is 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

God is Dead Now Zen is 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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When Sekito received the precepts, his master, Seigen, asked him, “Now you have received the precepts, you want to learn the Vinaya, don’t you?”Sekito replied, “There’s no need to learn the Vinaya.”Seigen asked, “Then, you want to read The Book of Sheela?”Sekito replied, “There’s no need to read The Book of Sheela.”Seigen asked, “Can you deliver a letter to Nangaku Osho?”Sekito said, “Certainly.”Seigen said, “Go now, and come back quickly. If you come back even a little late, you will miss me. If you miss me, you cannot get the big hatchet under my chair.”Soon Sekito reached Nangaku. Before handing over the letter, Sekito made a bow and asked, “Osho, when one neither follows the old saints nor expresses one’s innermost soul, what will one do?”Nangaku said, “Your question is too arrogant. Why don’t you ask modestly?”To which Sekito replied, “Then it would be better to sink into hell eternally and not ever hope for the liberation that the old saints know.”Sekito, finding that he and Nangaku were not attuned to each other, soon left for Seigen without giving Nangaku the letter. On his arrival, Seigen asked, “Did they entrust something to you?”Sekito said, “They didn’t entrust anything to me.”Seigen said, “But there must have been a reply.”Sekito said, “If they don’t entrust anything, there is no reply.” Then he said, “When I was leaving here, you added that I should come back soon to receive the big hatchet under the chair. Now I have come back, please give me the big hatchet.”Seigen was silent. Sekito bowed down and retired.Friends, before I answer your questions, I have to answer two letters from very knowledgeable idiots. This distinction has to be remembered. There is a certain ignorance that knows, and there is a certain knowledgeability that knows nothing.One is a Buddhist scholar, and he writes, “An enlightened man cannot be concerned with the trivia of the ordinary world and its concerns.”It means, according to him, I am an ignorant man. It is a compliment to me because every enlightened man finally becomes as ignorant as a child, or as innocent as a child. Socrates’ last words were: “I don’t know anything.”This man is a scholar, but blind. Does he think that a Third World War, which is going to erase the whole of humanity, is trivia? Does he think that the explosion of population in this country is trivia when it is going to kill almost five hundred million people in the coming ten years?And if these are trivia then I have to take him back to Gautam Buddha. He was concerned that no sannyasin of his should have more than three pieces of clothes – that was trivia. He was concerned that no sannyasin of his should wear shoes – that is trivia. He was concerned that no sannyasin should eat more than one time in a day – that was trivia. And still he is enlightened and I am ignorant. This is what I call a knowledgeable idiot.Buddha has made thirty-three thousand rules for his disciples – all trivia. Where can you find thirty-three thousand truths? Truth is one and inexpressible. But he was concerned with absolute trivia.One sannyasin was going to spread Buddha’s message. He had come for his last word because he may not be coming back to him for two or three years. And what was his message? “Don’t look at a woman.” Now, unless you look, you cannot decide whether the person is a woman or a man.I don’t understand what kind of nonsense Buddha was talking. How are you going to know that the person coming toward you is a woman? You have to see first, then you can close your eyes, but you have seen. And once you have seen a beautiful woman and you close your eyes, she becomes more beautiful. Is it not trivia?And Buddha told him, “You have to keep your eyes just four feet ahead of you. Just look only four feet ahead and keep your eyes down, so even if you come across a woman you only see her feet.” This is great spiritual stuff!The man was a little puzzled. He said, “I will try my best, but if by chance I happen to see a woman accidentally – suddenly a woman comes from out of the forest or on a crossroad – what should I do?”Buddha said, “If you accidentally see a woman, don’t talk to her.”Is it great spirituality? “Don’t even say hello because she is a woman.”And the man insisted. He said, “If the woman says something, won’t it be embarrassing not to answer her? Will it not be inhuman?”Buddha said, “If such a coincidence happens, you can talk to her, but don’t touch her.” Is this spiritual stuff?What do you call trivia? The whole humanity is going to die and I should not speak? And your Gautam Buddha is talking absolute nonsense to the people.The man was intelligent enough. He said, “There may be a situation in which I have to touch a woman. Perhaps a woman has fallen in a well. What am I supposed to do? Or in a ditch, what am I supposed to do? Should I just go on without looking at her miserable state, without helping her?”And Buddha said, “If such a coincidence happens, you can touch her. But remember: all that is outside is illusory.”If it is illusory, then why make the first point? The woman is illusory – and don’t touch her! What is the problem if you touch an illusion? Don’t talk to the illusion! Don’t look at the illusion! This I call absolute trivia.These Buddhist scholars are going to provoke me. I will pull Gautam Buddha down completely! My concern for humanity makes me ignorant, and his concern about women and about clothes and about shoes, and about not touching women, not looking more than four feet ahead, makes him enlightened? His enlightenment is rotten – it is a bullock-cart enlightenment. I am a contemporary man, twenty-five centuries ahead of Gautam Buddha. He is just old hat.But these Buddhist scholars are provoking me. I will start talking about Gautam Buddha, and pull down the whole house that he has built because it is all built on stupid things.My concern with humanity is absolutely spiritual. My concern for this beautiful planet is sacred. It is my compassion and my love. And I don’t care about any Gautam Buddha. I am a buddha in my own right, and your old Buddha is too out of date. I belong to my time, and I speak the language of my time.Buddha was afraid to allow women in his commune. For twenty years continuously he refused women. What was the fear? He did not trust his own sannyasins. This was distrust. A master distrusting his own people? He was afraid of what would happen to the celibacy of the monks if women entered into the commune. But if their celibacy is so thin that the entry of a woman is going to disturb their celibacy, it is not much of a celibacy.They must have been homosexuals, as we are finding now in every monastery around the world that all kinds of sexual perversions are practiced. It cannot have been otherwise for Buddha’s disciples. Only my people are living a natural, sacred, existential life, not against the current, not against the universe. And without listening to me, without reading me, these idiots go on making their comments.My whole effort is to bring materialism and spirituality into a balance. To me the outside world is as real as the inside world. Naturally this creates trouble for me from both the sides. The communists have written books against me, for the reason that I am teaching spirituality and meditation, and diverting people from their real concern, which is a classless society. And I am making people selfish because I am just telling them to go in.And the spiritualists are against me; they have written books against me, and articles, and every day there are letters. Their problem is that I am taking too much interest in the world. A man of real spirituality should close his eyes because the world is illusory.But none of your so-called and self-styled enlightened people have taken the trouble to think twice. When you say the world is illusory, then there is no need to renounce it. Nobody renounces dreams. Do you renounce your dream when you wake up in the morning? A dream is just a dream, there is no question of renouncing it. And if you are having a sweet dream, I say enjoy it.Make this whole world a sweet dream, not a nightmare. All your politicians and all your priests are trying to make it a nightmare. Then naturally people think of renouncing it. It is such a tragedy.I am not in favor of renouncing the world, and I don’t say that the world is illusory; otherwise, why does Buddha go begging every day? If the world is illusory, why are you going begging before an illusory house? If a woman gives you food, she is illusory and the food is real!Why do you need three pieces of clothes? This was the criticism of Mahavira, of Buddha’s contemporary, who lived naked. He did not accept Buddha as enlightened because he was not living naked. To Mahavira, three pieces of clothes was luxury – a man who lived naked in summer, in winter, in rain. Naturally he has the right to say to Buddha, “You are living in great luxury. Three pieces of clothes? You are much too materialistic.”Buddha ate one meal a day; to Mahavira that was luxury. In the twelve years before Mahavira became enlightened, he ate on only three hundred and sixty-five days, in twelve years he ate only one year – not continuously. Two months passed, and then one day he would eat; three months passed, and one day he would eat – so it came to nearly one year in twelve years. That means that after eleven days he was eating one day, on average. Of course, to him Buddha is indulging in luxury. These are relative terms.And Buddha was criticizing Mahavira for such trivial things, because he could not find answers to Mahavira’s criticism that he was living in luxury with daily food and three pieces of clothes. He found another way to criticize him.The followers of Mahavira were saying, “Mahavira is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient” – all the qualities of God. And Buddha was laughing at Mahavira, telling his disciples, “This fellow, this guy, is omniscient, all knowing? I know him. Once he was begging before a house in which nobody lives. And he talks about knowing everything – past, present, future – and he does not know that the house is empty, there is nobody there, it has been empty for years. This man is omniscient?“And one day he was passing early in the morning, going to the river, and he stamped on the tail of a dog who was fast asleep on the road. He only realized it when the dog started barking. This man is omniscient, all knowing, and he does not know that the dog is lying just in front of him?”Do you think these criticisms are very spiritual? Neither are Mahavira’s criticisms very spiritual, nor are Buddha’s criticisms very spiritual. Just trivia. So I want to tell this Buddhist scholar: consider again who is enlightened.The other is also a Buddhist scholar, and he had said to me, “I have been reading your books on Buddha, and I have appreciated them very much.” But he never wrote any letters to me, nor any letter to the newspapers. Now he had published a letter in the newspapers.It is a strange thing: when I was saying things in appreciation, nobody ever wrote a single word. They thought what I was saying is really the meaning of Buddha’s sutras. It was not! The meaning was given by me, and I can take it away, and tear down all your scriptures point by point!Now he says that I cannot have samadhi – enlightenment – because I don’t have sheel, I have only pragya. He does not understand at all – neither Buddha nor me. Pragya is a by-product of samadhi, of enlightenment. Pragya means wisdom. Unless you become enlightened, you cannot have wisdom, you can have only knowledge. And pragya does not mean knowledge, it means wisdom. It is a by-product of samadhi, enlightenment. But he has no experience of samadhi, he has just seen the scriptures. And you will see in the coming sutra, an authentic seeker simply denies that he has anything to do with sheel. Sheel means character. Now he is concerned with my character: “Without character you cannot become enlightened.” What does he know about my character? And has he ever thought about the character of Buddha?For twenty-nine years continuously Buddha was indulging in sex – not only with his wife; he had many concubines. His father was told when he was born that either he would become a world emperor, or he would renounce the world and become an enlightened one. These were the two alternatives. Of course the father wanted him to become a world emperor.So he asked how to prevent him from becoming enlightened. “I want him to become the world emperor.” He was a small king in a small kingdom. Arun, from Nepal, has just brought a picture of the palace – which is in ruins – where Buddha was born. Even in the ruins you can see that the kingdom was not great. The palace looks like just an ordinary big house. And it was a small village on the border of Nepal and India. Naturally his father must have had the ambition of Buddha becoming a great world conqueror.And the astrologers suggested, “If you want him to be prevented from enlightenment, then make every comfort and luxury possible for him. He should grow up in luxury, indulgence. He should not see anybody old, anybody dead. Even the flowers which are going to fall down should be removed before he sees them. All pale leaves which are going to fall should be removed.“And he should be made to live in different palaces in different seasons so he never comes to feel any season is a trouble.” So three palaces were made in different places: one for the summer, one for the winter, one for the rain. And great gardens were created around the palaces. And his father collected all the beautiful girls from the kingdom to be Buddha’s concubines. He was surrounded with women, music, wine, for twenty-nine years. He had a wife and a son. And he became enlightened.I don’t have a son, I don’t have a wife, I don’t have concubines, I don’t even have a girlfriend. And I don’t have character? And Buddha has character! No man has indulged more than Gautam Buddha. What character…?He used to have five disciples before his enlightenment. They were disciples because he was an ascetic. He was torturing himself, fasting and had become just a skeleton. And these five disciples were immensely impressed by his self-torture. The whole of humanity lives with this idea: if you torture yourself, you are a saint.The day he became enlightened, he dropped all self-torture, it was absolutely useless. All his five disciples left him immediately: he has fallen, fallen from saintliness. He had become enlightened, and those five disciples who had been with him for many years, respecting him as a great saint, just left him, saying, “He has fallen. He has started eating, he has started having warm clothes.”Perhaps these Buddhist scholars don’t understand anything at all except the scriptures. Character arises out of enlightenment, it is not vice versa. It is not character that produces enlightenment, otherwise enlightenment would have a cause to it. Enlightenment is your nature; it has no cause. It is already there, you just have to discover it. It does not matter what kind of character you have. If you go inward the sinner will find the buddha just as much as the saint. And only after you have found your enlightenment, the radiation of the enlightenment becomes your character, your sheel.Your enlightenment becomes your innocence, and out of that innocence arises wisdom. But wisdom is not knowledge, it is simply transparent clarity about everything, inner or outer.But these knowledgeable idiots simply prove something that I have been continuously telling you: don’t get involved in scholarship, don’t get involved in knowledgeability. That is the greatest barrier to enlightenment, because you are so full of knowledge, and all knowledge is of the mind.Enlightenment is not of the mind, it is the fragrance of no-mind. No-mind is not based on any character. Just the contrary: all character arises out of the clarity of no-mind. So it is not imposed from outside as a discipline, it arises as a spontaneous response. You simply cannot do any evil. It is not a question of your deciding not to do evil, you simply cannot do it. You are so full of light, how can you behave like a blind man? You are so full of light, how can you behave like a man stumbling in darkness?Character arises, wisdom arises, and a thousand more things – blissfulness, ecstasy, benediction, compassion. And there is no end; more and more flowers go on flowering. But this is the difficulty of the knowledgeable person. He has accepted a certain fixed formula.I want you to know absolutely clearly that just as everything goes on expanding and growing, even enlightenment becomes clearer, deeper, higher as time passes by. After twenty-five centuries, I am not going to be a replica of Gautam Buddha. I have nothing to learn from him. If anything has to be, he has to learn something from me. Twenty-five centuries have not been a mere wastage. Just as everything is progressing and evolving, so is consciousness.But every scholar gets completely fucked up! He thinks only in terms of his scripture, and the scripture is twenty-five centuries old. I am a contemporary man, and do not belong to any category. I am a category in myself. I decide according to my spontaneous response, not according to any commandments, not according to any discipline. Whether the discipline is given by Buddha or Mahavira or Christ or Krishna, it does not matter; they are all old. But these people are living in the past.I am moving moment to moment into the future. I have left Gautam Buddha twenty-five centuries behind. His enlightenment also is twenty-five centuries old. So much dust has gathered on it. But my mirror of consciousness is absolutely fresh, and I am not going to listen to anybody. Nobody is my master! And nobody has the right to tell me what character is and what is wisdom and what is enlightenment. Nobody has that right.I am a man, absolutely free. I live my life according to my own light. I am nobody’s follower, and I don’t live my life according to any scripture. These idiots should shut up! Because of them I will be provoked to condemn Buddha and Mahavira and Krishna and everybody! And they won’t have any argument against me.Now what can these people say? That Buddha was not concerned with trivia? He was concerned. And my concern is not trivia.My concern is a Third World War that is hanging just on the horizon. Any moment and there will be no life on the earth, and no possibility of any buddha! And you call it trivia?Beware of scholars. They are the most idiotic people in the world.Now your questions. The first question:Osho,God is dead, but that creates the question: Who began this universe?There is no need for anybody to begin it, because there is no beginning to this universe, and there is no end.This question has been exploited by all the religions because everybody wants to know who began the universe. Your minds are so small that they cannot conceive a beginningless universe, an endless universe, just eternity to eternity. Because you cannot conceive that vastness, your question arises, “Who created the universe? Who began it?” But if there was somebody already to begin it, there was a universe. Do you see the simple arithmetic? If there was somebody already to begin it, then you cannot call it the beginning because somebody was already there.If you think that a God is a necessary thing… It gives you consolation that God created the world, so you have a beginning. But who created God? Again you fall into the same problem.And all the religions have said that God exists eternally; there is no creator of God. If that is true for God, why is it not true for existence itself? It is autonomous, it exists on its own. There is no need of any creator because that creator will require another creator, and you will fall into an absurd regress. You can go from A to Z. But who created Z? The question remains standing. You simply go on pushing, but the question is not solved because you have asked a wrong question.The universe has no beginning. It is not a creation by anybody. It has no end. And remember, if it had any beginning, then there would certainly be an end. Every beginning is a beginning of an end, every birth is the beginning of death. So it is good! Get rid of God because if he can create the world he can destroy the world. And any world that is created is bound to be destroyed sooner or later. If there is birth, there is death. Only a beginningless universe can be endless.So your problem is just because the capacity of the mind is very limited. That’s why I want you to go beyond mind. Only no-mind can conceive the beginningless, the endless. The incomprehensible becomes absolutely clear, there is no problem at all. Those who have risen beyond mind have also simultaneously risen beyond God. God is a need for the mind because the mind cannot conceive infinite, eternal things; it can only conceive very limited things. The question arises because of your mind’s incapacity, its impotence.You ask: “God is dead, but that creates the question, ‘Who began this universe?’” But have you ever thought that God will not solve the question? On the contrary, the question will be pushed a step back: Who created God? Any hypothesis that does not destroy the question is absolutely useless. Any answer that keeps on pushing the question further back but does not touch it at all is not the answer.The only answer you will find is in your own experience of eternity. Then you will know nobody has created it. It has no beginning, no end: you don’t have any beginning, you don’t have any end. When you experience it within your own self, you know existence is autonomous, it is not created.A created thing cannot be more than a mechanism; it cannot be an organic reality. A car is created, man is not created. If man is also created, then he becomes a mechanism, a robot. You can dismantle a car, take all the pieces apart – the wheels and everything – and you can put them back together and the car will be perfectly okay. But cut a man into pieces and then join them together with German glue and still the man will not be back together. An organic phenomenon cannot be dissected. The moment you dissect it, its very mystery disappears. Then you can rejoin those parts, but you will have only a corpse, not a living human being.It is the dignity of existence that it is not created. It is the dignity of man that he is not created. God is an insult to existence, to man, to consciousness, to everything. God is a humiliation. God is not a solution for any problem; in fact, he creates more problems in the world. He does not solve anything.There are three hundred religions in the world and all are fighting with each other. And they are all created because of the concept of God, because they have all invented their own concepts.The Hindu God has three heads. Just think of the poor fellow. Imagine having three heads. I don’t think you would be able to stand up. One head would be falling this side, one head would be falling that side, this head would be falling this side, the very weight…I have seen the statues and the pictures of the Hindu God. His whole body seems to be just like a man; it cannot manage three heads. I have seen children in circuses that are freaks of nature. I have seen children with two heads, but they cannot even sit, they are just lying down. The circus is enjoying their tragedy, earning money.I have heard…A man had gone to see a circus, and there was a three-headed child in the circus. And the man was very much concerned because all his children…He had twenty children and four wives. He was a Mohammedan. The fee was one rupee per person, and all of his children were insisting on seeing it. There was great trouble. The father was trying to convince them, “We don’t have twenty rupees. I can stay out, and I can send you, but we don’t have twenty rupees.”The owner, who was distributing tickets, heard all this argument between the children and the father. He said, “Wait! I will give you twenty rupees. Let me bring the child with three heads. He can see you are a bigger phenomenon! One man with twenty children!”And he brought the child in a trolley to look at this man who has twenty children. The man gave him twenty rupees as a fee because, “This boy also needs some entertainment. He gives entertainment to thousands of people.”But that boy could not see from all of his three faces and six eyes. It was difficult for him even to turn in the trolley.The Hindu God must be living on a trolley. One head will always be pushing against the pillow, breathing will be difficult. And walking is out of the question. And all the three gods, which have one body, have wives. Just see the tragedy: each god is joined with two other gods, and each god has a separate wife. Three wives to one man, because the sexual machinery is only one. I never heard that the Indian God has three lots of sexual machinery! Now, I cannot figure out how things are managed…These fictions create three hundred religions because everybody is free to have his own fiction. Why borrow anybody else’s fiction? There are religions that think that God has one thousand hands. One thousand hands? They must be growing all over the body just like branches of a tree. I don’t think he can manage to do anything. One thousand hands? From the back they will be growing backward, from the front they will be growing… There will be no space left for anything else!There are gods that have a thousand eyes – I cannot conceive it. Even with no-mind I cannot conceive it! A thousand eyes in one head? Then there is no possibility for ears, no possibility for the nose, no possibility for the mouth, no possibility for anything – not even hair. He must be bald, with eyes all over the head. Even then I don’t think he can manage one thousand eyes. How will he move? According to which eye will he see? Even if he winks at a woman, which eye will he use? One thousand eyes, winking at one woman? That will be real romance!God has not solved any problem. God has created thousands of problems. And every religion has its own idea because it is a fiction. You don’t have different ideas about the sun; you don’t have different ideas about the rose. You can have only different ideas about a fiction. It is then up to you, whichever way you want it.The Bible says God created man in his own image. The reality is just the opposite. Man has created God in his own image. And he has been trying to refine the image of God, finding explanations for all kinds of absurdities. He needs a thousand hands because he has to care for five billion people. But if you have to care about five billion people, you need five billion hands. One thousand hands won’t do. At least, if you want to shake hands with the whole of humanity, you will need five billion hands. Just hands and hands and nothing else! You go on shaking and nobody is there.They go on finding explanations: he has one thousand eyes because he has to look after the whole universe. Can’t he move his head, just the way I am moving mine? I can see ten thousand people without any difficulty, just with two eyes. Doesn’t he move backward and go in reverse? He has eyes all over his head, so when he wants to go backward, the front eyes are closed, the backward eyes are open. When he wants to go sideways, three sides are closed, the right side is open. Is it a god or some kind of toy to entertain children?The very idea of God is just because our minds cannot comprehend eternity. Once you rise beyond your limited mind to an unlimited no-mind, you can conceive all that was inconceivable before. No God is needed.The second question:Osho,Is there any place for prayer in religion if there is no God?There is no place for prayer because prayer is God-oriented. If there is no God, to whom can you pray? All prayers are false because there is nobody to answer them, nobody to hear them. All prayers are humiliations, insults, degradations. All prayers are disgusting. You are kneeling down to a fiction which does not exist.And what are you doing in your prayers? Begging. “Give me this, give me that” – utterly beggarly – “God, give me my daily bread!” Can’t you ask once and for all? Every day? And five billion people asking, with only one person listening? Do you think he will remain sane? “Give me my daily bread”! Why not ask for the whole of your life and be finished? One prayer will do.But every day you are bothering him, nagging him like a wife, morning and evening. And there are Mohammedans who do five prayers a day. They are the great naggers.I used to go to take meditation camps in Udaipur. It was a long journey from the place where I lived in Jabalpur – thirty-six hours – because there was no plane at that time. In Jabalpur there was an airport, but it was a military airport, and they were not allowed to open it to the public. Now it has opened.So I had to go in a train and change at many junctions. First, I would have to change at Katni, then I would have to change at Bina, then I would have to change at Agra. Then I would have to change at Chittaurgarh, and finally I would reach Udaipur.It was evening time when the train reached Chittaurgarh, and Ajmer is very close to Chittaurgarh. Ajmer is one of the strongholds of the Mohammedans, so in the train there would be many Mohammedans. And the train had to wait for one hour for some other train to come which was bringing passengers for Udaipur train.So for one hour I used to walk on the platform. All the Mohammedans lined up on the platform would be sitting in prayer, and I would enjoy them. I would just go near somebody and say, “The train is leaving!” and he would jump up. And then he would be angry at me: “You disturbed my prayer!”I would say, “I did not disturb anybody’s prayer. I am simply doing my prayer. This is my heartfelt desire: that the train should be leaving. I was not talking to you, I don’t even know your name.”He would say, “This is strange… In the middle of my prayer?”I would say, “It was not prayer because I was watching: you have been looking again and again for the train.”He would say, “That is true.”And it was the same all over the platform. I would go to a few people further up and just whisper, “The train is leaving.” and again another person would jump up and would be very angry: “What kind of person are you? You look religious, and you disturb people in their prayer?”I said, “I am not disturbing anybody. I am just praying to God that the train should leave now.”What are your prayers? Begging this, begging that. Your prayer reduces you to a beggar. Meditation transforms you into an emperor. There is nobody to hear your prayers, there is nobody to answer your prayers. But all religions go on making you extrovert so that you don’t turn inward. Prayer is an extrovert thing: the God is there, and you are shouting to that God. But it is taking you away from yourself. Every prayer is irreligious.I have told you the beautiful story by Leo Tolstoy…The archbishop of the Orthodox Church of Russia – it is a story before the revolution – became very worried when many people from his congregation were going to a lake where there were three villagers. They lived on a small island in the lake, sitting under a tree, and thousands of people were going, thinking they were saints.In Christianity you cannot be a saint on your own authority. The word saint comes from sanction. You have to be sanctioned by the church if you are a saint; it is a certificate. It is such an ugly idea, that the church can give you a certificate that you are a saint. Even a man like Francis of Assisi, a beautiful man, was called by the pope: “People have started worshipping you like a saint, and you don’t have any certificate.”That’s where I feel Francis missed the point. He should have refused, but he knelt just like a Christian and asked the pope, “Give me the certificate.” Otherwise he was a nice man, a beautiful man, but I don’t mention his name because he acted in a very stupid way. This is not the way of a saint.I don’t need anybody’s certificate for my enlightenment or for my buddhahood. I declare it. I don’t need anybody’s certificate. Who can give me a certificate? Even Gautam Buddha cannot give me a certificate. Who has given him a certificate?But the idea of saint in English is very wrong. It comes from sanctus.So the archbishop of Russia was very angry: “Who are these saints? I have not certified anybody in years. Where have these saints suddenly come from?” But people were going, and the church was becoming more and more empty every day.Finally he decided to go and see who these people were. He took a boat and went to the island. Those three villagers were uneducated, simple people, utterly innocent. The archbishop was a powerful man; next to the czar he was the most powerful man in Russia. He was very angry at those three villagers and asked them, “Who made you saints?”They looked at each other. They said, “Nobody. And we don’t think we are saints. We are poor people.”“But why are so many people coming here?”They said, “You have to ask them.”The archbishop asked them, “Do you know the orthodox prayer of the church?”They said, “We are uneducated and the prayer is too long. We cannot remember it.”“So what prayer do you say?”They all looked at each other. “You tell him!”Another said, “You tell him!”They were feeling embarrassed. The archbishop became more and more arrogant, seeing that these were absolute idiots: “They don’t even know the prayer. How can they be saints?” He said, “Any of you can tell me. Just say it!”They said, “We are feeling very embarrassed because we have made our own prayer, not knowing the authorized prayer of the church. We have made our own prayer. It is very simple. Please forgive us that we did not ask your permission, but we were feeling so embarrassed we did not come to see you.“God is three, we are also three, so we have made a prayer: ‘You are three, and we are three. Have mercy on us.’ This is our prayer.”The archbishop was very angry. “This is no prayer! I have never heard this kind of thing.” He started laughing.Those poor fellows said, “Teach us what the real prayer is. We thought it was perfectly right: ‘God is three, we are three…’ And what more is needed? Just ‘…have mercy on us.’”So the archbishop told them the orthodox prayer, which was very long. By the time he ended, they said, “We have forgotten the beginning.” So he told the beginning again. Then they said, “We have forgotten the end.”He was getting angry and irritated and said, “What kind of people are you? Can’t you remember a simple prayer?”They said, “It is too long and we are uneducated, and such big words. Just be patient with us. If you repeat it two or three times perhaps we will get the knack of it.” So he repeated it three times. They said, “Okay, we will try, but we are afraid that it may not be the complete prayer. Some things may be missing. But we will try.”The arrogant archbishop was very satisfied that he had finished off these three saints and he could tell his people, “They are idiots. Where are you going?” And he left in his boat.Suddenly he saw that behind his boat those three people were running on the water, coming after him. He could not believe his eyes. He rubbed his eyes and by that time they had reached the side of his boat, standing on the water. They said, “Just one time more. We forgot!”But seeing the situation – these people are walking on water and he was going in the boat – he said, “Continue your prayer. Don’t bother about what I have said to you. Just forgive me. I was speaking out of arrogance. Your simplicity, your innocence, is your prayer. Just go back. You don’t need any certificate.”But they insisted, “You have come so far. Just one more time! We know we will forget it, but one more time so we can try to remember it.”But the archbishop said, “I have been repeating that prayer my whole life, and it has not been heard. You are walking on water, and we have heard only in the miracles of Jesus that he used to walk on water. This is the first time I have seen this miracle. Just go back. Your prayer is perfectly all right!”The prayer was not the thing because there is nobody to hear it, but their utter innocence and trust transformed them into totally new beings, so fresh, so childlike – just a roseflower opening in the early morning sun in all its beauty. Now that his arrogance had dropped, the archbishop could see their faces, their innocence, their grace, their blissfulness. And they returned back on the waters, running hand in hand, to reach their tree.Leo Tolstoy was refused the Nobel Prize because of such stories; he was nominated. The Nobel Prize committee opens its records every fifty years. It opened its records in the middle of this century. So when it opened them the last time, in 1950, researchers rushed to see in the records: whose names were nominated and canceled, and what the reason was. Leo Tolstoy was nominated but never given the prize. And the reason was written underneath: “He is not an orthodox Christian. He writes such stories, such novels, but although he is a Christian he is not an orthodox Christian, hence the Nobel Prize cannot be given to him.”But it was never told to the world that the Nobel Prize exists only for orthodox Christians. Leo Tolstoy was one of the most simple-hearted, innocent people, one of the most creative persons the world has ever known. His novels are of such beauty. His life was also very simple, although he was a count. His forefathers belonged to the royal family, and he still had a vast palace and thousands of acres of land and thousands of slaves. His wife was very angry with him – for his whole life this was a problem – because he lived like a slave and worked like a slave in the fields. He was very friendly with the peasants. He slept in their poor huts and ate their food.They could not believe it. They said, “Master, you are our owner.”He said, “No. We are all sharing. I work with you, I can eat with you, I can sleep here.”His wife was really angry. She was a countess; she herself belonged to a very rich family, another count’s family, and she could not believe what kind of man he was. “He lives with those dirty people, he eats their food. He goes to work in the field. He does not need to.”And such a simple man, innocent man, creative man, was refused the Nobel Prize on the grounds that he was not part of the Orthodox Church, he did not belong to the orthodox line of fanatic Christians. Even I was amazed when I read that statement. So this Nobel Prize is just for orthodox and fanatic Christians, politicians, not for creative artists.You are asking, “Is there any place for prayer in religion?” None at all.In an authentic religion, meditation has a place, but not prayer. Prayer is extrovert, meditation is introvert. Meditation makes you a buddha, prayer simply makes you a beggar. And prayer is fiction-oriented, meditation is truth-oriented. Meditation is Zen, and prayer is nothing but part and parcel of the fiction called God.Avoid prayers. They are taking you away from your own existential reality. Go deeper into meditation. That is the only religiousness possible.The sutras:When Sekito received the precepts, his master, Seigen, asked him, “Now you have received the precepts, you want to learn the Vinaya, don’t you?”Vinaya is one of the scriptures of Gautam Buddha. The whole name is Vinaya Pitak.Seigen asked Sekito, “You are initiated into sannyas. Do you now want to learn the scriptures called Vinaya?” The word vinaya means humbleness. It is one of the series of discourses of Buddha.Sekito replied, “There is no need to learn the Vinaya.”There is no need to learn the scriptures because truth is never found in any scripture. Truth is not a philosophy or a theology. There is no need.Sekito was sent to Seigen by his master, Eno. He was already ripe, but because Eno was feeling death was coming very fast – he was very old – and perhaps he would not be able to see the enlightenment of Sekito, it would be better to send him to a master who could help him in the last stages of his evolution. So he sent him to Seigen, who had been his lifelong competitor. But both recognized each other in their hearts as enlightened.Sekito was not a beginner, so when Seigen asked, “Would you like to learn the scriptures?” he said, “There is no need to learn the scriptures.”Seigen asked, “Then, you want to read The Book of Sheela ?…the book of character. “If you don’t want to learn scriptures about humbleness, would you like to know the scriptures that deal with character, morality?”Sheela means character. This is what the Buddhist scholar has raised in his question against me: without sheela, how you can become enlightened?Sekito replied……and this is the reply of a man who was coming very close to enlightenment:“…There is no need to read The Book of Sheela.”…because all these things will follow enlightenment. They don’t precede, they succeed.Enlightenment contains immense treasures. Just become enlightened and everything follows. You don’t have to learn, you don’t have to be disciplined, you don’t have to make any effort. Everything spontaneously follows you. Just first become a buddha.So Sekito said, “There is no need to read the book of character and morality.”Seigen asked, “Can you deliver a letter to Nangaku Osho?”Nangaku was another famous master, and this was just a strategy of Seigen. He was trying to figure out where Sekito was. All these questions were not for any answers; he was trying to figure out the newly-arrived person who has been living with a great master, Eno – how far had he reached, how deep had he reached? He was just trying to figure Sekito out from every nook and corner, so that he could begin to know how ripe he was and how much ripening he needed. So this was another methodology. He failed. When asked about the Vinaya scriptures, Sekito answered exactly as if he is already enlightened. Seigen asked about the Sheela scriptures, and he answered exactly as if he is already enlightened.Then Seigen tried a different way. He said: “Can you deliver a letter to Nangaku Osho?” Nangaku lived in another mountain monastery nearby.Sekito said, “Certainly.”Seigen said, “Go now, and come back quickly. If you come back even a little late, you will miss me. If you miss me, you cannot get the big hatchet under my chair.”Soon Sekito reached Nangaku. Before handing over the letter, Sekito made a bow and asked, “Osho, when one neither follows the old saints nor expresses one’s innermost soul, what will one do?”His question is very important. He is saying – with absolute respect – he is saying: “Osho, when one neither follows the old saints nor expresses one’s innermost soul, what will one do?” Nangaku said, “Your question is too arrogant.”“Nobody asks such a question immediately. You entered into my temple and you started asking me questions. First, you need initiation. First, you have to be a disciple. I am not here to waste my time on anybody who passes by and asks any type of question. This is arrogance.”It was not arrogance, but that was also Seigen’s strategy. Nangaku was a very different kind of master.Nangaku said, “Your question is too arrogant. Why don’t you ask modestly?”To which Sekito replied, “Then it would be better to sink into hell eternally and not ever hope for the liberation that the old saints know.”“If you call my question arrogant, then I would rather suffer eternally in hell than ask you any question modestly.”No question is ever modest. Every question has to be, in a certain way, arrogant. When you are questioning, you are showing doubt, you are interfering in the silence of the master. Obviously, every question is arrogant, no question can be modest. Only silence is modest. But that is not a question. That is the answer.But Sekito was really a man with a spine, with guts. He said, “Forget all about the question. I will not ask the question modestly because no question can be asked modestly. The very question is arrogant. Any question is a doubt. Any question is interfering in the energy field of the master. Only silence can be modest. But then I wouldn’t have to come to you. I could be silent anywhere. I could be silent even in the eternal fire of hell.”Sekito is really a man of great intelligence and great courage. Nangaku could not put him down. He was sent specially to Nangaku who was known to be very hard. Seigen wanted to know about Sekito’s response, what response he would make to Nangaku.And he really made the right response. He said, “Forget all about the question. I would rather fall eternally into hell than ask you a question with modesty. No question is modest, howsoever put. I have asked it very respectfully. I have called you ‘Osho’ – my beloved master – and you call my question arrogant? Rather than answering it you are insulting me.“No master insults his disciples, and I am not even a disciple. I am just a stranger, and you are not being nice to me. I am just a guest. You should welcome me. Rather than welcoming me, you are humiliating me. I am not going to ask any question.”Sekito, finding that he and Nangaku were not attuned to each other, soon left for Seigen without giving Nangaku the letter.“That man does not deserve even the letter.” He did not stay there, he immediately left.On his arrival, Seigen asked, “Did they entrust something to you?”Sekito said, “They did not entrust anything to me.”Seigen said “But there must have been a reply.”Sekito said, “If they don’t entrust anything, there is no reply.” Then he said, “When I was leaving here, you added that I should come back soon to receive the big hatchet under the chair. Now I have come back, please give me the big hatchet.”Seigen was silent. Sekito bowed down and retired.The silence of Seigen was his acceptance of Sekito, of his courage. He knew that the letter had not been delivered, that there had not been any reply even though Sekito had not mentioned the letter. Sekito simply said, “They did not entrust anything to me, so how can there be any reply?”Seigen saw the man, saw that he had the quality and deserved to be enlightened. His silence was his hatchet. He was saying, “When you come back, I am going to cut off your head with a hatchet.”And now Sekito reminded him: “Now I have come back, please give me the big hatchet.” “Cut off my head. Do whatsoever you want to do, I am ready.”Seigen was silent. In that deep silence is the transfer, the transmission of the lamp. It is not a question of language, it is a question of a transfer of energy. Simply in that silence the flame jumped from Seigen to Sekito. And because he received the flame, the fire, he immediately bowed down and retired. Now there was no need to disturb the master. He had been accepted, not only accepted, the last step for which he had come had been delivered.Eno was dead before Sekito became enlightened. In fact, the moment Sekito left Eno, before he reached to Seigen, Eno died. He was absolutely aware that death was coming close, and Seigen was the right person to whom Sekito should be handed over. And he was absolutely correct in his judgment; it was Seigen who finally managed Sekito’s enlightenment.But enlightenment happens in silence. That’s why my whole effort here is to make you as silent as possible. Then you don’t need even a Seigen. Sitting anywhere – in your room, under a tree, in the garden, by the side of the river, anywhere – if your silence deepens, existence itself gives you the initiation into buddhahood. And when it comes directly from existence itself, it has far more beauty than when it comes through a master.I teach you immediate, sudden enlightenment. The meditation that you are practicing is just preparing you for that great silence in which existence will become a flame inside you.Etsujin wrote:Fallingbut with easy hearts –poppies.The flowers are falling with easy hearts. They are not even looking back to the plant they have been blossoming on, the plant that has been their home for so long, the plant that has been their nourishment for so long. Now they are going back to the earth from where they have come.“Falling, but with easy hearts…” There is no regret. They enjoyed the sun, they enjoyed the moon, they enjoyed the stars. They danced in the wind, they danced in the rain, they danced, celebrated. What more does one need? It is time to go into eternal rest. That’s why their hearts are easy, no tension, no anxiety. They lived totally, they are dying dancingly. They are coming very easily toward the earth where they will disappear again. They came from the earth, they are going back to the earth; the round is complete.Just as flowers arise from the earth and go back to the earth for eternal rest, you come from existence and you return to existence if you have an easy heart. Then you will not be coming again into the imprisonment of a body. You will simply go back to the very source you have come from, to eternal rest.That eternal rest is nirvana, that eternal rest is moksha, that eternal rest is liberation. That eternal rest is samadhi, truth, enlightenment – different names for the same experience. You have come back home, and you have come back home dancing, with no regret, with no complaint, with easy hearts, to disappear peacefully and silently. This is the most exquisite experience, when you are on the verge of disappearing with an easy and relaxed heart, a simple and pure let-go.Maneesha’s question:Osho,In his book, The Antichrist, Nietzsche states: “People who still believe in themselves still also have their own God. In him they venerate the conditions through which they have prospered, their virtues – they project their joy in themselves, their feeling of power onto a being whom one can thank for them.” Would you like to comment?Maneesha, Nietzsche wrote The Antichrist in an insane asylum. But he was such a genius that, even though he was declared insane by all the psychiatrists, his books prove they were wrong. Even in his insanity he was far saner than your so-called sane psychiatrists – even in his death. He wrote his last letter to a friend and he did not forget… Before writing his signature he always used to write, Antichrist. Even at the moment of death he did not forget to write Antichrist first, then his name.And in that insane asylum he wrote many things which are of tremendous importance. The Antichrist is one of the books that will help you to understand Nietzsche’s depth. Although he never went beyond mind, he managed even with his mind, to reach to great heights and to great depths.He was anti-Christ his whole life. He said, “Christ’s teachings are a humiliation to humanity because he calls humanity sheep and calls himself the shepherd. He says humanity has committed the original sin, and he calls himself the savior. Just believe in him and he will save you! This is the ultimate insult to anyone who understands.”That’s why Sekito said, “I would rather suffer eternal hell than ask you the question again. We don’t fit with each other. There is no harmony between my heart and your heart. My journey to you has been futile.”In The Antichrist, he says many, many things. His whole teaching is concerned with the superman. God is dead and man is free to be a superman. Now he need not be a slave, now he can declare his freedom, and in his freedom he will become a superman. With God, he was just a slave kneeling down before statues and sculptures and scriptures, and praying to God like a beggar – believing in saviors, prophets, messiahs, who were nothing but arch-egoists. The whole of humanity has been turned into a great spiritual slavery.Nietzsche was against Christ because he was telling lies: “Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of God.” This is a lie. He is simply consoling the poor, and to console the poor is to destroy the possibility of revolution. And that’s what all the Christians are doing. They are protecting capitalism, they are protecting the people who are in power, and they are giving empty words as consolation to the poor: “Blessed are the poor.” Nonsense!And just to give them a deeper consolation, Jesus condemns the rich. He says: “Even if a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, no rich man will ever pass through the gates of paradise.” This is just to make the poor feel great: their poverty is spiritual, it is a gift of God, they are blessed. These people like Jesus have created poverty, and have destroyed the possibility of revolution, of changing the social structure, of creating a better society without classes, and finally, an ultimate society where the state also withers away.People like Jesus are not saviors but consolers. They are functioning, perhaps not knowingly, as agents of the vested interests. That was the reason why Nietzsche continuously wrote Antichrist before his signature. He was very clear about it.Jesus says: “If someone slaps you on one cheek, give him your other cheek.” Nietzsche does not accept it, and I agree with Nietzsche, not with Jesus. The reason? – Nietzsche gives a perfect argument for it. He said, “If you give the other cheek to a person, you are insulting him. You are telling him, ‘I am holier-than-thou. You are just subhuman.’” Nobody before Nietzsche has seen that this statement is an insult, that’s why I call him an original man. He just missed one thing: meditation. Otherwise, we would have had a greater buddha than Gautam Buddha himself because he would have been absolutely contemporary.Do you understand what he is saying? When you give your other cheek you are rejecting the man, his humanity. You are saying, “I am a saint, and you are just an ordinary human being.” Nietzsche says, “When somebody hits you on the cheek, hit him, as hard as you can. That makes you equal.” You accept the man’s dignity as a human being, and you also say, “I am also a human being, I am not superior to you, I am not holier than you.” A strange argument, but absolutely perfect.In this book, The Antichrist, he says: “People who still believe in themselves still have their own God.” Now they have become gods themselves. But he does not know anything about meditation; that is the difficulty. In meditation you enter as if you are a self, but the deeper you go, the more the self starts withering away. When you finally reach your center, you are no more. The question of being a god does not arise. You are certainly godly because the whole of existence is godly. But it is not a power trip because a power trip needs others to be lower than you are and for you to be higher.In deep meditation you know that even trees are equal to you, even animals and birds and rocks are equal to you. The whole existence lives in tremendous equality. That’s why I have been saying again and again that only a spiritual, meditative person can be authentically communist and anarchist, nobody else, because as you go deeper into yourself you disappear, you are no more. There is no question of any power trip, any ego number. And the whole of existence suddenly becomes just as you are. The ego is absent, the “I” is absent – there is only a presence of light, of consciousness, of witnessing. And the whole existence seems to be as silent as you are, as ecstatic as you are. There is no higher, no lower.Both the movements – the movement of communism and the movement of anarchism – have failed, in a way, because they missed the basic point about equality. Only a meditator knows everything is equal because we are all part of one organic cosmos. Different shapes and different forms create the beauty – because they create variety – but deep down, in the roots, it is the same juice, it is the same nourishment that is flowing in the tree, that is becoming a flower, that is flowing in you and becoming a buddha. Your unfolding into a buddha is exactly the same as the unfolding of a lotus flower; there is no difference at all. Nobody is higher, nobody is lower.Nietzsche is right. If people are not meditative and they drop the idea of God, they themselves will become gods – because who will prevent them? Their egos will become absolutely inflated, they will become more and more egotistical. God was there, and they were humble, they were afraid of punishment, of hell. Now there is no God – who is going to prevent them from becoming great egos?Once, when somebody raised the question, “This goes against the constitution of the country. What you are doing?” to Napoleon Bonaparte, he said, “I am the law. Throw away the constitution! Whatever I say is the constitution.” Now this is bound to happen. The egoists become the very law. The egotistical people become gods.Hirohito has just died in Japan. The Second World War was such a shock to the Japanese people not because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but because of the defeat of the Sun God. They believed that their emperor was a Sun God: he was not a human being, he could not be defeated. And he was defeated for the first time in their whole history.Because he was never defeated, the concept “he cannot be defeated, there is no power which can defeat him, he is no longer a human being, he is a god, a Sun God” continued and became more and more ingrained. The defeat of Hirohito was a great shock for the Japanese people because for the first time they were confused, could not believe that the Sun God had been defeated by ordinary human beings. But all great kings and emperors have believed that they share power with God. If there is no God, your kings, your emperors, the people who have power will start thinking, “We are gods and everybody else is just an ordinary human being.”So Nietzsche is right. If you are not acquainted with meditation, mind is a dangerous phenomenon. Without God, it can become very inflated. It can start thinking of itself as God.I am reminded of a beautiful incident. It happened in Baghdad, in the times of a Caliph Omar. A man declared that he had come with a new message from God, and that it was a great improvement on the Holy Koran.He was immediately caught and brought to Caliph Omar, to his court. “This man is proclaiming that he comes from God, and has brought a new message to humanity, more refined than Mohammed’s Holy Koran.”Mohammedans cannot accept any refinement on the Holy Koran: that is the last word of God. Every religion says the same. Mahavir is the last word: nothing can be changed, nothing can be refined. So is Buddha the last word for the Buddhists; so is Jesus, so is Moses. Every founder in the world has tried: “I am the final, the full stop. Everything stops with me; no more evolution.” But evolution does not care about these people, it goes on and on.Omar was very angry. He said, “You are a Mohammedan and you are claiming that you are a better prophet than Mohammed?”The man said, “Of course, because I am coming after so many centuries. The world has changed, the time has changed. It needs a new Holy Koran. I have brought it.”Omar was very angry. He told his soldiers, “Give him good treatment! Bind him naked to a pillar in the prison and beat him for seven days. Don’t allow him to sleep – and no food! After seven days I will come and see whether he has changed his mind or not.”The man was tortured for seven days continuously: no sleep, no food, and continuous beating. When Omar went to the jail on the seventh day, the man was simply covered in blood, his whole body was oozing.Omar asked, “What do you think now? Have you changed your mind or not?”The man laughed. He said, “When I was coming from paradise bringing the new message to humanity, God told me, ‘You will be tortured. Every prophet has been tortured.’ These seven days have proved completely that I am the prophet. God was right.”Omar could not believe his ears. And at that moment, suddenly from another pillar, a man who had been brought in one month before and whom Omar had completely forgotten about…This man used to declare, “I am God himself!” So he had been in the jail, tortured for one month. Omar had completely forgotten him – he had become interested in this prophet – and suddenly the man shouted, “Omar! Beware, I am God! After Mohammed I have never sent any prophet to the world. This man is lying!”What to do with these people? Just insane.No psychoanalyst, if he is true to his scientific analysis and scientific approach, can say that Jesus was sane. The man is calling himself “the son of God.” He needs hospitalization. He does not need crucifixion, that is absolutely wrong. He has not committed any crime, he is simply declaring his insanity. And you don’t put insane people on the cross, you have compassion for them, they need psychiatric treatment. But unfortunately there was no psychiatry and no psychology. It was waiting for another Jew, Sigmund Freud, to invent it. But he came too late, two thousand years after Jesus, the first Jew, was crucified.It is really megalomania. If God is not there, there is every possibility that anybody who has an egoistic mind will move to the other extreme. First he was kneeling down before God. Now, knowing there is no God, he moves to the other extreme. Now he declares, “I am God.” God has to be there.But this statement of Nietzsche’s is the experience of one who only knows the mind and nothing beyond it. As you move beyond the mind, you are no more. There is no one to declare, “I am the son of God,” or, “I am God.” There is no one to declare, “I am the savior of mankind,” or, “I am a prophet,” or, “I am the reincarnation of God.” All these people are simply insane. You have been worshipping insane people because they declared themselves to be God. All these so-called founders of religion needed psychiatric treatment.There are still people…When Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister of India, there were at least one dozen people all over India who believed they were Jawaharlal Nehru. I knew one such person. He used to live in a nearby town and I used to go there once in a while to lecture in that town’s college. There I met him because he had come to the lecture. The principal laughingly introduced him to me: “Here is our prime minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.” And the man was dressed exactly like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.I said, “He looks like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.”The man said, “Looks like? I am!”Later on the principal told me that the man kept on sending telegrams to government circuit houses: “The prime minister is coming on such and such a date, so keep the best room for him. He will be staying for two days. And inform all the officials.” Many times he had deceived people because in a small village nobody knows Jawaharlal Nehru directly. They have only seen his pictures, and that man was dressed completely like him. He had the same hairstyle, the same cap, the same baskit, the same Mohammedan-style pajama – everything was perfect. And, perhaps because of his mind, his face was also becoming similar to Jawaharlal Nehru’s. He believed it absolutely. There was no doubt about it. He behaved the way Jawaharlal behaved, he walked the way Jawaharlal walked. But he was never caught because he died in a car accident.Another man, who was in the biggest madhouse in India, in Barelli, used to think that he was Jawaharlal Nehru. He was forced into the madhouse, and finally after three years there, he recognized that he was not Nehru – perhaps it was the torture, perhaps the continuous hammering on his mind, “You are not.” He got tired, that’s my feeling, and what happened later on proves my feeling right.Jawaharlal Nehru was going to Barelli for some celebration and he was going to visit the madhouse, to open a new wing which had been newly constructed for more mad people to be accommodated. So the officers thought that since that man had been cured, it would be a good opportunity to give him his release from Jawaharlal’s own hands. So they waited: it was only a matter of a week.When Jawaharlal came, they brought the madman. They introduced him: “This is Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, our prime minister.”The man looked at Jawaharlal Nehru, and he said, “Don’t be worried. It will take three years at least. I used to think exactly the same as you think, but these people are such torturers. Finally I had to accept that I am not, although I know I am. In three years’ time you will also accept you are not Jawaharlal Nehru. Just go in. I am going. Get in! Don’t be worried, it takes only three years to be cured.”Jawaharlal could not understand what to do with this man – he was perfectly logical. He thought, “These people cured him by torturing him, but deep down he knows who he is!”It is said that it happened in England when Churchill was the prime minister… Because of the Second World War there was a curfew in London, and a very strict curfew. Nobody should be seen outside their houses, otherwise they might be shot. There was no question of any inquiry.Churchill used to go for an evening walk. And that day there was such a beautiful sunset – which is very rare in England where the sun only appears once in a while. So he went on sitting on a park bench watching the beautiful sunset, and he forgot about the curfew. Suddenly as the sun went down beneath the horizon he realized that he was late. It was already past the time when he should have been inside his house, which was still at least a mile away. And the strict orders, his orders, were that anybody seen out of their house after six o’clock had to be shot. He would be shot.He looked for wherever he could enter, any house – and anybody would give him shelter knowing that he was Winston Churchill, “our prime minister, our savior.” So he knocked on the first house. It happened to be a madhouse. A man opened the door, and Churchill said, “I am sorry to disturb you. I am Winston Churchill. You must know about me, I am the prime minister of England.”The man simply grabbed him. Churchill said, “What are you doing?”The man said, “Shut up! There are already six Winston Churchills here. Come in!”He said, “I tell you, I am really Winston Churchill.”The man said, “Don’t say anything. They all say the same thing. And I am putting you in with them. Soon you will know who is real.”There was no way to get out. There was a danger of being shot dead, it was better to rest in the madhouse. And he was put with those six fat guys, smoking the same kind of cigar as you always see Churchill smoking. When the seventh Churchill entered, they all waved to him…[To the accompaniment of laughter, Osho raises his right arm with two fingers extended in a V]…the Victory sign: “Welcome guy! Come in.”He saw this was a strange place. They all looked like him. They were fat and puffed-up, and smoking cigars and giving him the Victory sign. He tried hard, the whole night the discussion went on. He told them, “You people are mad. I am the real…” They all laughed.One of them said, “Everybody here is real. Unreal Churchills don’t exist.”Churchill tried: “Don’t you recognize me?”They said, “Don’t you recognize us? We are very happy to have you. Six of us were already here, you are the seventh. More will be coming! But all are real. Nobody is unreal.”His whole night he was tortured by those six Churchills continuously smoking and talking the way Churchill used to talk, about war affairs and programs of how to defeat Hitler. Churchill was silent. “What to do with these idiots?”And they nagged him, “Why are you sitting silently? If you are the real Churchill, join in and discuss the problems of the country with us. The country is in danger and you are sitting silently. And you think you are the real Churchill?”Later on Churchill said, “Once in a while in the night I had a doubt: if these people are so certain, who knows? Maybe I am mad – because I am also certain, there is no difference, they are also certain. They seem to be more absolutely certain than I am. I sometimes hesitated, maybe…”In the morning he phoned parliament. “Send people to convince this jailer.” They were all worried because the whole night they had been searching for him all over London. Where had he gone? The whole of England was dependent on Churchill’s methodology to defeat Adolf Hitler. “Where has he gone? Is it some conspiracy of Adolf Hitler, has he abducted him?”So when he phoned, people immediately came and told the jailer, “You are an idiot. You tortured our prime minister.”He said, “Just come in, and see that there are seven of them. I am not at fault; they all say the same thing. This man was also saying the same thing. How am I to decide who is real? Come in.”And when those people went in, they could not believe their eyes. They said, “You are right, we are sorry. But this man is the real Churchill. We are taking him out.” And they were high officials of the parliament, so the jailer agreed.Those six others said, “What is the matter? That phony fellow has been taken out. We are real Churchills – not one, six! – but nobody cares…”It has been the experience in many countries… Ego is insane. If there is no God, the egoist can think of himself as God. But this can happen only if you are not acquainted with meditation. Meditation simply dissolves into the cosmos. You are no more, only existence is.This is the time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh…A new young priest, Father Fever, has just arrived at the Holy Saints of Sackcloth Monastery. After a couple of weeks he is feeling so disturbed by sexual fantasies that he goes to see the father superior, old Father Fornicate, aged ninety-five.“Ah, Father,” cries Fever, “I am deeply troubled by impure thoughts, and sexual temptations come crowding into my mind – things like doggie-style and sixty-nine, French ticklers and satin panties with pictures of Jesus on them! The more I try to resist them, the more they crowd into my mind.”“Hmm,” says Father Fornicate, adjusting his robe. “So what would you like to know?”“Well,” replies Father Fever, perspiring, “you are ninety-five years old and one of the most ancient relics of the church. Tell me, how old do you have to be before you are released from the lusts of the flesh?”“Hmm,” says Father Fornicate, eyeing the young priest. “It takes many years of self-torture and holy prayer before your mind is cleaned of all such wickedness.”“Really?” asks the young priest. “How many years?”“Well,” replies old Fornicate with a sigh, “I can tell you that it is more than ninety-five!”Newton Hooton gets into Dingle Dilda’s New York taxi to go across town, and finds himself being thrown around inside the car as Dingle races through the streets.“Hey! Slow down!” shouts Newton, when he finally manages to catch hold of something, “or you will get us both into the hospital!”“You don’t need to worry, mister,” replies Dingle. “I have just got out of hospital after being there for eighteen months, and I don’t intend going back!”“Ah! I am sorry,” says Newton, feeling reassured. “You were in hospital for eighteen months – that must have been awful! Were you badly injured?”“Nope! Not a scratch,” replies Dingle. “It was a mental hospital!”Peter Pumper gets onto the famous TV game show, “Primal Passions,” and wins his way to the final round.“Okay, Mister Pumper,” says Monty Mount, the emcee, “for the big, sixty-four thousand dollar question, which subject do you choose?”“I choose ‘Sexual Techniques,’” replies Peter, excitedly.“Good,” shouts Monty, “and in addition, you are allowed to choose any expert to help you answer the questions.”“I have brought with me the famous French sexologist, Andre Perverse,” replies Peter Pumper, confidently.The audience gasps with approval.“Right!” shouts Monty. “Now enter the soundproof box together, and prepare to answer the big question on sexual techniques. You have exactly one minute to answer. The question is: You are in bed with your mistress, and you have exactly three kisses to arouse her to the max! Where would you place the first kiss?”“On the lips!” cries Peter, without a second’s hesitation.“Correct!” shouts Monty, “And where would you place the second kiss?”There is a pause as Peter thinks for a moment. But then he shouts, “On the back of the neck!”“Correct!” shouts Monty. The audience howls with approval.“Now,” continues Monty, “for the third and final part of the question – for sixty-four thousand dollars, where would you place the third kiss?”Perspiration pours down Peter’s face. He is in trouble as the music plays louder and louder and time ticks away. In desperation, Peter turns to his partner, Andre Perverse, and says, “Andre! You must help me!”But the Frenchman shakes his head frantically. “Do not ask me, mon ami,” replies Andre. “In my mind I have already been wrong twice!”Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent…Close your eyes, and feel your bodies to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to turn in. Gather all your energy, your total consciousness, and with an urgency as if this is going to be the last moment of your life, rush toward your very center of being.Faster and faster…Deeper and deeper…As you come closer to your very center, a great silence descends over you. It is falling like soft rain.A little more, closer, and a totally new experience…Flowers of peace, flowers of serenity, flowers of absolute tranquillity are growing all around you.Just one step more and you are at the very center of your being, absolutely drunk with the divine, surrounded by an aura of ecstasy. You are facing your original face for the first time. The face of the buddha is just a symbol, it is really everybody’s face, the ultimate face.The only quality the buddha has… All the buddhas, past, present, future are bound to have only one quality – witnessing, awareness.Just witness you are not the body. Witness you are not the mind. And witness you are only a witness.You are just a buddha, utterly innocent, beyond mind, a pure space, infinite and eternal.To make your witnessing deeper, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax…Let go, the same way as the flowers fall down from the trees – with easy heart, no tension, no anxiety. Settled at the center you are in tune with existence, your heartbeat is the heartbeat of the whole universe.At this moment you are the most blessed people on the earth, because there is no other splendor in existence greater than you are in this moment.Rejoice in this beautiful moment.Rejoice in this authentic and original experience.Rejoice that you are so blessed to be so close to existence itself. And gather all these experiences before Nivedano calls you back.You have to bring them from the center to the circumference of your life. You have to live a life of grace, beauty, joy, blissfulness, ecstasy – in every moment, around the clock.Whether awake or asleep you are the buddha and all that belongs to the buddha – the witnessing, the ecstasy, the rejoicing, the blissfulness, the utter drunkenness that comes to you. When you reach to your center you have reached to the very center of existence.You are drowned in the juices of life, and nourished.Collect all this experience and remember that you have to persuade the buddha to come with you.These are the three steps of meditation: first the buddha comes behind you as a shadow. But the shadow is fragrant, the shadow has tremendous solidity, the shadow is not a shadow but the presence – very tangible, you can touch it, you can feel it. It is almost behind you; its warmth, its compassion, its light will all be showering on you.The second step: you become the shadow, and buddha comes in front of you. Your shadow slowly, slowly fades away because your personality is nothing but a false idea, an imagination, a fiction, a lie.And as your shadow disappears your being becomes one with the buddha. That is the third and the final step.The moment you become the buddha, you have come back home. That day will be the most fortunate day of all your lives. You have lived for many lives, in many ways, in many bodies, and you have been missing and missing and missing. This time, make it clear to yourself you are not going to miss: you have to become enlightened. You have to achieve the highest peak and the deepest depth of your being.This is the very purpose of me calling your hidden secret, your hidden splendor, to the surface.God is dead, now only Zen is the living truth.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back, but very slowly, very peacefully, very silently, as if there is no one in the auditorium.Just sit silently for a few seconds to remember the path you have followed, to remember all that great space, those beautiful moments when your heart was in tune with the heart of the universe, those few rare moments when your whole life was eternal.And feel the buddha, his warmth, his compassion, his presence. It is just behind you.The day is not far away. You will take the second step and you will take the third step. These ten thousand people are going to become ten thousand buddhas in their own right.Okay, Maneesha?Yes, Osho.

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God is Dead Now Zen is 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

God is Dead Now Zen is 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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On one occasion Seigen commented to Sekito, “Some say that an intelligence comes from the south of the Ling.”Sekito said, “There is no such intelligence from anybody.”Seigen said, “If not, whence are all those sutras of the tripitaka?”Sekito said, “They all come out of here, and there is nothing wanting.”On Seigen’s death, Sekito went to Mount Nangaku. Finding a large, flat rock, he built a hut, and from thenceforward came to be known as “Stonehead,” and later, when he was a master, as “Stonehead Osho.”Hearing of Sekito living on a rock, the master, Nangaku, sent a young monk to him, saying, “Go to the east and examine in detail the monk sitting on the stone-head. If he is the monk who came the other day, address him. And if he replies, you recite to him the following song, ‘You are sitting so proudly on the stone, it is better to come to me.’“The attendant monk went to Sekito and recited this song. Sekito replied, “Even if you cried tears of sorrow, I would never ever cross over the hills.”The monk came back and made a report to Nangaku. Nangaku said, “This monk will surely make the mouth of the people tremble for generations.”Friends, a few questions from the sannyasins. The first question:Osho,My deepest pain is that of being an outsider, that I don't belong here in this life, that I am essentially wrong, and death is just waiting to claim me unmercifully. That sense of belonging here, of valuing myself and being valued by existence, and thus letting myself live and celebrate fully eludes me. Is this feeling the result of God-oriented religions?The God-oriented religions are bound to create such a feeling. It is absolutely, necessarily so because they are giving you lies as consolation. As man has gone beyond his primitive states of consciousness – he is more intelligent today – he can see the myth of God. He has lived with the lie as if it was the truth, and he was content. But now that he is intelligent and he can see the falsity of the whole religious lie, a great problem arises for him. God is dead. Man’s consolation is destroyed. He feels utterly empty, he has no relationship with existence.God used to be the fulfillment of one’s life, somebody who was caring, somebody who was forgiving, somebody who was compassionate. There being no God, suddenly you feel yourself an outsider to existence. But this is a good beginning, don’t take it wrongly.Every lie taken away will leave an empty space for some time. You can use this empty space to become miserable. Misery will fill it: you can make this space anguish, anxiety, suffering, pain. But it is up to you. You can make this empty space a new beginning, a new door: God is dead, now you have to search for truth on your own; nobody can give it to you. This emptiness should become a door going inward.The moment you enter to the center of your being, you are no longer an outsider. For the first time you are the insider. God was keeping you outside the truth, outside existence. God was keeping you simply consoled, but consolations are of no help. You need a transformation of being, you need to use your emptiness joyfully because it opens a door to the eternal space. It opens a door into your very roots, which are in existence. It suddenly makes you feel at home with the trees, with the birds, with human beings, with stars – with everything around you. The whole cosmos is your very home.So it all depends on how you use your emptiness. The so-called Western existentialists are using it wrongly. They are filling it with misery, anxiety, tension, dread, anguish, angst. First you were full of lies, fictions; at least they were consoling, at least they were giving you some hope, some connectedness with existence. But existentialism is using your emptiness in an even worse way than the religions have used it.Religions used it to exploit you. Then they were giving you consolation. And there is a price to everything, so they were exploiting you, but you were feeling perfectly happy for centuries because God was in heaven and everything was all right – he would take care of you.This consolation was false; it was not going to change you, it was not going to make you a buddha, it was not going to make you awakened, enlightened. It was not in favor of your spiritual growth – but at least it was keeping you without anxiety, without anguish, without meaninglessness; you were feeling at home. That feeling was a dream.Now that the dream is destroyed, you suddenly feel you are alone: there is no God and you don’t know any other way of relating with existence. Your old programming has failed. You need a new insight. You need, instead of prayer, meditation; instead of God, your own consciousness. A pillar of consciousness is going to fill your being. And this will not be a consolation; it will be authentic contentment, it will relate you with existence. You will not feel at all an outsider.Do you think I feel at all an outsider? I am as deeply involved with existence as one can be. The whole existence has become my very being, my heart is dancing with the heartbeat of the universe.God was preventing this happening, this tremendous phenomenon of transformation. God was not a friend to you; God was the greatest enemy. And the priests have been exploiting you.Now that intelligence understands there is no God, there is bound to be a small gap in which either you have to choose Western existentialism – which is not authentic, it is accidentalism – or you have to look inward the same way as every awakened being has looked. You have to stop looking toward the sky. You have to close your eyes and look toward the inner space from where you are connected with existence. Immediately the emptiness will disappear – not only emptiness, you will disappear and then only a dance remains, a celebration of this whole universe.You are absolutely one with it, there is no question of even being an insider. There arises a great oneness. You suddenly see yourself in various manifestations: in the trees, in the flowers, in the clouds, in the stars, you are everywhere. The moment you disappear you are the whole existence – blossoming, flying; all the greenness, all the mountains, all the snow, all the rivers, all the oceans. You are spread everywhere. This state is the state of a buddha. This is true liberation.So you are feeling yourself an outsider. This is good! This is the transitory period; now you have to be alert not to fill yourself with pain and misery. Now that God is no longer there, who is going to console you?You don’t need any consolation. Humanity has come of age. Be a man, be a woman, and stand on your own feet.For millennia you have been crippled because of God, because of the whole priesthood. They never wanted you to be healthy and whole. Their whole profession was dependent on your misery, pain. They were the people who were covering your misery and pain and giving you hope – and hope is an empty word.Karl Marx is right when he says religion is the hope of the hopeless. But the hope was just like a carrot hanging in front of you. You never reach it, but it is so close it feels you are going to – if not today then tomorrow, if not tomorrow then the day after tomorrow. The carrot is always hanging in front of you.A Sufi story says:A man has purchased a cow, and he was not accustomed to dealing with cows. So he was trying to drag the cow along holding the cow’s horns, and the cow was very resistant. Obviously this man was new. She wanted to go to her home, she wanted to go to her old owner.A Sufi mystic was watching. He said to the man, “It seems you are very new; you don’t know how to deal with cows. This is not the right way.”The man said, “What should I do? – because I am not that strong, the cow is stronger; she is dragging me with her.”The mystic gave him some beautiful green grass, and told him, “Let go of her horns. Take this grass and just move ahead of her. Keep the grass very close, but don’t allow her to eat it. As she moves toward the grass, go on moving toward your home.”And it worked.The cow went because the grass was so close and so green and so fresh. She forgot all about the owner; the immediate problem was how to get this grass. And it was so close, just hanging in front of her eyes. But the man went on moving slowly, the distance between the cow and the grass remained the same. And she entered into the house of the new owner, and he closed the door.Religions have been hanging carrots in front of you. Those hopes are never fulfilled, they are hopeless. Those promises are empty.When I destroy your hopes and your expectations and your ideas of God and your relationship with the world, naturally there is bound to be a small gap before you choose the right path. And the right path is not the existentialism of the West. The right path is the meditation that the East has been using for centuries and has completely worked out into a science. You move inward.God was preventing it because he was outside. Your prayer was toward the God who was not there. You are here. There is no need of any evidence that you are here, there is no need for any argument to prove that you are here, so why not explore this hereness, this presence that you are, this consciousness that you are? Why not explore it?Those who have explored it have never come back saying they are outsiders. They have not even said that they are insiders because even an insider is separate. They have come out and declared, “Aham brahmasmi!” – I am the whole, “Ana’l haq!” – I am the truth, I am existence itself. There is no question of outsider or insider. Those are two sides of the same coin. The whole coin is dropped, suddenly you find yourself one with the cosmic dance, a tremendous rhythm in which you disappear as a separate personality and you become one with the whole.Every wave in the ocean for a moment thinks it is an outsider, it does not belong to the ocean. The next moment it disappears into the ocean. You will disappear in the ocean of consciousness the same way – you are just a wave. It does not matter that you have existed for seventy years. Perhaps you have become frozen and all that is needed is melting. Every day I am saying, “Melt, melt, melt like ice melting and become one with the ocean that surrounds you. You are living in the very ocean.”I have told you about a young, very revolutionary fish. She started asking every other fish, “Where is the ocean? I have been hearing so much about it.”No fish could answer. They said, “You will have to find some wise fish, some enlightened fish maybe, but we don’t know where this ocean is. We have also heard about it, and we believe it must be somewhere when everybody says so. And for centuries our forefathers have been saying the ocean is. So we believe in it.”Then an old mystic fish got hold of the young fish and said, “You idiot! You are in the ocean. You are the ocean! You are born of the ocean, and you will disappear in the ocean, and you will live in the ocean. You are just a wave that is a little more solid – but you will disappear in the ocean.”This is the ocean in which you are living. Around you there is – just like air – the cosmic consciousness. You can’t see it, but it is continuously nourishing you. Your consciousness is nourished by the cosmic consciousness just as your heart is beating because of your breathing. The air that you cannot see is continuously giving you oxygen, keeping your body alive.But you are not only body. Behind the body is your hidden splendor, the consciousness. That too needs nourishment continuously. And all around you just like air…Once you are empty, just wait a little. Don’t take any decision. And suddenly you will feel a new rush – energy coming into you, from inside, from outside. You will suddenly feel you are surrounded with consciousness and you are melting into it. And then comes the realization: “I was just ignorant about myself and the existence in which I am living, which has given me birth and which is going to be my ultimate home. I have to disperse in this home.”But it always happens that there is a small period when you are very shaky.The other night I was talking to you about Gurdjieff and his method of working on the energy systems. He divided energy into the first layer, which is very small, enough for day-to-day affairs. The second layer is bigger. If the first layer is finished and you continue, the second layer will suddenly start functioning. And if you continue to exhaust the second layer – which is very difficult, it takes months, sometimes years to exhaust it – then the third layer which is cosmic, inexhaustible, starts functioning. But Gurdjieff’s method is very old, very primitive.But a coincidence happened… Avirbhava was shopping in Singapore that night, and she was feeling tired, utterly tired, and a moment came when she felt she could not go on any longer. But she wanted to finish and come back soon, so she went on and on and on.She has come back with eighteen suitcases filled with shopping! She’s the great shopper here, and she shops for me.So she went on and on. Then she suddenly felt a tremendous new energy arising that she had never known before, and she was as fresh as the morning dew.When she came back here and she related it to Kaveesha, she said, “This is a strange coincidence!” because that night I had been discussing these three layers of energy.The energy of the cosmos is surrounding you. All that is needed is a certain emptiness in you. So the emptiness is good. Don’t fill it with beliefs, don’t fill it again with another kind of God, another philosophy, some existentialism. Don’t fill it. Leave it clean and fresh, and go deeper.Soon you will find from both sides, from outside and inside, a tremendous rush of energy, a tremendous rush of consciousness, and you disappear, you are almost flooded with the cosmos. You are so small and the cosmos is so vast; you suddenly disappear into it, and that disappearance is the ultimate experience of enlightenment. Then you know you were neither an outsider nor an insider. You are one with existence.Other than oneness with existence, nothing is going to help. But that oneness is so easy, so obvious. Just a little relaxation, just a little turning in – not much effort, not much discipline, not much torture for yourself.It is good that you are feeling like an outsider because God is no longer filling the space and you are feeling disconnected with the universe. It is good. It only means that false connections have been removed.It happened one day…Mulla Nasruddin was sitting in his office waiting for some customers. A man came in, and Mulla Nasruddin started talking to him about the things he was selling. In the middle of it, he did not give the man a chance to say anything, he just waved his hand, “Sit down!” and picked up the telephone and started talking about millions. “One million dollars, that’s okay. Yes, take it!”At that moment the man could not resist the temptation. He said, “Wait a minute! I have come from the telephone company to connect the telephone.”The telephone was not connected. That one-million-dollar purchase was just show business!You are feeling disconnected because your connections were false. In fact, there were no connections, and you were talking to God – on the phone, direct line! I have suddenly made you aware that your telephone is not connected. To whom are you talking? All your prayers are before a telephone that is not connected. The only way to be connected with existence is to go inward because there, at the center, you are still connected.You have been disconnected physically from your mother. That disconnection was absolutely necessary to make you an individual in your own right. But you are not disconnected from the universe. Your connection with the universe is of consciousness. You cannot see it; you have to go deep down with great awareness, watchfulness, witnessing, and you will find the connection. The buddha is the connection.The second question:Osho,Is monotheism a necessary step in human evolution, or is it just an invention of the priests?Monotheism is a far more dangerous device of the priests than polytheism. In a monotheistic religion there is no possibility for a buddha to be born. It is not part of evolution, it is preventing your evolution.All the religions born outside of India – Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism – are monotheistic. Mohammed gives it perfect definition: one God, one prophet, one holy Koran. This is a very dictatorial type of religion, naturally dangerous because it is very intolerant. The Jewish God himself says, “I am a very intolerant God. I am very jealous, I will not allow you to worship any other God.”Monotheism is a far more efficient way of exploiting people. Hinduism is polytheistic; it has as many gods as you can think of. When Hinduism came into existence, there used to be thirty-three million people in India. Hinduism has exactly thirty-three million gods. This seems to be far more democratic – everybody has a god of his own! Rather than worshipping somebody else’s god, it is far better to have your own private god. There is no conflict.No Hindu scripture says, “One God, one scripture, one prophet.” All Hindu scriptures say there are as many gods as there are people. That’s why Hinduism is very inefficient. It has to be: it is not an army; it does not have a pope, it does not have any organized central body. It is a very disorganized chaos, so there is every freedom for everybody.Somebody becomes a Mahavira; Hinduism has no objection. Somebody becomes a Buddha; Hinduism has no objection. Both were born as Hindus, both went against the Hindus. There is no problem because there is no central body to appoint a court, a grand jury, to judge whether Mahavira is authentic as he does not believe in God. His whole effort is that you should develop your consciousness to the ultimate peak: everybody is a god.Mahavira’s interpretation of thirty-three million gods was that there are thirty-three million people, who are all going to become gods one day when they evolve to the highest peak. It is a probability: there are not yet thirty-three million gods, but thirty-three million potential gods. That gives a great freedom. And there is no need of any priest; you have your private god on a direct line.But Christianity, a monotheist religion, will not allow any buddha; hence it has remained poor in consciousness. Its religion looks very primitive. It is based on fictions. Nothing has been contributed by monotheistic religions to the world except war, because the Mohammedan God cannot tolerate the Jewish God, nor can it tolerate the Christian God, nor can it tolerate the Hindu gods. It has to kill all those gods and the believers in those gods: “Only one God.”So when Mohammedans came to India they destroyed millions of beautiful temples which had been made over the centuries by great sculptors. They destroyed millions of statues, beautiful statues of Buddha, Mahavira, and other Jaina tirthankaras. Whatever is left is a very small amount. Perhaps some temple was left because it was hidden deep in the forest…In every village you will find that when the Mohammedans came, people just threw their gods, beautiful statues, into the wells just to protect them from the Mohammedans; otherwise they would have destroyed the statues. So in every village – it happens often – you will find, in summertime when the water goes down, a Buddha arising, and people pull the Buddha out. He has been lying in the well for centuries, but he has been protected. People had forgotten because those who had thrown the statues in had died centuries before.Mohammedans came two thousand years ago, and they destroyed everything. They could not tolerate it: their God was intolerant, how can they be tolerant? Monotheism is the ugliest religion in the world because it is intolerant. Intolerance creates violence.Christians have crusades, Mohammedans have jihads – religious wars. India has never known any religious war. It is everybody’s choice to have a god or not to have a god; even the atheists were not burned.A great philosophy of Charvakas flourished for centuries. Charvakas believe there is no God, there is no soul – what Marx said five thousand years later. They say that the soul is just a by-product of five elements that constitute the body. The founder of the Charvaka religion was Acharya Brihaspati – and it is strange that Acharya Brihaspati is mentioned in the Vedas with great respect.This is tolerance. It is your choice, you are free to choose your path; you are free to choose, if you want, even a religion that has no God, even a religion which has no soul. Charvakas were the perfect atheists. Their whole philosophy was, “Eat, drink, and be merry because there is no hell, no heaven, no God. And don’t be worried because there is no judgment day and there is nobody to judge.” So sinners and saints all disappear into five elements.In India you will see people chewing pan. Brihaspati has used the symbol of pan because if you chew the pan leaf separately, it will not make your lips red, and if you chew all the things that are put in the pan separately, your lips will not be red. But put them together and your lips become red. The redness of your lips is a by-product of the five elements making up the pan. It is not an independent thing, it is just a combination of five elements together. This was a simple example by the Charvakas, but even they were respected, even the Vedas mention Brihaspati as a great master, an acharya.Such tolerance is possible only in a polytheistic religion. When there are so many gods, you have a variety of choice, you have a certain freedom. When there is one God you don’t have any freedom.According to me, monotheism is far worse than polytheism. The polytheism of the Hindus allowed for buddhas, tirthankaras, Charvakas, without any problem. Although they were against Hinduism, still nobody was crucified. Even Brihaspati was not crucified, but is mentioned with great respect in the Vedas. He has the freedom to think, to say, to create a philosophy of his own.Basically the name was not charvak, it was charuvak. There is a great difference. Charuvak means sweet words. The philosophy of Brihaspati was of sweet words. He was taking away all fear – there is no God, no heaven, no hell – he was taking away all kinds of dread. Death is the end, birth is the beginning; in the middle is a small life. Enjoy it, and enjoy it even if you have to borrow money. Don’t be worried because after death nobody is going to tell you, “Give me my money back.”His sentence is: “Rinam kritva ghritam pivet.” Even if you have to borrow money, don’t be worried: borrow money, drink ghee. Ghee is the most refined part of milk. When butter is refined, it becomes ghee. You cannot go beyond ghee; that is the last thing. And you cannot go backward either, neither forward nor backward. You have come to a full stop.So, significantly, he is saying that this life is the full stop. You are not going anywhere. Just enjoy it. It does not matter what means you employ, what matters is your enjoyment. And life is so short, don’t waste it in unnecessary fears that you will suffer in hell. Don’t waste it in unnecessary greed that you will be rewarded in heaven. Don’t bother about right and wrong. The only right thing is to enjoy! Even this man is respected, but slowly, slowly the word charuvak became in the masses’ mind charvak. Charvak means one who goes on eating continuously – just chewing twenty-four hours like a buffalo, like monkeys – because that was actually his teaching: eat, drink, be merry.Nor was Gautam Buddha crucified, although he declared that all the Vedas are false. He declared that the whole of Brahmanism, the priesthood of the Hindus, has been exploiting people. He declared that the Hindu caste system was wrong, that every man is born equal. But he was not crucified. Even Hindu philosophers used to go and listen to him. In fact, all his disciples were basically Hindu. Finding that they have only words and this man had experience, great Hindu scholars came to debate with him and became his disciples. From where else could he have found thousands of disciples? With such a tremendous urge to find the truth, it does not matter from whom it comes.The monotheistic religions – Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism – have been the most dangerous religions in the world. Buddhism has not killed a single person in twenty-five centuries. It has never attacked anybody, and it has spread all over Asia, converted the whole of Asia just by a simple experience.It was difficult to confront a Bodhidharma. Even the Emperor Wu of China could not manage to stand up straight in front of Bodhidharma. And Bodhidharma said to him, “You are an idiot!” He called the emperor of China an idiot because he asked: “I have been putting my whole energy, and my whole power and my whole treasure at the disposal of the Buddhist monks. Thousands of monks are here translating scriptures of Buddha into Chinese, and they are all my guests. I have opened many monasteries. I have made many temples for Buddha. What is going to be my reward?”Just the word reward was enough, and Bodhidharma said, “You are an idiot! If you have been doing all this for a reward, you will fall into the deepest hell.”The emperor was shocked. But Bodhidharma said, “The very idea of reward is nothing but greed. You are greedier than ordinarily greedy people. Those who are collecting money know perfectly well that when they die their bank balance is not going with them, nor is their money going with them. But you are really greedy, so greedy that you are trying to make a bank balance in the other world of which you know nothing. Obviously you are an idiot and I am not going to enter into your empire. I had come with that idea, but when the emperor is an idiot it is proof enough of the kind of people you must have there.”He refused to enter. He remained outside the boundary of China in a small temple. And when he was dying, Emperor Wu said to his people, his prime minister, “Write on my grave that I am really an idiot. I could not understand the great buddha who had come in the form of Bodhidharma. He was right. I have lived a wrong life of greed and fear.”Buddha’s word spread all over Asia from Sri Lanka to Korea. There was no clash, there was no fight. At the most there were beautiful discussions, very nice, civilized, cultured.The sword cannot prove that you are right, neither can crucifixion prove that Jesus was wrong. I always think that Judaism had such great rabbis, scholars, couldn’t they convince Jesus, a young man, only thirty-three years of age? But the problem is they were only scholars, there was not a single man who really knew the truth. And this man was claiming something that they could not argue against – because there is no way to argue against it. Jesus is saying, “I am the prophet you have been waiting for.” And they certainly had been waiting, they are still waiting; they will wait forever. It is waiting for Godot.When the book of Waiting for Godot came to me for the first time, I thought this Godot seems to be a parody on the word God. My ancient-most German sannyasin, Haridas, was there. So I asked Haridas, “Do you think Godot is German for God?” He said, “No. The German for God is Gott!”I said, “That’s great! Already gott – there is no need to wait!” I said, “That’s perfectly okay. When you have gott it, what is the point of waiting?” I love the idea. God is so far away, Gott is simply appealing.You are asking whether monotheism is a necessary step. No, not at all. It is an absolutely unnecessary step, and not only unnecessary, but dangerous. It has created only violence, murder. Living people have been burned in the name of a monotheistic God. One God will not allow you to believe in another God.Polytheism is also an invention of priests, but far more liberal. Monotheism is the invention of the priests, but dictatorial. It gives you commandments, as if you are an army and you need commandments. Buddha does not have any commandments, nor does Mahavira. They persuade you; they don’t command, they don’t humiliate you. They respect you, they know that your hidden potential is the same as theirs.Gautam Buddha relates this about his past life. He heard that a man had become enlightened. He was not very much interested, but just out of curiosity… The man had come to the town where he lived. He was very young and was not at all interested in enlightenment or spirituality, but out of curiosity: “What is this enlightenment? Let us see.” He went to see the man.He had no desire to bow down to him, but when he saw the man, he was so luminous, had such a grace, such a tremendous presence, that in spite of himself he touched his feet. He became aware when he was touching his feet, “What am I doing? I had come just to be a spectator.”When you really face a man who knows, a gratitude arises spontaneously. It is not an effort.It was not an effort at all. He had not even come with touching his feet in mind; he had come just to be a spectator. But seeing the man was enough. He forgot himself; this man’s presence was so overwhelming. Such beauty! His eyes as deep as a lake; so clean, so clear. He fell in love with that man immediately. While touching his feet he thought, “What am I doing? It has happened on its own.”But a bigger miracle was awaiting him. As he stood up, the man who had become enlightened bowed down and touched this young man’s feet. Buddha said, “What are you doing? You are a great awakened one. It is absolutely right for me to touch your feet, although I had not come with that desire – but it was spontaneous, you touched my heart – but why are you touching my feet? I am nobody, I don’t know even the ABC of enlightenment.”That man said, “You don’t know this life yet. There was a time I was also just like you. I had no idea who I was. Now I know. I have come to my flowering. And I know you will come to your flowering. Don’t forget! I have touched your feet so that when you become a buddha you remember, you don’t forget that everybody is a buddha. Somebody has blossomed, somebody is waiting for the right season. And everybody’s spring comes in its own time.”Buddha reminded his disciples again and again, “Never think for a single moment that you are inferior to me. We are all equal. The only difference is – a very slight difference which does not mean much – you are asleep, I am awake. But I was asleep, and you will be awake, so what is the difference?”The difference is only of timing. In the morning I wake up, in the evening you wake up – just twelve hours difference. That does not create any superiority or inferiority. Everybody has to walk according to his pace. Some people run, some people are really fast runners. Some people go slowly, some people take many stops on the way and have a little rest and a cup of tea – maybe an afternoon nap. But everybody is on the way. Somebody is a little further back, somebody is a little forward, but that does not create any question of inferiority or superiority.Buddhism has no priests, Jainism has no priests – because they don’t have God. If you don’t have God, you can’t have priests. Priests are the representatives of the fictitious God; they are the agents between you and God. And priests certainly would like monotheism rather than polytheism.Hindu priests are trying hard to create Hinduism as a monotheistic religion; but they have failed. There are eight shankaracharyas. The original shankaracharya, Adi Shankaracharya, appointed four shankaracharyas. He was the first man to make some effort to organize Hinduism. Before him there was no leader at all; it was just absolute freedom. He made the first efforts to organize Hinduism, He appointed four shankaracharyas for the four directions, so each would rule over one direction. But after his death, four new shankaracharyas popped up, because there are eight directions, not four. So four people popped up on their own; now there are eight shankaracharyas.I was telling one shankaracharya, that they should have two more.He said, “What?”I said, “There are ten directions. Eight you have, then one upward, one downward.”He said, “That’s a great idea. Then we can afford two more!”But these shankaracharyas have no central body, and they cannot have, because somebody is a worshipper of Shiva, somebody is a worshipper of Vishnu, somebody is a worshipper of Krishna, somebody is a worshipper of Brahma. And there are hundreds of smaller gods that people worship too. People worship trees, people worship just stones. Put a red color on any stone and just wait beside it. You will soon find some Hindu coming there, bowing down.When for the first time the British government made roads and milestones, they painted the milestones red because red can be seen from far away. No other color is so sharp or can be seen from far away, so they painted the stones red. And they were very much concerned: Hindu villagers would come and put their flowers and coconuts around the stones and worship.The British said to them, “These are milestones,” and the villagers said, “It does not matter. Any red stone represents God.”You will see trees being worshipped, stones being worshipped. There is a complete freedom to worship. It is far better than monotheism, but I don’t support it. It may be better than monotheism, but it is still poison – a little diluted. It will kill you slowly, but it will kill you certainly.Every religion is destructive of your evolution of consciousness. Monotheism is the most dangerous, but religion as such is dangerous. If you can avoid religion, you can become religious. If you can avoid religion, you can have a direct contact with existence and the cosmos.The third question:Osho,Is it difficult for people to drop God because he is their only hope and they focus all their expectations on him? It seems to be very hard to drop an expectation even when one can see it as such and can guess that most likely it will end up in disappointment.It is true. It is very difficult to drop an expectation, to drop a hope, because you don’t have anything real in your life. You are living only in the hope that tomorrow will be better. You are only living with the expectation that after death you will enjoy the pleasures of paradise eternally. Hence it is difficult to drop the idea of God.But it is God who is preventing you from all the joys and blissfulness and ecstasy right now. You are missing the present in the hope of the future, and the future is not certain. Tomorrow never comes. Have you ever seen tomorrow coming? God is just like tomorrow, always hanging around. It just seems it is coming, it is coming, but what comes is today. Tomorrow never comes. All those hopes never come true. All those expectations finally become frustrations.Why do you see rich people more frustrated than the poor? Just go into the interior parts of India where real poverty exists, and you will not find anybody disappointed. They are hoping for God, and they think their poverty is a fire test, and only the poor will enter into the kingdom of God.That’s why Christianity has such great appeal to the poor people of the world. It gives great consolation. It gives you an expectation which helps you tolerate the present misery, the pain, the present poverty, slavery. Your eyes are focused on the future. And the present goes on passing in misery, but your eyes are no longer focused on the present, so it helps to keep you alive – but just alive; just like vegetables. It keeps you vegetating.A life that cannot dance is not life. It is living at the minimum survival level. A life that cannot sing the song of love and joy is not life. So your expectations and your hopes may make it difficult to drop God, but you have to gather courage and understanding that your hopes and expectations are destroying your whole life. God is just a fiction. It is not going to fulfill anything. God is nowhere.You are, God is not. Existence is, God is not.So look into the isness of things, look into this moment now and here, into yourself. That is the closest door to the cosmos, it opens in your very center. All your expectations will look so poor, and all your hopes will look so ugly when you come to know your tremendous splendor, your godliness; when you realize your freedom and when you realize that the whole cosmos is related to you, deeply related to you, and you are just a great aspiration of the cosmos to reach to the highest point of consciousness.Vincent Van Gogh used to paint trees… Nobody liked his paintings because they were very absurd. His trees went beyond the stars. When asked, “Where have you seen these trees?” he would say, “I have never seen these trees; I have just heard a whisper. I was lying in the shade of a tree, and I just heard the whisper. The earth was saying to the tree, ‘You are my ambition. You are my ambition to reach the stars.’ Since that moment I have started painting my trees going beyond the stars.”He is really a genius. Certainly trees are the ambition of the earth. And what is man’s consciousness? The ambition of the whole of existence to reach to the highest peak, to become a Gautam Buddha.In your becoming a Gautam Buddha the whole existence rejoices. You have fulfilled the expectation of existence. You don’t need to expect anything, you are yourself an expectation of existence. You fulfill it, and you can fulfill it because existence has given you every opportunity and all the potential to fulfill it. Everything is there, you just have to put everything in the right place. And suddenly you will see life is a sheer dance of ecstasy from birth to death, from death to birth. These are small episodes – birth and death – in the eternal flow of life.But unless you drop God, you are going to remain miserable. And misery needs some support from hope, expectation, tomorrows. But this is not living. Do you think living in tomorrow can be called living?Life knows only one moment, and that is the present. Life knows only one space, and that is here. Now and here: these two words are the most significant words in the human language; they represent reality.Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that the hope of happiness is the instrument by which man is manipulated, more than any actual instance of happiness. Do you remember any moment of real happiness in your past life? Just go backward to your childhood. When you were a child, you thought you would be happy when you were older. Every child wants to grow up quickly.I used to live in a house that was just eight or ten houses from a post office. In front of my house was the public park, so it was a very quiet and silent place. I used to go for a walk early in the morning – three o’clock. One day I saw a little boy near the post office with a mustache. I could not believe it. It was dark, but it was full-moon night, so I could see the mustache. And he was smoking a cigarette.I thought, “Perhaps he is a pygmy.” Seeing me the boy moved behind a big tree by the side of the road. So I went behind the tree too.The boy said, “Don’t tell my father.”I said, “I’m not going to tell anybody. I don’t know your father. Who are you?”He said, “My father is the postmaster here; that is the post office.”I said, “What are you doing? You have got a good mustache.”He just pulled the mustache off. He said, “It is not real, but my father has a real mustache and I always want to grow one quickly. But how to grow it quickly? I even shave my mustache when my father is out, but nothing grows. And he shaves twice a day. So I got this mustache from a shop that sells things for people who are playing in a drama.”I said, “You are smoking a cigarette, too.” He was hiding it behind him.He said, “My father always smokes, and while smoking he really looks like a man. So I just thought to give it a try.”In that small boy I saw all the children of the world. Every child wants to grow up fast, because what is childhood? Being ordered by the mother, by the father; being ordered by the teacher, beaten by the parents, beaten by the teacher. Every boy wants, every girl wants just to grow up quickly. Just remember your own childhood.It is absolutely false for people to say, “My childhood was the most beautiful period of my life.” Out of your childhood grows your youth, so if your childhood was the most beautiful period of your life, it should be more beautiful. Out of your youth grows old age – it should be perfection. But that is not the case. When you are a young man you start looking embarrassed. You are young and where is the happiness? Perhaps it is hidden in a woman, or hidden in a man – find a soul mate!Just today I have received information that in Europe there is now a great New Age movement for finding your soul mate. And in their pamphlet they mention my name because once I told you that you cannot find a soul mate. It is a big world, and I don’t think God creates soul mates, or existence creates soul mates. Where are you going to find them? People find each other just in their neighborhood, or in their college. How is existence going to manage to put you and your soul mate in the same college? So that pamphlet condemns me because I am not saying the right thing: everybody has a soul mate.That is a good consolation; but just look at those who have found their soul mates… Zareen is here. She has found a soul mate, and since she has found her soul mate I have never seen her as happy as she was before. And I know her soul mate. He keeps himself locked in his room because he wants, poor fellow, some time to himself. But Zareen is not going to let him be alone – you have to be careful when you have found your soul mate – so she goes on knocking on his door. She jumps balconies to reach the poor fellow. And not to make a fuss – “Everybody will know” – he has to open the door. Then the meeting of the soul mates begins. Both have been miserable since they have met.Anando was telling me because I was asking her why Zareen does not look as happy as she used to be.She said, “She has found a soul mate.”I said, “She should be happier. If the soul mate is not right, bring a group of sannyasins, and put them in a queue before Zareen: ‘Choose your soul mate!’”And you can change every day. Why get bored with one? Just the same sari, the same sari… One gets bored, that is absolutely natural. All soul mates create boredom and nothing else.And here in this place where freedom is the absolutely total value, ultimate value, where change is accepted as life’s way, why should you bother about one soul mate when there are so many soul mates available? Just go on changing, and life will be a joy. And Zareen will again be laughing and smiling. Because of this soul mate she becomes hard and dictatorial on the gate. On whom to take revenge? – because the soul mate always goes to Mumbai, just to have a little freedom.Unnecessary misery. In youth people start thinking, “Perhaps in old age life will be peaceful.” In old age life becomes a constant anxiety. Death is coming closer and closer. So your whole life is wasted just looking ahead.I am reminded of a famous Greek astrologer. Even kings of the different countries of Europe used to consult him about their fate. One night he was walking, looking at the stars. But when you look at the stars you cannot look at the road. You cannot manage to have one eye looking up and one eye looking down – I don’t think it is possible. They both go up, or both go down. So he fell in a well, and then he shouted, screamed, “Save me!”An old woman, living nearby on her farm, came. She was very old, but somehow she managed to pull him out with a rope. And the astrologer said to her, “Do you know who I am? I am the royal astrologer. Almost all the kings and queens of Europe come to me. All the richest people discuss their fate, their future with me. My fee is very high, but because you have saved me you can come to me. I will tell you about your future without any fee.”The old woman laughed. She said, “You cannot even see that the well is ahead of you. Just feel ashamed! Those who have been coming to you must be fools. I am not going to come. You cannot see the well ahead of you, what can you see about my future?”The future is just your hope, expectation. And when this life does not fulfill you, you start looking further, beyond death. All these are fictions just for you to survive somehow. But this survival is not how you are supposed to be. Existence has not given you birth just to live in hopes. You can be really ecstatic this moment, and there is no other moment.Meditation is, Zen is living now and here.The sutra:On one occasion Seigen commented to Sekito, “Some say that an intelligence comes from the south of the Ling.”Sekito said, “There is no such intelligence from anybody.”South of the Ling there was a great scholar, a very wise fellow. So Seigen simply mentioned to his pupil, Sekito, “People …say that an intelligence comes from the south of the Ling.” Sekito said “There is no such intelligence from anybody.”Intelligence arises within you. It never comes from outside, from anybody, from any place, south or north or east or west. It has nothing to do with the outside. It is your inner flowering.Seigen said, “If not, whence are all those sutras of the tripitaka?”If you say that intelligence does not come from the outside, then what about the sutras of Gautam Buddha called tripitaka, the three treasures? From where do they come? What do you say about them?”Sekito said, “They all come out of here…”Remember this word here. We were just talking about the same thing.Sekito said, “They all come out of here, and there is nothing wanting.”Once you are here, there is nothing unfulfilled in you. Everything becomes so fulfilled, such a deep contentment, that you don’t need anything anymore. You have actualized your potential. Your flowers have opened their petals, the spring has come.It all comes from here, it all comes from now. Neither Buddha can give it to you, nor anybody else.On Seigen’s death, Sekito went to Mount Nangaku. Finding a large, flat rock, he built a hut, and from thenceforward came to be known as “Stonehead,” and later, when he was a master, as “Stonehead Osho.”This Mount Nangaku is the place where he had gone to see Master Nangaku.In Japan it has been a tradition that whenever a master lives on a mountain the emperor gives the name of the master to the mountain, so the mountain becomes his memorial. For centuries and centuries people will know that this Mount Nangaku was once the temple and the shelter of a great master, Nangaku.Sekito had gone to see Nangaku to deliver a message, a letter, from Seigen. At that time he must have looked on the beauty of the mountain where Nangaku lived at the top. And when Seigen died, Sekito went to Mount Nangaku. He must have seen, while he was going there and coming back, that the place was immensely beautiful.Nangaku was not right for him. That does not mean that the man was wrong. It simply means they could not feel a certain harmony. He may have been right for someone else, but he was not right for Sekito. Or perhaps Sekito was not right for Nangaku – it means the same thing, but it is not a condemnation of Master Nangaku. It simply means that the two persons did not feel anything as a bridge. But Sekito must have seen the mountain, coming and going from there. It was a beautiful place.So he found a small place, a flat rock on Mount Nangaku. On the top was his monastery. …he built a hut, and from thenceforward came to be known as “Stonehead”… because he was always sitting on a stone. And he used to have – as every Buddhist monk has – his head shaved. So his head looked almost like the rock he was sitting on.You know our Sekito Stonehead? Just look at his head. I have called him “Stonehead, the first Zen master of Germany.” All that he needs is a rock. I will find a beautiful rock for him, so he can enjoy sitting on it. Once he finds the rock, you shall have to address him as “Stonehead Osho.” Right now he is only called “Master Stonehead Niskriya.”Hearing of Sekito living on a rock, the master, Nangaku, sent a young monk to him, saying, “Go to the east and examine in detail the monk sitting on the stone-head. If he is the monk who came the other day, address him. And if he replies, you recite to him the following song, ‘You are sitting so proudly on the stone, it is better to come to me.’“The attendant monk went to Sekito and recited this song. Sekito replied, “Even if you cried tears of sorrow, I would never ever cross over the hills – I am not going to come.”Sekito was absolutely certain that Nangaku was not the man to be his master. There was no feeling of synchronicity. He had not even delivered Seigen’s letter.The monk came back and made a report to Nangaku. Nangaku said, “This monk will surely make the mouth of the people tremble for generations.”It is true. Just look at our “Stonehead Osho.” Even now – after centuries! – he is making people tremble. He used to have a girlfriend, she used to tremble. But since he became a stonehead master, the girlfriend has disappeared. Who can love a stonehead? This is a great protection, particularly in this place where every woman is looking for a boyfriend. Stonehead is absolutely unafraid. Anybody who wants to be unafraid, just become a stonehead because no woman likes a stonehead.Nangaku was right in his estimation. He encountered this fellow when he came to see him, and you remember what he said? Nangaku said, “You should not be so arrogant in asking the question. You should be more moderate, you should be more humble.”Sekito said to him, “I would rather go into hellfire for eternity than to change my question.” And the reason was that no question can be humble. Every question is deep down a doubt, and every question is an interference into the master’s silence. It is arrogant. And he left immediately without delivering the letter.Nangaku had seen this man before, so when he sent the messenger he told him, “Take care. If this is the same fellow who came the other day, recite this sutra. Tell him to come to me rather than sitting on that stone, and report to me what he says.”And what did he say? He said, “I am not going to leave this place, even if you come with tears in your eyes.”Nangaku must have immediately remembered that this was the same man who was ready to go to eternal hell, but would not ask the question in a different way. That’s why he made this comment: “This monk will surely make the mouth of the people tremble for generations.”And Sekito became the master of hundreds of people who became enlightened. He was a very hard master, almost dangerous to the disciples, but all his hardness came from a very loving heart, a very deep compassion. He wanted them to become enlightened. He did not allow them to escape.Once in a while a disciple may escape and Sekito would follow him for miles and pull him back, “Where are you going? Come back!”And the disciple would say, “Just forgive me, I am tired” – because he would beat the disciples, he would jump on the disciples.Once he threw a disciple from the window of a second-story building, and jumped on top of him. The disciple had multiple fractures, and Sekito was sitting on his chest asking, “Got it?” And the disciple really got it! He became enlightened. Who cares about multiple fractures? The real thing is enlightenment. It has to happen at any cost.People had never come across a man like Sekito, whose compassion was so great. He was ready to do anything. Even in his old age he would hit so hard that his own hand would hurt. And disciples would say, “You are getting old now, Master, you should not hit people so hard because they are young and you are old. You are becoming more fragile every day.”He would say, “I know. My hand hurts the whole night, but I cannot see somebody groping in the darkness. If just one hit can make him awake, it does not matter if my hand hurts the whole night. Sooner or later these hands will disappear into the earth, but if these hands can help somebody to wake up… You think I am getting old; that is true, but as far as I am concerned, even when I am dead, if I see someone stumbling in the darkness, I will jump out of my grave and hit him as hard as I can.”This man was a rare master, apparently very hard, deep down so soft that he was ready to jump out of his grave. My feeling is, if he had done that – he has never done that – just his skeleton would have made the person enlightened. There would not have been any need to hit. The person would have shouted immediately, “Got it! Just go back into the grave.”Issa wrote:Pearls of the dew!In every single one of themI see my home.These Zen poets have transcended all the poetry of the world, because all poetry is mind fabrication; only haikus come from no-mind.“Pearls of the dew! In every single one of them I see my home.” And when you can see in every dewdrop your home, how can you feel an outsider or insider? You simply become one with existence. This whole existence is so deeply one at the center. Only on the circumference are we different.Draw a big circle. On the circumference of the circle you can put points which are different. Then from every point draw a line toward the center. As those lines start coming closer to the center, you will find they are coming closer to each other also. And at the center all the lines meet.So when I say go to your center, I am not only sending you to your center, it is the center of the whole existence. There, we all meet. There, it is only one oceanic consciousness.Maneesha’s question:Osho,Nietzsche's foreword to his book, The Antichrist, begins, “This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living yet. Possibly they are the readers who understand my Zarathustra… Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.”To understand him, Nietzsche continues, one must have “New ears for new music, new eyes for the most distant things.”Beloved master, do you find in us the capacity for those “new ears,” those “new eyes?”Maneesha, everybody has the capacity, but the capacity has to be transformed into reality. It is only a potential. And I am working to give you that transformation where your potential ears become your reality, where your potential eyes become your reality.Perhaps Nietzsche is talking about you. This is the day after tomorrow. And your meditation will make your ears sensitive enough, your eyes clear enough.If you can understand me, there is no difficulty in understanding Friedrich Nietzsche because Nietzsche is only mind. I am no-mind. If you can understand me, you have far better ears and far better eyes than Nietzsche was thinking about. Your meditation is going to open all your sensitivity, your receptivity. Nietzsche will not be difficult for you to understand.Meditation will make you capable of understanding not only Nietzsche, but those great buddhas who are not born yet. You will be able to understand all the buddhas of the past, of the present, of the future, because their song is one, their music is one. It is the music that arises out of deep silence.This place is just a scientific lab to create the new man – in Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, the superman. But I use the words new man because the superman gives a sense of superiority. Otherwise the word is beautiful, but it can be misguiding; hence I call it the new man, or the buddha, because the new man is going to be fully awakened. If a fully awakened man cannot understand Friedrich Nietzsche, who else can understand him? You are on the way to understanding even deeper things and greater heights.It is time from these great heights to roll down laughing. It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh.When Little Ernie gets into mischief, his mother tries to discipline him by saying, “God would not like that!” And when Ernie gets really out of hand, his mother says, “God will be angry!”But one evening at the dinner table, Ernie takes one look at the plate of prunes put in front of him and says, “Yuck! I’m not going to eat these wrinkled old black things!”“Ernie!” says his mother. “God would not like that!”“I don’t care,” snaps Ernie. “I am not going to eat them!”“Ernest!” threatens his mother, “God will be angry.”“Ah!” shouts Ernie. “Fuck God!”At this, his mother sends him up to his bedroom.A few minutes later, a violent thunderstorm blows up and shakes the roof and rattles the walls. Ernie’s mother goes upstairs to remind him about God’s anger. But to her surprise, she finds Ernie looking out of the window at the terrible storm.“You see, Ernie,” exclaims his mother. “This is what happens when you make God angry.”“Well,” replies Ernie, “if you ask me, it is a lot of fuss to make over a plate of prunes!”Captain Koppa of the LA police receives an order from the police commissioner to raid “Madam Fifi’s House of Carnal Delights” in downtown Hollywood. But this order causes Koppa and his men some embarrassment because they are all frequent customers themselves, and are friendly with Madam Fifi.So Captain Koppa calls the establishment on the phone to warn them, but finds that Madam Fifi and all the girls have gone out on a picnic. Only Mrs. Moppit, the cleaning lady, is there to answer the phone.“Listen,” says Captain Koppa. “Pass this message on to Madam Fifi: we have to make a surprise raid on the place tonight. But when we come, we will honk the horn loudly, and drive around the block. We will do this three times – and then we will come rushing in. By that time, we want everybody safely out of the place! Do you understand?”“Yes, yes!” replies Mrs. Moppit, and she puts down the phone. But when she has finished work she goes home and forgets to pass on the message.That night it is business as usual, and “Madam Fifi’s House of Carnal Delights” is packed to capacity. At midnight exactly, Captain Koppa and the boys arrive in their patrol cars. They all honk their horns and screech around the block. When they reappear, they honk their horns and go around again. They honk and circle the block once more and then screech to a halt outside and charge into the building.As they are racing up the stairs with the captain in the lead, they meet two naked girls coming down, holding a mattress between them.“What the hell is going on?” cries Captain Koppa. “Where are you girls going?”“Don’t blame us!” shouts one of the girls. “Some idiot outside is honking for take-away service!”Bishop Kretin has a small church on the Greek island of Crete. One of the rules of his Greek Orthodox Church is that he cannot hold a church service with less than six people present. Since Kretin only has six old ladies in his congregation, this rule is beginning to cause him some anxiety.Sure enough, one Sunday morning only five old ladies show up – Old Mrs. Theocrapolis has dropped dead the night before, while saying her prayers. So Bishop Kretin has an idea. “Perhaps we can get a passerby to join us,” he announces, “to make up the sixth person.”He sends off old Mrs. Suflaki to try and find somebody. “Remember, Mrs. Suflaki,” shouts Bishop Kretin, “anyone will do – man or woman!” Mrs. Suflaki shuffles down the street in her black dress, black shoes and black head scarf, looking for a passing tourist. She runs right into Herman the German who has just arrived for his summer holidays.“Hey! Mister!” croaks the old Greek lady. “How would you like to be the sixth man?”“Mein Gott!” cries Herman. “I would not even want to be the first!”Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent.Close your eyes, and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to turn inward, with your whole energy, with your total consciousness. Rush toward the center, with an urgency as if this is going to be your last moment on the earth. Without such an urgency nobody has ever become awakened.Faster and faster…Deeper and deeper… As you are coming closer to your center, a great silence descends over you. The whole night starts singing songs for you.A little deeper, and you find flowers of peace, serenity, joy, ecstasy, blissfulness, all growing around you.Just one step more and you are at the very center of your being. Suddenly you see you are no more, only your original face without any mask, without any personality, is there. This is the face we have called in the East the face of the buddha. This is everybody’s original face, it is nobody’s monopoly. The only quality the buddha at the center of your being has is witnessing. Witnessing is the whole of spirituality compressed into one word.Witness you are not the body, witness you are not the mind, and witness you are only a witness, just a mirror reflecting without any judgment, without any appreciation, without any condemnation – a pure mirror, that’s what the buddha is.The silence becomes deeper. Ecstasy becomes overwhelming, you are drunk with the divine. This center is the connection with existence. From here your consciousness is being nourished continuously.This is your eternal life, without beginning, without end.To make the witnessing more clear, and more deep, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax, let go completely, but remember one thing constantly, that you are a witness.This witness is the truth. This witness is beauty. This witness is the good. This witness is the opening of all the mysteries of existence, the ultimate secret of all the miracles.At this impeccable, silent moment, you are the most fortunate people on the earth. I can see your melting; the ice is melting into the ocean. You are disappearing. Gautama the Buddha Auditorium has become an ocean. Ten thousand buddhas have disappeared into one oceanic consciousness.Collect as much experience of the center as possible, all the flowers of the beyond, the eternal peace, the ultimate joy.You have to bring all these qualities to your ordinary day-to-day life. The more your day-to-day life becomes graceful, beautiful, peaceful, silent, loving, compassionate, the closer the buddha will come to you.So remember to persuade the buddha that you are getting ready. Only he is missing. He has to come following you just like a shadow.These are the three steps of enlightenment. First, buddha comes behind you with all his warmth and grace and beauty and blissfulness and benediction, as a shadow.Soon he takes over. You become the shadow in the second step. And in the second step, your shadow by and by starts withering away because it has been only a shadow and nothing else.In the third step you find you are the buddha, and the person you used to be is no longer to be found anywhere.That day will be the greatest day of celebration in your life – not only in your life, but in the life of the whole of existence. The whole existence will celebrate: the trees, the stars, the moon, the oceans, the earth – everything around you will have a tremendous ceremony to welcome your coming home.After a long wandering into different bodies, into different species, finally you have come home.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back, but come back with the same grace a buddha comes, with the same silence.Sit for a few moments, reminding yourself of the golden path you have traveled, and the tremendous space you have been in.And feel the radiance and the coolness of a buddha behind you. He is almost touching your body and your heart. He is so motherly, he is so feminine, so fragile – just like a lotus leaf.Rejoice that you are those chosen few Friedrich Nietzsche speaks of. Soon you will start having a new sensitivity to your ears, and a new light will be shown in your eyes, and a new dance will be in your heart.The spring is coming soon, and you are all going to blossom into buddhas. Less than that is not sufficient.You have to be a buddha; only that experience of the ultimate height and the ultimate depth will bring you home. The very source from where you have come is also the goal where you are going.And I am immensely happy with you. You are doing so well, with such honesty that any master would have been proud of you.God is dead, and Zen is the only living truth.

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God is Dead Now Zen is 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

God is Dead Now Zen is 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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After Nangaku’s comment about Sekito, he once more sent the attendant monk to Sekito to ask him a question. On arrival, the monk asked Sekito, “What is liberation?”Sekito said, “Who bound you?”The monk asked, “What is the pure land?”Sekito responded, “Who made you dirty?”The monk asked, “What is nirvana?”“Who gave you birth and death?” Sekito replied.The attendant monk came back to Nangaku and reported Sekito’s answers. Nangaku put both hands together and made a gesture of touching his feet.At that time, Kengo, Ran and Nangaku were thought to be the three masters in the country, and all three of them said, “From the stone-head comes the lion’s roar to my ear.”The monk went back to Sekito and said that, if there were anything the monk could do for him, to let him know. A little later, the master, Nangaku, came with his monks to see Sekito. Sekito stood up to receive him, and the two greeted each other. Later, Nangaku had a temple built for Sekito’s convenience.Friends, first the questions. The first question:Osho,Is it not the same to call existence intelligent and loving as to call it God? It might not be the Christian concept of God, but there are other pantheistic concepts which see God in everything.It is not the same. God gives a sense of personality, of limitedness, while existence gives you an unlimited, nonpersonal vastness. God cannot be equivalent to existence. God has always been conceived by all religions, monotheistic or polytheistic, as the creator of existence. And existence is not a created phenomenon; it has been here always.So, first this God gives you an impression that he is the creator, then many lies start arising out of this idea of God. Then prayer becomes possible, then worship becomes possible, then statues of God become possible. Then temples and churches and mosques start arising. Then organized religions become possible. God is the center of all organized religions.Once you accept God as a person, you have limited intelligence, intelligence invested in one person. I am spreading it all over existence. The whole of existence is intelligent, caring, compassionate, loving, but it is not a person. It is not limited in any way; it is unlimited, infinite and eternal. There is no beginning, no end. It is continuously evolving toward higher and yet higher peaks; it is continuously fathoming depths beyond depths. There are skies beyond skies; there is no end to existence, it has no boundary.God is bound to be limited. God is a fiction of the human mind, existence is not. You have created God in your own image. He is just sitting on a throne, an old man of course – you cannot conceive of God as young or a child – with a long beard. The beard must be longer than God himself. Since eternity he has never entered a barber’s salon and I don’t think that he has safety razors. Every morning in the bathroom… I don’t think that he has a bathroom either, there is no mention of his bathroom in any scripture. He seems to be perfectly Indian. So beware of him! He must be using the whole sky as his toilet. When something falls on your head, it is holy shit. Conceiving of God as a person is going to create many troubles.No, not at all, existence is a totally different concept. It is not your fiction; it is there. When you were not here, it was there. When you will not be here, it will be here. We come and go; we are just waves in this vast ocean of existence. We come and go, existence remains. And to find that which remains is the ultimate truth. You don’t have to worship nature, you don’t have to pray to nature. Those things are only associated with the fiction of God.Existence is nonjudgmental. I want to emphasize this fact as categorically as possible. God is judgmental. The Christian God has exactly declared that there will be a Judgment Day when he will choose those who are on his side, the followers of Jesus Christ, his son. And those who are not on his side are against him. They will be thrown into hellfire for eternity. It is because of God that all kinds of moralities arise: this is good, that is bad. What is the criterion? The scriptures. And the scriptures were written by primitive, uneducated people. They don’t belong to our century.Existence does not write any scriptures and does not give any commandments. Existence does not tell you what to do and what not to do. Existence is absolutely nonjudgmental. It is as compassionate to the sinner as to the saint; it makes no difference because in the eyes of existence everything that is natural is beautiful. Religions call those who go against nature “saints.” Nature simply feels sad for them. Existence simply feels that they are going astray, and by being astray they will suffer.It is not that existence is giving them suffering and hell, punishment and reward, no. Existence is simply there. If you are in tune with it, you will be immensely rewarded. Nobody is rewarding you, just the very tuning with existence is such a peace, such a joy, such a benediction, you are already rewarded. There is no reward beyond this, and those who are not in tune with nature and existence are already punished.You can see your saints: they can’t smile, they can’t laugh, they can’t enjoy anything. They are the ugliest human beings who have fallen from humanity into some kind of darkness that knows no end. They are self-torturers, masochists, and they are already suffering. Their suffering is not caused by anybody else, it is caused by themselves.This is the criterion for me: if you are suffering, that means you are not in tune with nature. If you are miserable, that means you are not in tune with nature. So the moment you feel you are miserable, suffering, in agony, immediately try to make the distance smaller. Come closer to existence and suddenly there will be light and there will be joy and there will be song and there will be celebration.To be in tune with existence is its own reward; not to be in tune is its own punishment. So my approach is very clear and clean. If you make God, then he is bound to judge you. And his judgment is going to be out of date; he will always be lagging behind human consciousness. And if you follow those scriptures which are creations of the priest, not of God…There is intrinsic proof of it. Hindus say the Vedas were written by God himself and I cannot conceive the stupidity. Nobody in thousands of years has objected to the idea. There is intrinsic proof in the Vedas themselves that they are created by the priests. There is no need for any outer proof.I will tell you about just a few which are intrinsic. Ninety-eight percent of the prayers in the Vedas are from priests. God will not say a prayer. There is no other God; to whom will he pray? Just look at the point. God cannot be a worshipper, God cannot be in prayer; God cannot ask anything from anyone because there is no one beyond him. All the Vedas are nothing but prayers, and the content of the prayers is so idiotic that it is a miracle that nobody raises the question. One of the so-called Hindu seers prays – of course to God – that this year, “Just let your clouds rain in my fields and not in the fields of my enemies.” Do you think this writing can come from God?Another seer, a so-called, self-styled seer, asked God, “Let my cows have more and more milk and let my enemies’ cows simply stop giving milk at all.” Will God write this kind of thing? This is intrinsic proof that these are the writings of ordinary worshippers – brahmins, priests – and they are proclaiming for thousands of years that the Vedas are written by God. All religions try to prove that their holy scripture is written by God – if not written, at least it is sent through a messenger, but the word is coming from God.Once you accept the fiction of God, you will have to accept these holy scriptures and you will have to accept his judgment. And his judgment is absolutely against nature, because these scriptures prescribe that you live an abnormal, stupid, insane life: “Don’t eat according to the needs of your body, fast. Don’t live in the world, renounce. Go to the Himalayas, live in the caves.” With difficulty man has come out of the caves. Thousands of years’ struggle has brought man out of the caves, and these so-called holy scriptures are sending him back: “Go to the caves!”There is a certain psychological reason behind it. If you are fasting, you become more imaginative. Obviously you have to imagine food; that is the first imagination that comes. The whole night you will imagine that you are being invited by the king himself, and you are having a great feast. It is bound to happen.If you are sexually starved, you will have sexual dreams. If you are physically starved, you will have dreams about food. If you are thirsty, you will dream about water.Your dreams show what you need, what you are denying yourself. Dreams are indications from your very nature that you are unnecessarily going against nature; that you will suffer. But all religions prescribe fasting as one of the virtues, great virtues. The reason is that fasting helps hallucination, it is a scientific fact. If you fast for three weeks continuously and you are alone in a cave in the Himalayas, you will start hallucinating. By the end of the second week you will start talking to yourself. By the end of the third week you will start talking to God – actual dialogue, you will answer from both sides. You will ask the question and you will answer the question and you will feel that the answer is coming from God. By the end of the fourth week you will be able to see your God, or Jesus Christ or Krishna or Buddha – whosoever you have been believing in. By the fourth week you have lost all grip on intelligence, you have lost all grip on reality. You cannot make any distinction between what is real and what is dream; you have fallen back into a state of a small child.The small child cannot make the distinction in the beginning between what is dream and what is real. In a dream he is playing with a toy, and when he wakes up in the morning and the toy has gone, and he starts crying, “Where is my toy?” he cannot make the distinction that the toy was a dream. It will take a little maturity, a little growth of intelligence to make the distinction between the real and the unreal. But just four weeks fasting and you will lose all the discrimination of your intelligence.Living alone is absolutely necessary for this because if somebody else is living with you, you will talk to him. That will be a release. But if you are living alone… Every religion prescribes living alone, in monasteries, in your cells or in caves: “Live alone.” Why alone? So that you cannot talk to anybody – then your whole mind is boiling so much to talk that you start talking to yourself.You have seen people on the street. You can see their lips moving, and they are alone. They are going fast toward their office or their home and their lips are moving. Sometimes they are making gestures, throwing something away. What is happening to them? They are going like robots toward their house because it has become habitual. They don’t need to think about where to move right and where to move left, that will be done by the legs themselves. So they can… I have seen people counting money on their fingers, I have seen people with lips moving.I have loved a story very much…A man had become the focus of the whole crowd that was gathered in a waiting room at a railway junction. The train was late and all were eagerly waiting for the train, but everybody was focused on a person who was resting in a chair. His lips were moving, and once in a while he would start smiling, once in a while he would giggle, once in a while he would throw something away. Finally they could not resist the temptation: what was going on?So one man asked him, “What is going on? Sometimes you giggle, sometimes you smile. Sometimes you throw something away.”He said, “Nothing. I am just telling jokes to myself. When I hear a really good joke, I smile. And when a joke is fresh and new, I giggle. And when I hear some old joke, I simply throw it away.”He is telling jokes to himself and all the jokes must be old.Everybody said, “You are having a great time, while we are unnecessarily worrying about the train that is getting later and later.”It happens in India…Once I was stuck in Allahabad. First they declared the train was two hours late. I said, “Not much of a problem. I will reach the place where I am going in time.After two hours, I went to inquire. They said, “Now it is another four hours late.”I said, “Is it going backward? How can it be another four hours late when it was just two hours late before? Those two hours are gone; the train should be on the platform. It means it is now six hours late. What is happening? Is the train going backward?”The man was in shock. He could not answer me because my question was absolutely logical. “What is happening to the train? I can understand that it was late, but it cannot go on moving backward. Next time I will come after four hours. It may be twelve hours late because it is going backward. You have to answer me.”He said, “What can I do? I have just been informed by the stationmaster that it is now another four hours late.”I said, “Go and ask the stationmaster, otherwise I am going to report this to the police.”He said, “For what?”I said, “Your stationmaster and you are both crackpots. What is happening to the train? How can it be so much later?”He rushed toward the stationmaster and the stationmaster came to cool me down. He said, “It is not going backward.”Then I asked, “What is happening?”He said; “I don’t know. The information has just come from the other station that it is another four hours late.”I said, “Inquire from the other station from where they were receiving the message, because if it gets a little later I will go to the police station and find out where the madhouse is in Allahabad. And you will be arrested.”He said, “But it is not my fault.”I said, “I don’t care whose fault it is! Find out why the train is going backward.”But in India it happens every day, just to keep people hoping. They don’t know exactly how late it will be, so they say two hours late. If it comes early, it is good. If it does not come early, then again it becomes late, but to tell people that it will be twelve hours late is too shocking. So make it easy: “Two hours… Four hours… Two hours more… It is just coming within one hour…” By and by it is twelve hours late. So they could not answer me because I knew the reality. What was the reality? The reality was they had no idea how late it would be.Then you have people in the waiting room, sitting, watching… And I have seen people with nothing to do: they will start moving their lips, talking to themselves, just keeping themselves engaged. Otherwise it is an agony to think that you are caught up in this place, and nobody knows for how long. Sometimes the train is twenty-four hours late, sometimes I have even seen it forty-eight hours late! I don’t know how this happens.But I found out once…I was going from Chanda to Gondia, in a very small train. Now those small trains have almost disappeared, except in a few places. This train was a passenger train; on that small line there were only passenger trains, and it was stopping at every station. A friend of mine, a rich man who has since died, had persuaded me to travel on it. He said, “It is a beautiful place to travel by this train. On both sides it is scenic – mountains, rivers, forests, wild forests.”So I agreed; otherwise I was going to fly because the train would take twelve hours while I could fly in fifteen minutes. I said, “Okay, this time let us try it. You have been telling me again and again that it is a beautiful country around this train.” It is an almost unpopulated area, an aboriginal area, where people live deep in the forest.At one station he told me, “Get down.” It was mango season. And that place! Outside the station, there were such beautiful mango trees, perhaps for miles, and the smell of mangos… And hundreds of cuckoos creating such beautiful songs, such beautiful sounds.He led me out. I said, “What are you doing?”He said, “Come with me. You will never find such beautiful mangos anywhere.” So he climbed up a tree and told me to come behind him.I said, “But what about the train?”He said, “Don’t be worried. That is my responsibility. Unless I come down, the train will not move.”I said, “This is strange because you have not told anybody, the stationmaster or the driver.”He started laughing, he said, “Just look up. The driver is ahead of us. Unless I allow him to come down, the train cannot move. Don’t be worried.”And the driver started laughing. He said, “That’s right.”So we enjoyed mangos for almost one hour, and whenever the driver tried to come down my friend said, “I will pull your leg and throw you down. Just remain there. The train cannot move until we are finished. You eat mangos, there is no harm.”So we kept the driver up the tree. And all the passengers on the train were wondering what the matter was. It was the only train on the line: one time it goes, one time it comes, so there is no question of another train coming. The stationmaster was looking to see where the driver had gone. The conductor was looking all around, everywhere. And we were looking at everybody searching for the driver, and the driver was completely imprisoned because he could not pass us – we were there to push him back. “Just go back up!”Then I knew how these trains get so late. It could only happen in India.All religions preach fasting and, “Go into aloneness and constantly visualize, imagine your God.” It is a psychological fact that in four weeks even the most intelligent person will start wavering over what is real and what is imaginary. And what to say about the ordinary masses whose intelligence quotient is not more than a seven-year old? Their minds remain stuck between seven and fourteen. The body goes on growing to seventy, eighty, but the mind stays somewhere between seven and fourteen; very rarely does a man pass beyond fourteen.So these people have a retarded mind. Only a retarded mind can belong to a religious organization, can believe in the fiction of God, can believe in heaven and hell, can pray to the empty sky. These people renounce the world out of fear and greed, and when they are alone they start visualizing. And fasting is absolutely necessary: it weakens not only you, but also your mind.Have you ever thought that no vegetarian in India has ever received a single Nobel Prize? And in fact they should be the ones to receive most of the Nobel Prizes because they think they are eating the purest food. Their minds should be purer and clearer and cleaner than the nonvegetarians. But not a single Jaina has received a Nobel Prize, and it will never be possible because something needed for intelligence to grow is missing in their food. But they won’t listen.I have talked at their conferences and they were all angry, they were ready to kill me. But they won’t listen. I was telling them that it is perfectly good to be vegetarian, but they should understand that there are a few proteins which are missing in their food and they have to substitute them.The best way is to start eating eggs that are unfertilized. They are just vegetable; there is no life in them. When the hen has not been hanging around a cock, she is still going to give eggs every day. She is not dependent on the cock. But the egg will be just vegetarian, there will be no life in it. And it has all the proteins and vitamins which are needed for the intelligence to grow.But just the word egg is enough to freak them out: “You are teaching us to eat eggs!”I said, “You don’t understand. I am not teaching you to eat eggs, I am teaching you to eat unfertilized eggs.”They said, “Eggs are eggs.”They will not understand a simple phenomenon: that when it is unfertilized, it is not an egg, it is just the shape of the egg. Otherwise it is pure protein, vitamins, and so cheap and so natural. And it is an absolute necessity for your intelligence to grow.You will be surprised to know that Jews get forty percent of the Nobel Prizes and the whole remaining world gets sixty percent. And there are not many Jews because everybody is killing them; for four thousand years the whole world has been killing Jews. Mohammedans are killing them, Christians are killing them, everybody is against them. So they are a very small portion of humanity, but they get forty percent of the Nobel Prizes. What is the problem? And when I worked out what the reason was and when I told the Indians, everybody was against me.I finally stopped talking to the masses because those idiots won’t understand. The Jews are some of the most intelligent people on the earth. Just see: Jesus has turned half of humanity to Christianity; Karl Marx, another Jew, has turned the other half to Communism. Sigmund Freud, the third Jew, exploits both. The fourth Jew, Albert Einstein, created atomic energy and nuclear weapons to destroy the whole world.These four Jews are the most important people in the world. Strange! And the reason is even stranger: that is their circumcision. It is not a laughing matter at all; it has a scientific basis. And now scientists are agreeing with the fact that circumcision has something to do with Jewish intelligence.As they have been working on the brain, they have found that there are millions of small nerves in the brain – in this small skull, millions of small nerves that are not visible to the eyes. They control your whole behavior, your intelligence, your functioning of the body, your digestion, your blood circulation, they control everything.The intelligence is controlled by a certain center in the brain. Just by the side of this intelligence center is the center that controls your sexuality. They are very close: the more intelligent a person is, the more sexual he will be; the more sexual a person is, the greater the possibility of more energy for creation, for intelligence.What happens when the smallest child, just born, is immediately circumcised? The sexual organism is connected with the brain center, and particularly in a small child everything is very soft, flexible. And to cut that small child’s unnecessary skin from the sexual organ gives a certain shock. That shock does not only go to the sexual center. Because the sexual center is so close to the intelligence center, the shock goes to the intelligence center too, and that shock, in a certain way, wakens it.Mohammedans also circumcise, but not in childhood, later on. Then it is useless for awakening intelligence because everything has become fixed. Now things are not so volatile, not so flexible. So Mohammedans don’t get the same Nobel Prizes as the Jews. Both religions, Christianity and Mohammedanism, are by-products of Judaism.In the time of the emperor Constantine, there was a great debate whether to continue circumcision for the Christians. He was a Roman and he was the president of the Council of Nicaea that was deciding what to do about circumcision. The Christians were all Jews who had converted to Christianity. Constantine voted against it. That’s why Christians stopped circumcision; now they are starting again.In America now it is an “absolute” thing. It does not matter to what religion you belong. Every child that is born in a hospital is circumcised. And nearly every child is born in a hospital, not at home.So the doctor has to immediately circumcise the child. The reason is twofold: it is hygienic, it prevents many diseases, it keeps you cleaner, and the secret reason is it gives a shock to your intelligence center. It certainly starts functioning better than any other center.I am absolutely in favor of it. The whole world should be circumcised, and immediately after the birth; the quicker you do it, the better. But to tell people the truth about anything is very difficult. To have eyes in a valley of blind people is not an easy job.Keeping a person fasting for four weeks destroys all those proteins and vitamins that make his intelligence. You don’t know the dynamics of fasting. Why are all religions insisting on fasting? – because it destroys. One can go on living at the most for four weeks on storage. After the fourth week there is no storage. And immediately, within six minutes, if they are not supplied with the right amount of proteins, oxygen, the right amount of vitamins, those small nerves break down. Once those small nerves break down, you don’t have any capacity to discriminate whether it is Christ standing before you, or whether it is your imagination, your projection.You start seeing dreams with open eyes. It needs aloneness so nobody disturbs your imagination, and it needs constant visualization, praying the whole day. What are people doing in monasteries? Praying the whole day: “Ave Maria, Ave Maria,” and holding Mary’s picture and prostrating themselves and fasting. Ave Maria! In a few days’ time the picture will start moving its lips. “Ave Maria” is coming alive and that is a great satisfaction to the stupid mind.Soon Maria will start coming out of the picture – a great revelation! That’s what the person was waiting for. He touches the feet of nobody, but he feels the feet, just as you feel things in your dreams. He has destroyed the barrier between dream and reality. To destroy that barrier, fasting and aloneness and constant visualization are used.You can visualize God, but you cannot visualize existence. And there is no need to visualize it, it is already there. The trees are there, the rivers, the ocean, the mountains, the stars, the whole sky is there – it is not your imagination. And it is an objective phenomenon: you can all agree that it is a full-moon night. But if somebody is seeing Jesus, you will not agree because you will not see Jesus, only he is seeing Jesus. It is a projection. If it was a reality, then there would be no question; others would also see, as they see the full moon, as they see the sunrise, as they see roses and everybody agrees that, yes, there is a roseflower.Maybe they will have different opinions: a poet may be more sensitive, a painter may look at the rose with different eyes because he has a sensitivity for colors, a man who is an expert in perfumes will have a different sensitivity toward the rose because he will smell it more deeply than you do. And for a man like me who has an allergy to perfumes…My gardener, Mukta, has to keep all the flowers outside my windows, which are never opened, so I can see the roses but the perfume cannot reach me. And poor Mukta has to work hard because keeping those roses around my room… There are such big, huge trees, so much shadow, and roses cannot blossom perfectly unless they have sunlight. So she has to constantly change the flowerpots.But she manages for me to see roses all around me wherever I am in the house. She is deceiving the sun and she is deceiving the roses. She has to continually move them in a rotation: whenever a flower comes to its total blossoming, she brings it to my side outside the windows. And when she sees that the plant is not happy without the sun, she takes the plant to the sun. So she has to keep a double row, a rotation. It is a rotary club! But she manages perfectly well. She knows I love the roses, but I cannot tolerate their fragrance. I am too sensitive to their fragrance. That immediately disturbs me.So it may be different to different people, but the existence of the rose will be objective. Everybody will accept it, except a few blind people – but they can also touch the rose, they can also smell the rose. They can have some idea of the rose except for the color. They can feel its softness, its velvety petals and because the blind man has no eyes…Eyes use eighty percent of your energy, and the other four senses have only five percent distributed to each. Twenty percent of your energy is used by four senses; the eyes use eighty percent. So the blind man distributes his hundred percent of energy to four senses, twenty-five percent to each. That’s why blind people are good singers; they have a better ear than other people. Their touch has more energy than a man with eyes because their hands are carrying twenty-five percent of their energy, your hand only five percent. So they may not be able to see the flower and the color, but they can touch and their touch will be deeper than yours. They can smell and their smell will be deeper than yours. But we can come to the conclusion that there is something objective.Your dream is purely yours, you cannot share it with anybody.I have told you about two friends who were talking…One man said, “Last night was a great night. In my dream I went fishing. And, my God, I have never seen such a big fish in my whole life. I felt I was not strong enough to catch even one fish and carry it to the bank. The fish was so big. And fish upon fish, and I was lying down on the beach, the whole beach was full. You should have seen it, you should have been there.”The friend said, “That’s nothing! Last night I dreamt that two naked women were lying by my side, one on my left, one on my right. I looked to the right, and I was amazed – it was Marilyn Monroe, the American actress, the concubine of President Kennedy. And on the other side was Sophia Loren, both naked. And you are talking about fish, you idiot.”The other man became angry. He said, “If this was the case, why didn’t you give me a phone call immediately? What are you going to do with two women?”The man said, “I did. I phoned your wife, and she said, ‘He has gone fishing.’”You cannot share your dreams, you cannot share your hallucinations. So a follower of Krishna will see Krishna, not Christ. And a follower of Christ will see Christ, not Krishna. And when he is seeing him, you can be there but you won’t see anything at all. So it is just a projection of open-eyed dreams. To make it possible you need fasting to destroy your intelligence and you need aloneness, so nobody disturbs you and tells you that you are an idiot: “There is nobody. I can see the plain wall. Where is your Krishna? I don’t see him. And I can bring other people as a proof that nobody sees him.” Be alone, so nobody disturbs your projection, your hallucination.God has been one of the greatest disturbances to human evolution because it has made people hallucinate – destroying their intelligence, destroying their possibility of becoming a buddha.Existence has its own wisdom, existence has its own love. You just have to experiment. And now science is very clear about it. In fact, the first scientist who became aware of the sensitivity and intelligence of trees was so shocked because he felt, “We don’t have that sensitivity and that intelligence – a totally different dimension that we have never bothered with. We have lived with trees for millennia, millions of years, but we have never bothered whether those trees have any intelligence, any sensitivity.” It is just within the last ten years that scientists have become aware of this.Now they have a special instrument, like a cardiogram, exactly the same type of mechanism. They put the cardiogram around the tree and it starts making a graph of how the tree is feeling. The graph is very harmonious: the sun is rising, a cool breeze is blowing and the tree is dancing in the wind, in the sun; she is really happy. The graph is very harmonious; there is no tension in the tree’s mind – no trouble, no anxiety. The graph is going on harmoniously, and suddenly a gardener appears with an ax in his hand. Immediately the graph starts trembling, it is no longer harmonious, the tree is feeling worried. But this happens only if the gardener is going to cut the tree. It is strange. The tree is not bothered by the ax; the tree is bothered by the intention of the gardener. When that became clear to the scientists, it was really shocking.First they thought it was the ax: even though the tree has no eyes it must have some way of perceiving. But finally they found that it is not the ax, it is the intention of the person – because one time they brought a gardener with an ax who was going to cut the tree, the same tree that they were working on. The gardener was to cut one of the branches, and the tree was completely freaked out; the graph was showing that the tree was absolutely against what was going to happen. It was shocking: trees don’t have eyes; how far away was the gardener with his ax? And then they tried a gardener coming with an ax but with no intention of cutting the tree, and the graph remained harmonious.So it was not the ax, it was the desire, the intention of the gardener to which the tree was somehow receptive. And then they have worked on. For ten years the work has been going on, particularly in Russia. They wired up other trees around that tree, the main tree, and they found that it is not only the tree which is going to be cut, but other trees also feel sympathy for that tree. Although their graphs don’t go that crazy, they become disharmonious. They are feeling that one of their friends, one of their neighbors, is going to be cut. But this happens only if there is an intention. If there is no intention and the mali comes with an ax and passes by, no tree gives any signal of worry, anxiety, anguish.This whole existence has its own way of being intelligent. Our intelligence is not the only intelligence.A famous scientist, John Lilly, has been working – and he has almost gone crazy – he has been working on dolphins. Dolphins have a very different language. Nobody has ever thought that anybody had language except man. And the dolphin’s head is bigger than a man’s head, it has more nerves than the man’s head; perhaps it is a higher stage of intelligence than man. It uses a system which is called sonar, because it creates a certain sound in the water. That sound travels through the water for miles and reaches another dolphin, to whom it is addressed, without any wire. This is a wireless system. There are thousands of dolphins in the area. A message comes to a certain dolphin – perhaps the boyfriend or the girlfriend – and the message is a sound we cannot hear, it is beyond the range of our hearing. Only when we magnify it through instruments can we hear it, a certain very beautiful sound.But that sound must be directed to a particular dolphin – perhaps that particular dolphin has a name, an address – and the sound reaches, and soon you will find the other dolphin comes rushing to the spot from where the first dolphin has given the signal, “Come soon!”Lilly has been working almost his whole life, and he has become almost insane working with dolphins. Just now, a friend suggested to him to come here: “Forget dolphins for a few days. Meditate for few days so that you can calm down.” His shock is great: dolphins have a language that we cannot understand, we cannot even hear, and their language is capable of traveling miles and miles in the ocean and reaching to the right address.Dolphins are very loving animals, very playful, very joyous. They have never attacked any human being or any other dolphin – no fight, no quarrel. If you are swimming, they will swim with you. If you are playing with them, they will play with you. They are perfectly happy with human beings, there is no problem at all. The whole of existence…I used to have a mali, a gardener, a very old man. I have found that once in a while when he was not aware that I am watching – I may have been inside the house and I looked at him through the window – he was talking to the trees.I caught him one day red-handed. I asked, “What are you doing?”He said, “Don’t tell anybody, they will think I am mad. But the truth is that I feel a certain affinity… My whole life I have worked with trees; I have always talked to them. And to my surprise, if I take two plants of equal height and I talk to one plant and not to the other – and I give equal nourishment, equal care, equal water, equal sun, equal manure to both, but to one I talk with great love, I caress it with my hands – that tree grows faster. Soon, within a month, it is double the height of the other tree. Although everything else is equal, one thing is missing – my love.And every year he used to win the flower competition. He was bringing the greatest roses that I have ever seen, the greatest dahlias I have ever seen. And his strategy was to talk to the flowers: “Don’t let me down. The competition is coming closer. You have to give me one big flower, the biggest that you can manage.”Once I became intimate with him, he knew that I would not tell anybody. I understood him, and I didn’t think he was mad. He was working perfectly.Poor fellow, if he had been educated scientifically he would have found out many secrets about trees. I have seen it with my own eyes because he was with me for almost nine years. When I left, he wanted to come with me, but I said, “In Mumbai I won’t have a garden.”He even wrote to America, when I was there, “Now you have such a big place there, why don’t you call me? – although I am too old and not much use. But still, what I can do with trees, nobody else can do.” And he was right.Existence has multidimensional intelligence. We are only one section of this vast universe.Don’t think for a single moment that I am putting existence in place of God. No! God does not exist, existence exists. That’s why we call it existence.The second question:Osho,It is very easy for me to say, “Ah, I have not believed in God since I was a child, and even then I was not so sure.” But this habit of the mind to try to turn the mysteries into superstitions is very deep-rooted and slippery.The other night when you were speaking, I was reminded of the occasions when I have attributed these qualities of omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience to you, or when thoughts of your death have filled me with fear and dread much more than the loss of any God. It seems this disease of God is hiding deep in the bones and pops out like some obscene intruder when I least expect it and where I certainly don't want it.It is easy to change your prison. The new prison looks better. It is easy to change your chains, your slavery because any slavery, howsoever different from the old one, is still deep down the same. And that’s what people go on doing: Hindus become Christians, Christians become Hindus. They are only changing their slavery. They are only changing their prison, they are only changing their handcuffs, their chains. Nothing is changed.So when you hear God is dead and your intellect is convinced that God never existed – it is nowhere to be found – that is intellectual conviction. But you are not just intellect. You are emotion, you are sentiment, you are feeling – which are deeper than intellect – and the concept of God has entered into your emotions, into your sentiments, into your feelings. So intellectually, on the surface of your mind, you may be convinced logically, rationally, there is no God.One of my friends – an old man, very intelligent – used to be a follower of J. Krishnamurti. He was of the same age as J. Krishnamurti. I came into his life when he was very old, but he started coming to me. And intellectually he was absolutely a giant, convinced that there is no God, no hell, no heaven, no morality: “This is all social convenience.”His son was the attorney general of the state where I was living. The supreme court of that state was in the city. One day the son came running to me, they lived just five minutes walking distance away, and he told me, “My father has had a great heart attack and the doctors are worried that he may have another attack coming. He is so weak and he suddenly has remembered you and wants you to be there.”So I went running with him. As I approached… They had put the whole room in darkness, an air-conditioned room. I stood at the door; I heard some sound. That old man was repeating, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.” I could not believe. His whole life he was denying, denying, denying and now he was repeating, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.”I went very slowly, not to disturb him, sat by his side, listened closely that he was repeating, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.”I shook him. He opened his eyes. I asked, “What are you doing? Just one heart attack and a whole philosophy gone?”He said, “This is not the time for discussion, and this is not the time to take any risk. Just leave me alone; just sit by my side and let me pray to God. I know intellectually there is no God. But who knows? What is the harm? Anyway, I am dying. It is better to repeat his name. If he exists, it will be helpful; if he does not exist, what is the harm? I just repeated his name a few times, that’s all.”I said, “This is not the question. It is a question of your whole integrity. You are a very split man.”It was only intellect. And that’s what I have been saying to you again and again, that this is intellectual rationality. And that was the failure of J. Krishnamurti; he was only talking to people intellectually, convincing them intellectually, but he had no method, no meditation that people can experience deeper than the feeling.People can go deeper than the heart. They can reach to their being and only then does a tremendous light arise which is unwavering. Whether death comes or a heart attack comes, it makes no difference.And he became okay. After a few days he came to see me and he said, “Don’t tell anybody.”I said, “I am going to tell everybody and I am going to send a message to J. Krishnamurti.”I did. I said, “These are your followers, lifelong followers. And you have depended on these people.”Krishnamurti’s last statement before he died agreed with me. His last statement was, “I am dying a frustrated man. People have used me as entertainment. Nobody has listened.” But it was not the fault of the people. It was his own fault. He was just talking to them intellectually, and never giving them any indication to go deeper.Unless you go deeper, you will shift your projections from one thing to another. If there is no God, you will make me your God. And I am certainly not God. I have never created this ugly mess that you see around the world. I never created Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane, and Nadirshah and Benito Mussolini. I never created these people. Don’t make me responsible.And I am not omnipotent. I am just sitting in my chair, that’s all. Omnipotent means I will need a chair in which the whole universe fits. And I am not omnipresent. I am not a Peeping Tom looking into your bedroom. That’s what God used to do: even watching your bathroom through the keyhole.I am not omniscient either. I don’t know what is going to happen next moment. I am simply human, just awake, just fully alert, conscious and responding to life moment to moment according to my awareness, my consciousness; just a pure mirror reflecting whatever comes in front of me. Don’t project anything on me.But I can understand your trouble. Your trouble is that you are convinced intellectually, but you have not known the truth from deeper sources of your being. You have to know it through meditation that there is no God; existence is self-sufficient, it does not need any God, any fiction.Once this happens inside you at the deepest core, you will never project the same old stupid superstitions again. Only meditation can bring a metamorphosis to your being. Krishnamurti died a failure because he never thought that he was only dealing with people’s intellects. Intellect is part of the mind, and Krishnamurti never helped anybody to go beyond the mind. I suspect perhaps he himself never got beyond the mind. Otherwise, how could he miss it? If he had gone beyond the mind, then his whole effort would have been a long life of ninety years of helping people to go beyond the mind.When you start looking beyond the mind, there is no God, but this existence becomes so beautiful, so intelligent, so charismatic, so self-sufficient, it needs nothing else.But only meditation can do that miracle.The third question:Osho,Yesterday I heard you saying that prayer is something directed toward the outside. What about gratefulness? I have the feeling that gratitude does not necessarily have an outer object. Also, does gratitude happen only because of a declared or undeclared desire that is fulfilled?You are not aware that you have changed the word from gratefulness to gratitude. They are two different words. Gratefulness is always toward the outside, and it is always because deep down you wanted something directly or indirectly and it has been given to you. That’s why you are grateful. Gratefulness simply means thankfulness. That will make it clear. You thank the person who has fulfilled a desire which was hidden in you whether you were aware of it or not. Something has been gratified; hence you feel a thankfulness.Thankfulness is going to be outward. It may be thankfulness toward God which does not exist, it can be thankfulness toward a friend who exists, but thankfulness is a gratification of conscious or unconscious desire being fulfilled.Gratitude is a totally different phenomenon; it is not in the dictionaries. In the dictionaries, gratefulness, thankfulness, gratitude are all put into the same category. Existence is not according to your dictionaries. Gratitude has no outward object, nor inward object. Gratitude is almost like a fragrance arising out of a flower. It is an experience not directed to anybody.When you reach the very source of your being, where you are completely in the mood of spring, and the flowers are showering on you, you suddenly feel a gratitude not directed to anybody – just like a fragrance arising out of you, just as incense brings ripples of smoke and fragrance, moving toward the unknown sky and disappearing.Gratitude arises out of you just like a fragrance, not as a thankfulness to anybody. It is the shadow, the by-product of your becoming the buddha. It is not a gratification of any desire. If you have any desires, conscious or unconscious, you cannot become a buddha. It is only when all desires have passed on, when you have transcended all desires and demands, that you become a buddha. And out of a buddha a fragrance radiates. That fragrance has many elements in it. It is gratitude, it is compassion, it is love, it is blissfulness, it is ecstasy. It is manifold, multidimensional.Now the sutra:After Nangaku’s comment about Sekito, he once more sent the attendant monk to Sekito to ask him a question. On arrival, the monk asked Sekito, “What is liberation?”Before I discuss Sekito’s answer, I will tell you a small anecdote about al-Hillaj Mansoor, the Sufi mystic.A man came to him and asked the same question, “What is liberation?”He was sitting in a mosque with beautiful pillars all around. Listening to the question, al-Hillaj Mansoor went immediately toward a pillar, and holding the pillar with both hands started shouting, “Help me!”The man could not understand what was happening. He had just asked about liberation, and this man seemed to be mad. Mansoor was holding the pillar and asking, “Please help me, the pillar is holding me. And it is not letting me go. Liberate me.”The man said, “You are mad, you are holding the pillar. The pillar is not holding you.”Mansoor said, “I have answered. Just get out of this place. Nobody is binding you.”That was Sekito’s answer:“Who bound you?”Why are you seeking liberation? This is the right approach of Zen: to look into your bondage. Don’t bother about liberation. Your bondage is false and your own creation. Who has made you a slave? You yourself! And now you are saying, “Liberate me!” Nobody can liberate you because nobody has enslaved you. It is your own game.The answer is very hard, but very clear and very truthful. Sekito said, “Who bound you?” First tell me what your bondage is. Who has done it to you? Why are you asking for liberation? Once you look into your bondage, you will simply start laughing. The bondage is your own creation; you can drop it right now. And once you drop this bondage…Liberation has been your nature; you don’t have to be liberated. You are born liberated, you have been liberated since the beginning, but again and again you get into bondage.Perhaps this bondage gives you a certain security, a certain safety. The bondage gives you a certain feeling of doing something against the bondage! But in your consciousness you are absolutely liberated, always liberated.It is as if you lie down and close your eyes and start shouting, “Wake me up!” Now it is very difficult to wake a man who is awake. It is easy to wake up a man who is asleep. You can throw cold water, a bucketful of ice-cold water on his eyes and he will jump. You can take his blanket and he will immediately shout, “What are you doing?”But if a man is awake, and lying with closed eyes, and says to you, “Please wake me up!” That’s what Sekito is saying to the monk who asked: “What is liberation?” Sekito said, “Who bound you?” You have always been liberated. You are the buddha, you are the awakened one. It is your own fabrication, fiction, of bondage.You can try a small experiment, just sitting in your room. Put your fingers this way. [Osho clasps his hands.] Hold the hand, close your eyes, and just think, “Whatever I do, I cannot open my hands.” For at least five minutes continue repeating with closed eyes, “Whatever I do, I cannot open my hands.” Then, after five minutes, make every effort to open them. Put your whole energy into opening them and you will be surprised: the more you try, the more it seems to be impossible. You have hypnotized yourself into a bondage.Now the only way to open the hands, which you have hypnotized into bondage, is not to make any effort in opening them. Just relax. And the hands will be okay without your making any effort. Your effort is going against you because you have hypnotized yourself. Now you cannot open your hands with effort.We have hypnotized ourselves into all kinds of bondages and then we try to be liberated. Then we make a great effort. Every effort brings more trouble. The hands become tighter, then you start freaking out: “My God, what to do? The more effort I make, the tighter they become.” It seems impossible because you don’t understand the simple process.Hypnosis can be dissolved only by relaxation. Just relax. Don’t make any effort to open them, and the hands will open by themselves because closing is an effort, opening is just effortless. You don’t have to make any effort. That’s why… Have you seen a man dying with closed fists? Can a dead man manage to keep his fist closed? Impossible, because the fist needs effort and a dead man cannot make any effort. So all people die with open hands; all people are born with closed fists. Just watch a small child – a fist! And watch a dead man – the hand is open because the dead man is completely relaxed. For the first time in his whole life there is no tension.The monk asked another question:“What is the pure land?”But this is just going round about the same thing.Sekito responded, “Who made you dirty?”Why are you bothering about pure land?The monk asked, “What is nirvana?”“Who gave you birth and death?”They are fictions. Your birth is a fiction, your death is a fiction. Your body is born, your body will die, but you have never been born. You are coming, passing through many bodies, many births, many deaths and you are going on and on from beginning to end – eternity to eternity. You are an eternal light. So what is the point of asking, “What is nirvana?” Nirvana simply means getting rid of birth and death, and birth and death are both fictions.Even to say “getting rid of” is not right. What is right is just to look deeply into everything, into your bondage, and you will find it is your creation. Your idea that you are a sinner, dirty, is your idea. Perhaps you have borrowed it from others – the preachers, the priests, the so-called religious saints. They are making you feel dirty, sinners, getting ready to fall into hell. They are putting all kinds of humiliations on you. And people go on listening to those humiliations.From my very childhood I was fighting with every saint who passed through my village. My parents were worried, my family was worried. “You disturb every meeting. Whenever some saint comes, the whole village gathers to listen to him and you stand up in the middle.” And my father would beat his head, “Again he is standing, again a disturbance!”My basic point was, “You are humiliating people by calling them sinners. Just tell me who is a sinner here and what sin he has committed. You are making a generalized statement: ‘You are all sinners.’ Just point out the person who is a sinner.”These saints were telling people, “Don’t be attached to women because they are nothing but bones, flesh, mucus, blood, covered in a bag of skin. Why are you getting attached to them?”I would immediately stand up and say, “What about you? You think you are made of gold? Women are bones, blood, mucus, flesh; okay, what are you? And if blood, mucus and bones hug each other, what is the problem? Rubbing their skin together, what is the problem? Why are you making so much fuss? What else can they do?”But all the holy scriptures are full of these descriptions in detail, only about women, not about men. Strange! Both are made of the same stuff and in fact man comes from the woman. The woman never comes from the man.Right now in America they have allowed lesbian marriages in many states, so a woman can marry a woman. There is no problem now, it is legalized. And this year they are expecting thousands of babies out of lesbian marriages. One of the partners who is ready to carry a baby for nine months goes to the hospital, gets an insemination, an injection. What is man? – just an injection, a syringe. Any syringe can do that work.So I used to tell the saints, “You just have a syringe, and that syringe is also made of bones and flesh, and is covered with dirty skin. So what are you bragging about? And why are you humiliating these people?” And they are all listening with their eyes down because he is telling a great truth. All the scriptures were saying it too.So my father would take me home, “Because you disturb the whole meeting, people have started leaving and the mahatma is very angry.”I said, “I don’t care. If he is angry, he is going against his own teachings, he will suffer in hell. He was teaching against anger and now he is angry, so I have shown him his real face.”My father would say, “Just come home. Sometimes I feel worried that they will not even beat you, they will start beating me. And you are such a fellow. Not a single saint can pass through the village without being disturbed by you. And we keep the information as secret as possible so that you should not come to know that some mahatma, some saint, is delivering a speech. We give you money to go to the movie.”And the moment they gave me money I would say, “Keep the money. I am coming with you. This money is never given to me for the movie, it is only given to protect the mahatma. I am going to the real show!”The problems that I created for the mahatmas became so difficult. It was a simple question: “If two persons are rubbing their skin together, what sin is there? Just tell me. I am rubbing my skin; it’s the same, it is just cleaning my hands, warming my hands. And if a man and a woman are rubbing their skin together, they will fall into hell! And just look at your belly…”All the mahatmas in India have big bellies and they are teaching people, “Don’t eat with taste.” They themselves…I said, “Where does this belly come from? Stand up! Show your belly to all the people. You are eating too much and the country is hungry. And I know that because of this belly you cannot make love to a woman, so now you are teaching everybody not to make love to any woman. It is because of this belly, not because of your religion.”I have seen such bellies, you would not believe it.Muktananda’s guru was Nityananda. Perhaps he had the biggest belly – an Everest! He was always lying down; because of that belly, walking was difficult. And lying down, it did not seem that Nityananda had a belly, it seemed the belly had Nityananda. The belly was just like a mountain: on this side a small head, on that side two small legs. These creatures have become great mahatmas. I have never seen such a perfect belly. He was always lying down and eating sweets. Worshippers were bringing sweets and halvah and puri and making his belly bigger and bigger.When I saw him for the first time, I said, “This man is going to burst some day. He is using his belly as a balloon. This man cannot make love to a woman.” That is true. Where could you find such an inverted-belly woman? I can’t understand, it just seems to be impossible, a puzzle, a koan. This man can make love only if he can find a woman with an inverted belly so they fit together.Obviously, because he cannot do anything, he will talk to everybody, saying, “Be celibate.” He is suffering out of necessity; he is trying to create the same suffering around him.People enjoy other people’s suffering because that gives them a chance: “We are higher than you. Look at us. We are always happy, silent, peaceful.” And the reality is they cannot stand up, they cannot walk.One very famous mahatma, Shivananda, who had many followers in the West, used to be a doctor. That a doctor should do such a stupid thing to himself makes it more difficult to understand. He was eating so much that he could not walk without two persons holding his arms. His hands were so heavy, so fat, he could not even raise his hands. One person would take his one hand, another person would take his other hand and then a small walk would be done.And he was telling people, “You have to follow the five great principles of Hinduism. The first is ashwad, no taste.”And what happened to this man? He was a doctor! I asked him, when I went to Rishikesh and I saw him, “What kind of doctor are you? It seems your certificate is bogus. You can’t even take care of your body; you have become a monster. You cannot raise your own hands, they have become so heavy.”Everything was out of proportion: a big belly, big fat hands, the legs like elephant legs. And this person is teaching the whole world: “You are not the body, you are the soul.”Who are these monsters? Just bodies, with no soul at all. I can’t see any space in them; they are so filled up with junk that I don’t think they can have a soul too.What Sekito is saying is absolutely right: tremendous truth in small statements. “What is the pure land?” Sekito responded, “Who made you dirty?” You are always pure, that is the pure land. Your inner space has never gathered any dirt. That mirror is always clean. No dirt can reach that depth, into that invisible beyond.The monk asked, “What is nirvana?” He is not understanding at all; the first question was the last question. All these are repetitions of the same thing. Nirvana is nothing but liberation: liberation from all desires, liberation from all attachments, liberation from all bondage. What is nirvana? – liberation from birth, from death.And Sekito said, “Who gave you birth and death?” It is you, your desire.Just try a small experiment. In the night when you are going to sleep, wait, and at the last moment when you think now you are just on the verge of falling asleep, just say, “One.” Go on saying, “One, one, one…” As you are crossing the border from waking to sleep, “One, one, one…” Perhaps two, three times after the boundary is crossed, you may repeat, “One, one, one…” and then you will be fast asleep. In the morning, watch. As you become aware that you are waking, you will be surprised that you are repeating, “One, one, one…” Strange! After eight hours of sleep that “one” was continuously being repeated inside you. The last thought when you go to sleep will be the first thought when you wake up. That is an absolutely guaranteed science.Why am I giving you this example? Because the last thought and desire when you die will be the first desire when you enter a womb. If you die without a desire, without any thought, you will not enter any womb. Nobody is forcing you into some womb. It is your desire, your last desire when you die. Some ambition, some unfulfillment, some frustration… You wanted to be the prime minister and you missed. You wanted to be the richest man – you missed. You wanted a beautiful woman and you missed. Anything that is the last thing in you will take you into a new womb to fulfill your desire.Life is very merciful; existence is very compassionate. It gives you chance upon chance, opportunities upon opportunities. If you die meditatively without any desire, then there is no womb for you, no birth, no death. That’s what Sekito is saying. Who has given you birth and death? – you yourself. By your desires, by your ambitions you go on perpetuating the circle of birth and death. Stop desiring. That is nirvana: you move from death into the cosmos, not into another womb. To move into the cosmos, to become one with existence, is nirvana. It is also liberation, it is also freedom, it is also the pure paradise – different names for one experience.The attendant monk came back to Nangaku and reported Sekito’s answers. Nangaku put both hands together and made a gesture of touching his feet.Although he was not there, he accepted Sekito as enlightened. A very strange story. One day Sekito had come to Nangaku to deliver a letter, but they could not find any attunement with each other, and Sekito had returned without delivering the letter. At that time Sekito was not enlightened.This time, on the same mountain where Nangaku had his temple and monastery – and the emperor had given the name Nangaku Mountain to the whole mountain – Sekito had settled on a small hilltop, on a flat stone.Nangaku heard about Sekito after his master had died – that he was just sitting on a rock. He wanted to know whether he had become enlightened or not. Nanggaku must have seen that very day – when Sekito had come as a disciple of Seigen – he must have seen the man, his strength and his power. He had asked a question and Nangaku had said, “Your question is very arrogant. You should ask in a humble way.”And Sekito had said to him, “I would rather fall into eternal hellfire, but I will not ask the question in any other way.” And he had returned directly – a man of steel.Nangaku was a famous master. When he heard these answers from the monk, he folded his hands, bowed down, and recognized that that fellow Sekito had become enlightened. These answers cannot be given by any scholar. They cannot be borrowed knowledge. They can only arise as an experience.At that time, Kengo, Ran and Nangaku were thought to be the three masters in the whole country, and all three of them said, “From the stone-head comes the lion’s roar to my ear.”Because he was sitting on a stone with a shaved head he became known as Stonehead Sekito. All three masters were staying by chance in Nangaku’s monastery. And they all three said, “From the stone-head comes the lion’s roar to my ear.” He is sitting far away, but I can hear the lion’s roar.The monk went back to Sekito and said that if there were anything that the monk could do for him, to let him know. A little later, the master, Nangaku, came with his monks to see Sekito.It is a strange phenomenon. Once, Sekito had gone as a disciple to Nangaku. Things have changed completely, now Nangaku comes to pay his respects to Sekito.Sekito stood up to receive him, and the two greeted each other. Later, Nangaku had a temple built for Sekito’s convenience.Zen gives a totally different taste – no competition. Nangaku made a temple for Sekito – on his mountain, for his convenience – and took care of him. A monk used to come to ask him what he needed. Soon thousands of people started coming to Sekito. He became one of the greatest masters of Zen. He was a very straightforward man, not a philosopher or a theologian. His answers were very simple, but absolutely to the point. His sword was very sharp, and in just one blow he used to cut people’s whole intellect, their whole mind. He helped many people to become enlightened. Very few masters can claim that they have made so many people enlightened as Sekito.Chinejo wrote:Suddenly light,suddenly dark –I am a firefly too.You have seen the firefly. It goes on… As it opens its wings, you see the light. As it closes its wings, there is darkness.“Suddenly light, suddenly darkness – I am a firefly too.” Chinejo must have been meditating deep in the night. And the silence of the night and many fireflies just moving around – sometimes dark, sometimes light, sometimes dark, sometimes light – suddenly he became so attuned to the fireflies that he said, “I am a firefly too. Sometimes I am ignorant and sometimes I am awakened. Sometimes all is dark and sometimes everything becomes light.”Every buddha was as ignorant as you are in his past; everybody who is ignorant has a future. Any day, suddenly, light – and in that light all the past, maybe millions of years, disappear like dreams. Gautam Buddha used to measure people’s age from the time they became enlightened. He did not count the previous age.One day, a great emperor of those days, Prasenjita, was sitting by the side of Buddha asking him questions. And an old monk – he may have been seventy-five years old at least – asked Prasenjita, “Forgive me please. I have been waiting because I have to leave before the sun sets. I have to reach the other village” – a Buddhist monk cannot travel in the night – “so I am in a hurry. And I have to disturb you just for a moment, just to touch Buddha’s feet and ask if there is any message because I may not see him again. Who knows about tomorrow?”So he touched Buddha’s feet and Buddha asked, “How old are you?”And the old man said, “Four years.”Prasenjita could not believe that and could not resist the temptation either to interfere. He said, “What? Four years? You must be at least seventy-five.”Buddha said, “Prasenjita, you don’t know that in my commune we count only those years which he has lived as an enlightened being. Before that was just darkness and dreams, nightmares, misery – not worth counting. You are right, he is seventy-five years old according to the ordinary world, but this is not an ordinary world. He is living in an extraordinary commune. As far as I am concerned he is four years old. I was just asking him whether he remembers or not. He remembers. He knows what real life is – only four years. That seventy-one years was just fake. It does not matter, has no meaning at all. There is no need to count it.”Buddha said, “With my blessings you can go because your remembrance is correct.”Maneesha’s question:Osho,Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of himself – but I see his sentiments as being much more true of you – “One day there will be associated with me a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sacrificed. It is my fate to know myself in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia…. I am not a man, I am dynamite.”Would you please comment?Maneesha, there is no need to comment. I am not a man, I am dynamite. What Nietzsche was writing did not happen in his life; he ended up in a madhouse. No crowd gathered, no disciples, no friends.The last phase of his life was a tragedy. The woman he loved refused to marry him because she did not think he was in his senses. The man he respected, Wagner, a great musician, told him not to come to his house because it was Wagner’s wife to whom he had proposed. All his friends deserted him, only his sister remained to take care of him. And finally she was also unable to take care and had to put him into a madhouse.He was certainly a man of great insights, but all his insights were only intellectual. Those great insights drove him mad because he could not manage to live with the crowd, and he could not manage to live alone. He was against everything, just the way I am.But I am absolutely capable of living alone. My aloneness is absolute silence. I just come for the evening talk to be with you, then I am alone the whole day, the whole night. But my aloneness is not lonely, my aloneness is so full of existence, so full of ecstasy and divine drunkenness. My aloneness is my innermost depth, my highest consciousness.Friedrich Nietzsche was poor in the sense that he never knew anything of meditation. So his dynamite turned against himself. He burned himself in his own intellectual, rational, logical arguments.But I am certainly not a man, I am dynamite. And my people have come already and they are coming more and more. Millions more will be here. No boundaries of nations, no boundaries of any church can prevent them. And my whole work is to put dynamite in you to destroy you completely, so that you can enter the cosmos with an easy heart, relaxed, at peace, finally at home.Maneesha, you are right, your feeling is right. It does not need any commentary on it.This is the right time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh. After such a serious and difficult time, Sardar Gurudayal Singh has come to help you.Gilda and Gilbert Goldfish are swimming around in their fish bowl one day, having a deep philosophical discussion.“So,” gurgles Gilda, “you say that you do not believe in the existence of God?”“That’s right,” bubbles Gilbert, throwing down his copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “And Friedrich Nietzsche says that God is dead and fish are free!”“Holy shit!” splutters Gilda. “Then who is the guy that changes our water?”Chester Cheese, the obsessed golfer, is preparing one Sunday morning to go to the local golf course.“Golf! Golf! Golf!” nags Betty Cheese, his wife, standing with her hands on her hips and curlers in her hair. “That’s all you ever think about. If you ever spent a weekend with me I think I would drop dead!”“Look,” replies Chester, putting on his golf hat. “There is no point in trying to bribe me!”Chief Patrol Officer Kowalski and his partner, Officer Jablonski, are walking down Main Street in Warsaw late one night. Suddenly, Officer Kowalski stumbles over a dead body lying on the sidewalk with a huge knife in its back, just in front of the Philharmonic Hall.“Ho!” shouts Kowalski with surprise. “What do we have here?”“It is a dead body, chief!” exclaims Officer Jablonski, his eyes popping out.“Right!” says Kowalski, and he pulls out his pad and paper and starts writing.“Time?” shouts Kowalski.“Er, one a.m.” replies Jablonski, nervously looking at his watch.“Okay,” says Kowalski, writing furiously. “Now, date?”“Er, March eleventh,” replies Jablonski, checking his calendar book.“Good!” shouts Kowalski. “Description?”“Er, knife stuck in back,” cries Jablonski.“Right!” exclaims Kowalski. “And location?”Jablonski looks up at the huge building and says, “Er, F-i-l-a-m-o-n-i-c. Philharmonic Hall?”Kowalski scratches his head, and starts writing.“F-i-l… No, that is not right,” he says, and then he tries again.“P-i-l-l… No, that’s not it! Maybe it is F-h-i-l – oh, shit!” snaps Kowalski, breaking his pencil. “How the hell do you spell Philharmonic?”“Gee,” replies Jablonski, “I don’t know.”Then Kowalski bends over, picks up the bleeding body, throws it over his shoulder, and starts walking away.“Hey! Chief!” cries Officer Jablonski. “Where are you going?”Kowalski turns around and says, “Let us put him in front of the post office!”Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, close your eyes and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to look inward.Gather your energy, your total consciousness, and with an urgency, as if this is going to be your last moment in life, rush toward your very center – faster and faster, deeper and deeper.As you are coming closer to your center, a great silence descends over you. It is falling almost like soft rain, so tangible. A little more close, and a great peace arises from your very sources, surrounds you in a glory you have never known before, in a grace that is not of this world.One step more and you are at the very center of your being.For the first time you are seeing your original face. As a symbol in the East we have accepted the face of Buddha as the original face of everyone. You are facing your own hidden buddha.This is your hidden splendor. This is your nature, your dharma.The buddha has only one quality, witnessing. Witness that you are not the body, witness that you are not the mind, witness that you are only a witness. And suddenly you have become one with the buddha.As your witnessing deepens, a great ecstasy starts, starts arising in you just as if a lotus flower is opening in the morning sun, so fresh.On its petals there are still cold dewdrops of the night, shining in the morning sun like pearls.At this moment you are the most fortunate people on the earth. To be at your center, to be a buddha is the greatest experience of life.To make this witnessing deeper, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax… Let go… But keep on witnessing.Slowly slowly, you start melting like ice in the ocean. Gautama the Buddha Auditorium is turning into an ocean of consciousness.Ten thousand buddhas are disappearing as separate units and are becoming the oceanic vastness, eternity, infinity.This is your ultimate nature. This is your birthright, to be a buddha, and you have gone beyond the mind and you have reached to the very source of your being from where you have come. And when the source and the goal become one, the circle is complete. This completion of the circle is enlightenment. Every day it will become deeper and deeper.Collect all the experiences that are happening right now: the feeling of vastness, the oceanic feeling, the great peace, the strange silence, the great ecstasy and flowers of bliss showering on you.Collect everything, you have to bring all these things to your ordinary day-to-day life – the same grace, the same peace, the same silence, the same joy, the same celebration.If you can manage to bring all these things from the center to the circumference, the buddha is bound to follow. But anyway, persuade him.Before Nivedano calls you back, persuade the buddha to come a little more close, just following you so that he remains a continuous presence behind you.In every act, in every gesture, in every word, in every silence, day, night, waking, walking, sleeping, whatever you are doing, his presence is always there following you like a shadow.But the shadow is very solid and the shadow is very radiant; the shadow fills you with great joy. Your heart starts dancing.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back…but come back very peacefully as if there is no one here, very silently, with great grace. You have to remember that you are a buddha.Sit down just for a few seconds to remind yourself of the golden path that you followed, to remind yourself of all the experiences that open their doors at the center of your being.The experience of the center is the only miracle there is.Just by your honesty, just by your sincerity, you have made this evening a magic evening. Feel the presence of buddha behind you.These are the three steps of meditation: first, you will find buddha as a presence behind you; second, you will find buddha as a presence in front of you, you will become a shadow; and third, your shadow will disappear into the buddha, you will become the buddha himself.You will not be anymore, only the buddha is.Buddha is just a symbol of pure existence, of ultimate liberation, of nirvana.One day, these three steps will be fulfilled in you. When the third step is fulfilled, you are awakened, enlightened. Then there is no birth for you, no death for you. You have become part of the ultimate cosmos.God is dead, and Zen is the only living truth.

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God is Dead Now Zen is 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

God is Dead Now Zen is 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The mind of the great sage of India was intimately communicated from India to China. In human beings there are wise men and fools, but on the way there is no northern or southern teacher. The mysterious source is clear and bright, the branching streams flow through the darkness.To be attached to the relative, this is illusion, but to take to oneself the absolute is not enlightenment.Each and all the elements of the subjective and objective spheres are related, and at the same time independent; related, yet working differently, though each keeps its own place.Form makes the character and appearance different; sound, taste, smell, distinguish comfort and discomfort.The dark makes all things one; the brightness makes all things different.The four elements return to their nature as a child to its mother.Fire is hot, wind moves, water is wet, earth hard. Eyes see, ears hear, the nose smells, the tongue tastes – one salt, another sour.Each is independent of the other, but the different leaves come from the same root.Friends, first the questions. The first question:Osho,Could one summarize the difference between a God-oriented religion and the quality of religiousness as the difference between a judge external to us, a projected conscience, and a witness within our consciousness?The difference between God-oriented religions and the religions without God is immense. The God-oriented religions are simply fiction. Lies told again and again and again almost start appearing to be true. God as the ultimate lie creates many lies around itself because no lie can stand alone. Because no lie is self-evident, it needs other lies to support it; hence, all God-oriented religions have created many lies to support God.Truth can stand on its own legs, but not a lie. Truth needs no argument, but not a lie; a lie needs many arguments, many fabricated proofs, many imaginary evidences. Truth is utterly naked – either you know it or you don’t.God-oriented religions are a disease of the soul, a sickness of the mind, because God is only your fear, your dread, your anxiety, your insecurity. Then comes prayer, and then comes the priest, and then comes the organized religion, the church. True religiousness cannot be God-oriented. True religiousness is your own interiority, your own inner space.You can see the difference between these two kinds of people. Those who follow the God-oriented religions don’t show any compassion, don’t show any ecstasy, don’t show any blissfulness. On the contrary, they are very violent, they are very against freedom. They are in constant fear that somebody will object to their lies, and they will not be able to answer because all that they have is only a belief system. A belief system can only help you to forget your ignorance, it does not destroy it. So the God-oriented man lives in ignorance and believes that he knows.Mere words, theories, hypotheses, are not going to change your character. They can at the most make you a hypocrite. They can give you a beautiful mask but not the original face. They can create a very convenient personality, but they cannot create or discover your beautiful individuality. And the personality, however convenient, is a heavy weight on your chest, on your heart, because you are living a lie. Nobody can feel at ease when he is living a lie.The man who has no belief system, but has himself encountered truth suddenly finds himself changing into a new man. There is no effort involved. Grace comes by itself, compassion comes by itself; violence disappears, fear disappears, death and birth disappear. One starts feeling at home with the universe. There is no tension; one is absolutely relaxed.This is our home. One stops searching and seeking, one starts living, dancing, loving. Knowing one’s own interiormost center is also knowing the center of the universe itself. Doors of all the mysteries open – not that you start getting answers; you become more mysterious.All answers are mind products. Questions arise out of the mind, and answers are also from the same mind. Neither the questions lead you toward the truth, nor the answers. Answers only repress your questions, but they will surface again and again.A man without God finds himself in total aloneness. He has nowhere to go except withinward. All roads leading out are meaningless; they don’t lead you anywhere because there is nobody outside – no God, no paradise. Removing God is a great rebellion and an absolute necessity to be awakened, to be enlightened.God is holding millions of people outside their own consciousness, and God being a fiction, your prayer is false, and your religiousness is imposed. Hence all these religions demand: “Do this, don’t do that.” Everything is imposed from the outside. And, whenever something is imposed from the outside, your dignity is destroyed, your individuality is crushed, your freedom turns into slavery. The ugliest slavery is spiritual slavery.With God you can only be a slave. With God you can never be liberated. Liberation begins with liberating yourself from God and all the lies that surround him. Liberation brings you to your own very center, and there you find a totally different experience that is not of the mind; it is of pure silence, truth and beauty, of eternity, of life as a constant festival.And because you experience this festivity inside you, it starts overflowing from you. In your actions you become graceful, your eyes start shining with love, with depth, your very movement shows a centered, balanced, harmonious being. Your words carry something of that which is beyond words. Your silence is no longer the silence of a cemetery, it is not dead. It is very alive, throbbing; it has a heartbeat, it is a silent dance of pure awareness. It is a silent song without any sounds, but it is immensely alive.Anything imposed from outside destroys you, your freedom, your individuality. Your inner space is completely closed, and it is closed in such a beautiful way that you never think that your parents, your teachers, your priests, your leaders, politicians – all kinds of so-called wise men – are poisonous. With all good intentions they are poisoning every child. And God is the original sin – original sin because we created a great lie, the ultimate lie.Once I was in a court for the first time, in a strange case. There used to be a Christian church, a very beautiful church with vast grounds around it, huge ancient trees… You will be surprised that Indian Christianity is the oldest Christianity in the world. One of Jesus Christ’s closest disciples, Thomas, came directly to India. His gospel is not included in the Bible because it was written in India. It is the most beautiful gospel; those four gospels included in the New Testament are nothing compared to it.Thomas became a transformed man here because he started seeing the difference between God-oriented religion and a religion without a God. A religion without a God gives man dignity because man becomes the ultimate evolved consciousness in the whole of existence. It gives man freedom from a burden imposed by the priest in the name of God.And you have asked, “Could one summarize the difference between a God-oriented religion and the quality of religiousness as the difference between a judge external to us…?” There is no judge, and there is no religiousness in a God-oriented religion. It is mere theology, it is a mind project. It is not existential, it is not experiential.And you are asking, “Could one summarize the difference between a God-oriented religion…?” First remember, the God-oriented religion is only a name. God is fiction, so anything oriented in God cannot be anything else but a lie.And secondly, you are asking, “…and the quality of religiousness?” The God-oriented so-called religion has no religiousness to it. It has a certain morality, it has a certain imposed discipline which is against nature.God is the enemy of nature because nature is truth and God is a lie. But the lie is dominating millions of people and telling them to withdraw from nature, which is the only truth. So there is no religiousness in a God-oriented person. What he has is a morality, which is nothing but a social convenience. It differs from place to place, from country to country, from race to race. What seems to be religious to one fragment of humanity is not religious to another fragment of humanity because every society has its own climate, its own heritage, its own past – which is different from other societies.For example, the Hindu concept of heaven is that of a centrally air-conditioned place. Not that they have used the words centrally air-conditioned, but they say the whole day a cool, fragrant, breeze blows; it is never hot in heaven. Obviously, it shows that the people who have projected this lie are living in a hot country, and they don’t want to live eternally in a hot place.The Tibetans have a very warm heaven, no snow at all; no winter ever happens in their heaven. They suffer from the cold and winter and snow. They are projecting something which they can tolerate eternally. This life is small, but to suffer the same thing eternally would be too much. The human mind is too frail, too weak.Just watch what each country thinks of as religious. In India, you have to take a morning bath before the sunrise and say your prayer, and only then can you eat your breakfast – not before that. In the religious scriptures of Tibet it says you should take a bath at least once a year!But the trouble is that people go on carrying their concepts even though they move into different climates…One of my friends, a very scholarly brahmin, wanted to go to Tibet. He was very interested in the Tibetan language and Tibetan scriptures.I said to him, “All that literature is available. You don’t have to go to Tibet. And you will not be able to remain there more than two days.”He said, “Why not?”I said, “How will you manage a bath before sunrise? And without a bath you cannot take your breakfast. You cannot eat anything unless you pray, but the prayer needs – it is an absolute necessity – that you take a bath.”But he didn’t listen to me. He went to Tibet, and after just two days he was back. He could not even reach Lhasa, he returned back from Ladakh, which is just in between Tibet and India. Even Ladakh gave him too much trouble.Taking an early morning bath in Ladakh can kill you. It is ice cold. So he came back, he did not go further.I said, “What happened? It is just two days and you are back?”He said, “You were right. I am a brahmin and I follow my religion. I cannot remain without a bath.”Tibetan lamas came with the Dalai Lama as he escaped from Tibet when China invaded it. So hundreds of lamas came with him.I was holding a meditation camp in Bodhgaya, the place where Gautam Buddha became enlightened, in exactly the same campus, by the side of the same tree. And a group of Tibetan lamas came to pay their respects to the tree under which Gautam Buddha had become enlightened.You will not believe it… Even from far away they stink because they are still following the idea that you should take one bath every year – in India! It was hot summer and they were perspiring.And they were still wearing the same kind of clothes as they wore in Tibet – layer upon layer. There are many layers of clothes, and they are so dirty, so oily, and dust had been gathering on the oily clothes. They were good in Tibet, they prevented any cold from reaching to the person’s body, but in India…They had not changed. I asked them, “Do you understand that all kinds of so-called religions are social conveniences. It was good in Tibet but here you are being stupid. So many layers of clothes upon clothes – you are being insane!”But they said, “Our religion says one bath a year is absolutely necessary. More than that is luxury. More than that is condemned, it is dangerous.”And to make people afraid that if you go against the dictates of your scriptures you will fall into hell, they said, “It is better to stink than to fall into hell.”I said, “That’s right. You are already in hell. I don’t think that even the Devil is even going to allow you into hell because never, in no scripture of the world, is it said that the Devil stinks; he is a gentleman, a nice fellow.”I said to those people, “Just keep these clothes on in India and they will save you from hell. As soon as the Devil starts smelling you, he will close the doors: ‘Tibetan lamas no longer allowed! Go to the other place.’”Jesus used to drink alcohol. Now, in India no religion can conceive that a man of understanding, a man who is enlightened, can drink alcohol.I don’t see any problem – if the body is illusory – because the alcohol is going into the body, not into the soul. It is called a spirit, but don’t think that it is spiritual! It does not go into your spirit. It may affect your mind, and you may fall unconscious, but still it is not touching your consciousness at all because the mind and brain are part of the body. Mind is the program and the brain is the computer that is programmed.When a child is born, he has a brain but no mind. Mind is nothing but the whole collection of information, knowledge; it is programming. So the brain will be affected by alcohol, but not your spirituality.What is the problem? To me there is no problem. Even a buddha can once in a while have a little drink, enjoy a little party, Italian style.In Italy, party means something absolutely different to what you understand. It is a real party, with two partners. But why prohibit a buddha from enjoying a little party, a little spaghetti, a little wine? All these things are material, and they don’t touch your spiritual being.But in India nobody can conceive that a buddha can drink – he will not drink even tea. One cannot think of Mahavira drinking alcohol. The reason is simple. In this hot climate, drinking alcohol is not needed, but in a cold climate, alcohol is absolutely necessary. It keeps you warm; it does not make you intoxicated, it only keeps you warm. And there is no harm in feeling warm when snow is falling all around you.So in a cold country the morality will be different. In a hot country the morality will be different. This is just an example. On every point, different climates will create different moralities.Mohammed said to the Mohammedans, “You can marry four women.” The reason was that in Saudi Arabia at that time, fourteen hundred years ago, the proportion was four women to one man. And it happened because the men were continuously fighting. It was a tribal world, and every tribe was fighting with another tribe. Of course, the men were being killed, and the women remained. So the proportion became such that there were four women to one man.So I don’t condemn Mohammed. He was making it convenient for the society, otherwise, what will three women do? They will disturb the whole society. They will start having love affairs with married people; they will become prostitutes. And such a vast number of prostitutes will create so much ugliness and perversion. It was better that a man married four women.Strangely enough… I have been in deep contact with a few Mohammedans who have been my friends. I was amazed. I used to think that theoretically one woman is enough to drive a man either insane or enlightened – there are only two alternatives. Just one woman, so what will four women do to a man? But my actual experience, when I came into contact with Mohammedans who had four wives, was totally different.That’s what I always say, that theoretically something may look logical, but life has no obligation to follow your logic.I was surprised that the Mohammedan household has no quarrel the way one man and one woman are continuously nagging and fighting and jealous. The reason is, those four women are fighting among themselves and the man is simply out of it. They are not much concerned about the man, the whole question is about four women. So the man is far happier than anybody who lives with one woman.I asked those friends, “What is the matter? One woman either drives men insane or they renounce the world – really it is renouncing the woman – and they become enlightened.”So now I understand why no Mohammedan has ever been enlightened. They are very normal people, they don’t go insane either. It is those four women fighting among themselves, and the man is simply out of the game. He can watch the game, but he is no longer part of it.But now the proportion is not the same. In a country like India, the proportion of men to women is exactly the same, and now even in Saudi Arabia the proportion is exactly the same. Now, to go on marrying four women in Saudi Arabia will create problems and inconvenience for the society because three men will be left without wives. Now these three men will create trouble. They will have love affairs with other people’s wives. And always remember, the other person’s wife is far more beautiful than your own wife, far greener. Just as the neighbor’s lawn looks so green that you want to chew it, you also want to chew the neighbor’s wife!The French actually have an expression. When you are in deep love in France, tell the woman, “I want to eat you” and she will be immensely happy. But only the French do that much. If you say that thing in India – that I want to eat you – the woman will give such a scream. You will be arrested by the police: “What did you say to that woman that she was screaming so loudly?” And if you say, “I was just telling her ‘I love you,’ and I told her, ‘I want to eat you…’”Even language changes, just as morals change, as religions change – according to climate, according to tradition, according to their past.I have heard about a very great French warrior. In the Middle Ages the warriors were always going on crusades. Christians were going to kill Mohammedans, and they were also going to kill Jews, or convert them into Christians. If you wanted to stay alive, the only chance was to be a Christian – otherwise be finished!So the warrior was going on a crusade, but he had a very beautiful wife. In the Middle Ages in Europe, they used to have locks: when the husband would go away for a few days, he would put a certain lock on the woman’s vagina. It was a belt with a lock, and strange locks were developed so that nobody could make love to the woman. Some locks, which the richer people used, had a knife inside. Anything entering into the lock, and the knife would simply fall on it. They are exhibited in the great museums of Europe, particularly in London.So the warrior who was going away for months – or maybe it would take a year or two years – locked his wife. But he was worried about taking the key with him, as it was war and if the key were lost then it would be very difficult to open the lock. You would need to call some locksmith or somebody who could make another key, and it would be very embarrassing. So he called his best friend, and told him, “I am going on a crusade, and I trust you, you are my best friend, so keep this key. When I come back I will take the key from you. This is the key to my wife’s lock.”The friend said, “Don’t be worried.” And just five minutes after the warrior had gone on his horse, he saw his friend coming fast on his horse. The warrior stopped and asked, “What is the matter?”The friend said, “You have given me the wrong key.” After just five minutes!When men and women are not in proportion, what Mohammed said is good, there is nothing wrong in it. But it belonged to his time and that situation. It has now become a rule among Mohammedans, and because they cannot find so many wives in their own religion, they go on abducting other people’s wives.In India it is a game. You just catch hold of somebody’s wife…and Hindus are very fussy about it. Once the wife has stayed one night outside the house – finished! She cannot enter the husband’s house again, the husband won’t allow it. She cannot enter her parents’ home again, the parents will throw her out because she has degraded their respectability, their prestige: “Just go and commit suicide, there is no other way.” Rather than committing suicide the woman returns to the Mohammedan. That seems to be saner and more logical.A woman has to be out of the house for just for one night. It does not matter whether she has made love to anybody or not. This is how Indian Mohammedans go on increasing their population. Obviously, a man with four wives can have at least four children per year. The same is not possible for four husbands and one wife. They may not even have one child – the four husbands may kill the child before it is born.So remember, your God-oriented religions are only conveniences for society. They should not be called religions. They are only moral precepts to keep the society together, and in the least inconvenient way. It is not religiousness. Religiousness arises only as a blossoming of your own consciousness.God-oriented religions certainly create a conscience, but not consciousness. Many people have the false notion that conscience and consciousness are one. Their root is one, but they are two separate branches moving in diametrically opposite directions. Conscience is forced on you by others. Consciousness is an evolution rising from your own depths to the ultimate heights. Conscience is just like a plastic flower.Once I had a neighbor…I had a beautiful garden with all kinds of flowers and all kinds of trees. Of course, he was jealous. So what he did… I could only see one of the windows of his house from my house. Tall trees hid his house from my garden, but one window was available for me to see. He brought a pot and arranged plastic flowers in it. And just to deceive me, because plastic flowers don’t need watering, he would water them every day just to show me that he also had flowers. But I saw that the same flowers continued – six months passed and still the same flowers remained. I said, “He has found a great flowering tree!”So one day I jumped over my boundary wall and went close to the window. And I could not believe that what kind of idiot he was. He had brought plastic flowers with plastic leaves and planted them in a flowerpot. And just to deceive me that they were real, he had to water them. He would only water them when I was there to show me that his flowers were real.Plastic flowers are permanent flowers. In fact, scientists are worried that plastic is one of the things the earth cannot absorb. And now so many plastic things are being thrown into the ocean, into the earth, that they are destroying the whole of ecology. Plastic is something eternal.A tree grows out of the earth, a man grows out of the earth; you put the tree back into the earth and it will disappear into its basic elements. But plastic is man-made. You can put it into the earth and after many years you can dig and find the plastic exactly the same, nothing has changed. It is because of the American idea of using a thing once and throwing it away. It is cleaner, but it is dangerous. The whole bottom of the ocean around America is full of plastic things: plastic bags, plastic syringes. Everything is plastic: plastic covers, plastic toys.And those layers of plastic have created something strange. Millions of fish have died because the plastic has made the water poisonous. Its aliveness has gone, it has become dead. The fear is growing every day that the more plastic thrown into the oceans, into the rivers, into the earth, will kill everything; everything will be just plastic.I knocked on the neighbour’s window. He came, and I said, “You have got great flowers. I have got very poor flowers; in the morning they blossom, by the evening they are gone. Although you have got only one pot, it is better than my whole garden.”He was very embarrassed. And I said, “You are a very intelligent man. You have been watering these plastic flowers…” He had not a single word to say. His wife came behind him and said, “You are saying he is intelligent. He is an idiot! I have been telling him that plastic flowers don’t need water.”I told his wife, “You don’t know… He was not watering the plastic flowers, he was trying to deceive me. And that’s why I had to climb over the wall, committing an illegal act, to make him aware that he cannot deceive. These plastic flowers have been there for six months, and they will remain forever. This man will die, you will die,” I told his wife, “but these plastic flowers will remain. They are immortal beings. But they are dead, that’s why they are immortal – already dead.”You cannot kill a dead man, can you? Once a man is dead he becomes immortal. You cannot kill him twice. Resurrection has happened only once, and that too was false. Once a man dies there is no more death.This is the difference between imposed morality and religion, and an inner growth of consciousness. They are totally different. Perhaps only in the French language are conscience and consciousness equivalent – but I am not certain, I don’t know French. I have a certain feeling that in French those two words are not different: conscience is used for both conscience and consciousness, but that is absolutely wrong. The French linguists have to change it.Conscience is God-oriented; consciousness is your own innermost being flowering. Then you have a spontaneous response to situations. A God-oriented morality cannot have spontaneity in it. It consults what the holy scripture is saying – what Moses is saying, what Jesus is saying. It has to consult its memory system. But spontaneity has not to consult anybody – Manu, Moses, Mohammed, anybody. Spontaneous action simply arises in you, and because it arises in you it has an authenticity, an honesty, and you function as an individual, not as a sheep. You function as a human being with dignity and splendor and honor.A God-oriented religion takes away everything that is beautiful in you and leaves behind just a dilapidated human being, crippled in every possible way, exploited by all kinds of parasites. God is the ultimate parasite. He goes on threatening you.Of course, because there is no God, the priest is the spokesman and he goes on threatening you: “You will be thrown into hell if you don’t listen to me. I represent God.” It is a pure invention of the priesthood all over the world, to dominate man, to exploit man. And what they are saying to the people, they themselves don’t believe. How can they believe it? They know it is a fiction. But it is a good profession, it is a good business.Just today, the archbishop of Jerusalem – which is a holy land for three religions, Jews, Christians, Mohammedans – the archbishop of this holy city was arrested in London because he was misbehaving in the railway station public toilet, exposing himself, exhibiting his sexual machinery to other people. The archbishop of Jerusalem! One cannot even believe that these people go on teaching celibacy to others and they themselves behave in such stupid ways.I have told you…Three bishops were going to Pittsburgh. The woman on the window where they had to get their tickets had such beautiful tits…The youngest bishop was sent to purchase the tickets. When he saw the woman’s tits, he forgot everything. He said, “Just give me three tickets for Tittsburgh.”The woman was very angry. The bishop felt very ashamed, so he went back. He said, “Forgive me, but I forgot myself completely.”So the second one said, “Don’t be worried. I will go.” As he gave the money, he told the girl, “Give me the change in dimes and nipples.”The girl was furious. She said, “You are all idiots of the same type! Can’t you behave like human beings?”He ran away. And the oldest bishop said, “Don’t be worried. I will take care.” And he went there, and he said, “Woman, you will be in trouble! If you go showing your tits like this, at the pearly gates, Saint Finger will show his peter to you!”What to do with these people? Once you repress something it is bound to come up. You simply become a fool. Now all three bishops proved to be utterly foolish and absolute idiots. But they are victims of a constant harassment by religion, by their abbots, by their popes, against nature.All moralities are against nature and in favor of a certain social structure. The social structure is man-made, and is not perfect, it needs to be changed. But all moralities, all God-oriented religions, are protective of the social structure. They are against any revolution. They don’t have any consciousness. In place of consciousness they have created a bogus conscience that is plastic consciousness. What they call conscience is simply implanted, it is programmed in you. So you have to act accordingly, but your inner being is not in favor. So when you want to say, “Pittsburgh,” your inner being says, “Tittsburgh.” When you want to say, “Saint Peter,” your nature says, “Saint Finger will show his peter.” This dichotomy is created by your God-oriented religions.Man is suffering from schizophrenia, neurosis, psychosis – all kinds of mental diseases – because of the one fiction that he cannot drop. Just drop God, and you will find yourself saner, natural, and a certain beauty will come to you which only comes to natural beings.If you believe in a God, you are bound to be afraid of his judgment. But if there is no God, there is no judgment; you have only a witness, and a witness is not a judge. A witness is only a mirror. It clearly shows you the situation and it gives you a spontaneous response to it. Then it has tremendous beauty and harmony, and your life is without any regret. You don’t look back, you remain constantly in the present – just a witness, acting, responding, to whatever encounters you, according to your own consciousness.And remember one thing: even if you fall into hell, but you have lived spontaneously and according to your consciousness, you will have no regret. But on the other hand, if you enter heaven because others forced you to act according to certain precepts, certain commandments, even in heaven you will regret that you have not lived your life according to your own nature.There is only one blissfulness in the world, and that is to be in accordance with your nature, with your existence. Don’t bother about any commandments, don’t bother about any disciplines, don’t bother about any morality. Just live according to your own consciousness, and go on growing your consciousness. Soon you will see the spring and all the flowers will bring a clarity of vision, a certainty of action, a totality to every response. Your every response will be beautiful because it will be coming out of a growing consciousness.Conscience is borrowed. Consciousness is your nature. The difference is vast.The second question:Osho,It seems life is not the ultimate value, the mechanical man is expendable. God is nothing more than a sick fantasy; obviously, that cannot be the ultimate value. What then, does that leave us with?With nothing – just yourself. Once God is no longer there, you are alone and responsible.People are clinging to God for a certain reason. They are throwing all responsibility on God. “He will take care. All that we have to do is to go to the church every Sunday – that’s enough – and God will take care.” But you don’t know that the moment you give your responsibility to God, you have also given your freedom into his hands. You have become a puppet.Once you know God is just a sick fantasy, that very understanding will make you healthy and whole. And living out of your wholeness, your aloneness, is such a beautiful experience, that you don’t need any value, any ultimate value. You are the ultimate value. Your very being, when discovered in its totality, is a Gautam Buddha. You don’t need any other value as an incentive to make the journey toward the goal.All that you need is to drop all sick fantasies, and all your religions will disappear from the earth, and will leave you absolutely healthy. Out of that health and aloneness, out of that freedom, you will find your ultimate peaks and ultimate depths. This is what can be called the real meaning, the real significance, the ultimate value.You are the ultimate value. It is because of a sick fantasy that you are not looking at yourself, you are looking at the stars.The third question:Osho,Primitive societies have always conceptualized God as parts of the environment, such as rivers, trees, and the sun and moon. As societies became more civilized, they began to conceptualize God as a separate individual. Why is this?Primitive societies had no private property. Primitive societies had no families, they were tribal. Nobody knew who was the father, people only knew about uncles and the mother. Primitive societies were matriarchal; the mother was the only person they knew, the father had not yet arrived.As societies started moving from hunting to cultivation, they stopped being gypsies; otherwise they had been continuously moving wherever there was the possibility of finding more animals to hunt. They could not remain in one place, soon the food was finished. Animals were escaping from them, so they had to follow the animals. Their whole concern was how to get food.There were no houses, there were no cities, there were only temporary camps. Private property had not yet arisen. But with cultivation, private property came into being. The people who were stronger managed as much land as they wanted. The people who were weaker managed to live at the very minimum, on whatever was left over from the stronger gangsters. Those strong criminals finally became your kings, and your lords, and your counts. These are basically criminal people who have deprived humanity of much of its joy, forced it into a corner.Once private property arose, the father had to be certain that his son was his son. With private property the family came into being, and with private property the woman was transformed into a subhuman species. She became imprisoned. Now she was nothing but property, the property of a certain man, and her whole function was to be a factory to reproduce children.Tribal people have no idea of the father, but the tribal people and the primitives have known many things that we have forgotten: they felt life surging in the trees; they felt life moving in the rivers; they felt life in the tidal waves of the ocean, shattering continuously, eternally on the seashore. They were more sensitive people. They were illiterate, uncivilized, but they were more sensitive and more receptive.I have heard about the native Australians. Most of them have been killed by the white man, and killed in such an ugly way that the white man seems to be the most barbarous man on the earth. The native Australians were killed almost like animals. People used to go hunting the natives, because they thought them not to be human beings, but a far lower species. I have heard that almost ninety percent of the natives of Australia have been killed, and eaten, by the white people – because it was just hunting. Just as you hunt tigers and lions and deer, they were hunting a species that was different from humanity. They were not white, their faces were different, their behavior was different.But I have heard about the natives of Australia – and a few scientists are still working on the project – that they had a very strange way. They had no post office, they had no telephone system, they had no wireless. They used to hypnotize a tree, a certain tree which is more hypnotizable. Their sensitivity must have found the right kind of tree that is ready to be hypnotized.In humanity thirty-three percent of people are immediately capable of being hypnotized, only thirty-three percent. But strangely enough, only thirty-three percent of people are intelligent; they are the same people. Only thirty-three percent of people are creative; they are the same people. The remaining ones are insensitive, unreceptive, unintelligent.The natives of Australia have found which tree is more hypnotizable, so each village has its own hypnotized tree. And through the tree they used to send messages to another tree in another village. For example, somebody’s son had gone to another village, and the father wanted to send a message to him. When the son was leaving, the father would say, “If I have to send a message to you, I will send it exactly when the sun is rising. At that time, listen to the hypnotized tree in that village.” It may have been hundreds of miles away. And early, exactly when the sun was rising, the father would go to the tree in his village. He wanted to send a message to the son. He would tell the tree, “Please inform the tree in a certain village where my son must be waiting for a message…” And then he would talk to the tree, give the message. The son would be listening to the tree a hundred miles away, and the message was received, “You can stay two days more, but finish the work” – or any message.They practiced it for thousands of years, but slowly, slowly they have forgotten it; most of them have forgotten how to hypnotize because Christianity has been forcing them into schools to learn and to read. And Christianity is absolutely against hypnotism. It thinks it is something to do with the Devil. Hypnotism or mesmerism or anything like that is counted to be dangerous. So along with the natives they have destroyed those trees, which had been hypnotized for centuries. They had become so sensitive that they immediately sent the message to the other tree hundreds of miles away, maybe thousands of miles away. The space did not matter, neither did the distance.Primitive man was very sensitive because he lived with trees, he lived with animals, he lived with rivers, he lived with oceans, he lived with mountains. He was part of nature. The primitive man had no religion, no organized church, no priesthood. Obviously, primitive man was aware of a surging life all around. He lived amidst an ocean of life. And obviously, his love for trees, his love for rivers, his love for the ocean, his love for the high mountains, the stars, the sun and the moon, was immense. He lived in a totally different world – very related. He was one of the members of the cosmos, just as every living thing is. As far as sensitivity is concerned, he was far more human than the so-called civilized man. He has become hard, he has become more mechanical, more robotlike, and he has lost much of his sensitivity.You can see this, holding hands with different people; some hands will feel almost as if you are holding the hand of a dead man, no energy, no warmth, no throbbing of life, no transfer of any loving, friendly energy – just closed, dead. And you will find hands which suck you. You find afterward that you are feeling weaker. There are people with whom you don’t want to be, because being with them you feel sucked out of your energy, as if somebody has taken blood out of you. They are parasites of energy. They don’t have any energy to give, but they are ready to take any energy possible.And you will find the opposite also: holding someone’s hand you will feel healthier, fresher. Their hands will be flowing into your being, pouring some energy into you, some love, some warmth.Just the other day, Anando brought one very rich woman to see me. She owns some newspapers and magazines, a very beautiful woman. She wants to write an article about me, so she wanted a photograph of me with her. I took her hand in mine, and it was a sad shock to me. The woman was smiling, but her heart was sad. I could feel immense sadness in her hand.If you are sensitive, you will be able to feel whether a person is blissful, sad, feeling unworthy, feeling a sinner, or is standing on his own feet, feeling the dignity of being human, feeling rooted, centered; feeling that he has a place in existence of his own, that he is not accidental, that existence needs him otherwise he would not be here. “The very fact that I am here shows clearly that existence needs me. There is some tremendous purpose, some destiny that existence wants to be fulfilled by me. I am existence’s ambition, just as you are.” The moment you feel this, you have a great gratitude arising in you.Out of that gratitude primitive man was bowing down to the trees, to the rivers, to the sun, to the moon. It was far more beautiful than going into a church and bowing down to a sad Jesus Christ. Obviously Jesus has to be sad, he is crucified. You don’t expect him to laugh; that would be absolutely inappropriate. I would have done it. But Jesus has a long face, utterly sad.You will find all God-oriented people are serious and sad because deep down there is doubt; God is not their experience, it is just a belief. And how can you make belief a truth? It will remain a belief. You can repress your doubt as much as possible in the unconscious, but it is there and very alive and kicking. It makes you sad that you are living a fictitious life, a life that is not your own, a life that others have imposed on you. God is the most responsible for taking away your prestige, your dignity, your pride.The primitive man loved existence. To me, he was more religious than the civilized man.With private property came the father. The father can protect you when you are a child, but when you become a young person and you get married, then you have to live your life. And by that time, perhaps your father will have died or will have become sick and old. You have lived under protection of the father from your very first breath. He was the big man in your life, the first big man, so when you are alone, you start feeling some vacuum in you which the father used to fulfill. Hence, God became the father, and a father which is not going to die.Your father betrayed you, he left you alone, and you trusted him so much. He did not care that you have been left alone. You have lived with that program from the very first breath.So when the father leaves you and you are on your own, suddenly you feel a vacuum. That vacuum can be filled by another father, but that father cannot be a human being because a human being has already deceived you. You are feeling hurt. You project a father which is eternal and immortal; far away, and omnipotent – not like your father, whom you used to think in your childhood…You can see it when small children continuously fight: “My dad is the greatest man in the world! Your dad is just a chicken!” Every child thinks his dad is all-powerful, he can do anything, because the child looks around and his dad is doing all kinds of things. He repairs the car, repairs the television, beats the mother… The child knows he is powerful.But slowly, slowly, as you grow in your intelligence, you start seeing that powerful father’s frailties, his weaknesses. Suddenly, a gap. Even if the father is alive and with you, you know he is not omnipotent. He is becoming older, soon he will die. You know he is not all-powerful. Before his boss he starts wagging his tail, his invisible tail.There is a place in your backbone, just at the end, where some millions of years ago there used to be a tail connected. The plug is still there. That was the greatest argument by Charles Darwin that if there was no tail connected to you, then why this space? This space would not have been here. The tail has dropped, leaving the hole, leaving the space where it used to be attached.Why do you start smiling when you see your boss? You don’t smile at your servant; the servant has to smile, not you. You don’t take any notice, you go on reading your newspaper. You know he is passing by, smiling, but you don’t even look at him. Your boss is doing the same with you. You smile, and he goes on writing. Perhaps he is not writing anything, but just seeing you coming in, he starts getting engaged with a file, turning pages. He looks very occupied and busy.I used to stay with one of the presidents of the ruling Congress Party, U. N. Dhebar. He was very interested in me. He used to attend my camps, even though all his political friends tried to prevent him, telling him, “Don’t go to this man.” But he was not a politician, not cunning. He was a very simple and very authentic man. It was just by chance, accidentally, that he became the president.It happens in most cases. He was chosen as the president because he was the most polite, nice, and a man who would never say no. And Pandit Jawaharlal needed a yes-man. Nehru was the prime minister and he wanted the Congress to be ruled either by himself – which would look dictatorial – or by a yes-man. And U. N. Dhebar was such a simple man that he would say yes to whatever Jawaharlal wanted. So it was Jawaharlal who was dictating almost everything.I was staying once in his house in New Delhi, and he was talking to me and gossiping about all the political leaders, what kind of people we have got. He was telling me about all kinds of idiots. There was one, Maulana Azad, a Mohammedan, who knew no English and no Hindustani. He was a scholar of Arabic and Persian, and he was the education minister of India. He was just talking about this Maulana Azad.Once, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had gone to a conference in London, a conference of the commonwealth nations. Maulana Azad was the second man in the cabinet. He had been given that second place because he was a Mohammedan, to satisfy the Mohammedans of India.You will be surprised to know India is the greatest Mohammedan country. No other Mohammedan country has as many Mohammedans as India. Even after Pakistan and Bangladesh separated, still India has a greater population of Mohammedans than any other country in the world.To satisfy the Mohammedans, a Mohammedan had to be number two in the cabinet. And when Jawaharlal went to London, Maulana Azad thought, “Perhaps now I am the acting prime minister because I am the second man.”Prime ministers are prime ministers wherever they are. There is no such thing as an “acting prime minister.” If the president, who is the head of the government, goes out of the country, then the vice president becomes the acting president. But the prime minister is not the head of the government in a constitution such as India or England. The prime minister is not the head, so there is no need for any acting prime minister. But Azad thought this, and U. N. Dhebar was saying to me, “We all told him that this is absolutely unconstitutional. There is no place in the constitution for any acting prime minister. There is only a place for an acting president.”Azad did not listen. He immediately phoned Jawaharlal’s chauffeur. “Bring his limousine to my house. While he is away I am the acting prime minister.” And with the prime minister’s flag on the car, and two motorbikes ahead, and two motorbikes by the side, and two motorbikes behind, he went into the parliament, and everybody laughed.U. N. Dhebar was telling me, “There are such idiots! And Jawaharlal had to phone from London: ‘Don’t do this stupid thing. It is absolutely unconstitutional. There is no such thing as an acting prime minister.’”Then suddenly a phone call came. U. N. Dhebar took the phone and said, “I am very busy and I cannot give you any appointment for at least seven days,” and threw the phone down.I said, “You are not busy, you are just gossiping with me.”He said, “This is the trouble in politics. You have to pretend that you are very busy, that you don’t have any time – and you have all the time. But you have to show the people that you are a very busy man, not so easily approachable. I have told him that after seven days he should phone again. If I have time, then I will see him – although I am completely free… Because you are here, I have canceled all my programs. While you are here in my house, I don’t want to waste my time with anybody else. I want to be with you. This is a rare chance because in the camps I cannot have much time with you. This is a great opportunity. And I have told everybody and the guards, ‘Don’t allow anybody…’”I said, “This is strange. That man may have some important work.”He said, “Who cares? Nobody cares about anybody.Such a nice person, very cultured, educated, but who cares?”The moment he said it to me, I said, “This is very insensitive. And you pray every day to God.” He had a small temple in his house with the statue of Krishna. He was a devotee of Krishna. “Your prayer is meaningless. It is better to go outside and pray to a rosebush. At least the rosebush is alive! This Krishna that you are praying to is man-made – just a stone cut into a statue. Can’t you see the deadness of your Krishna? Look outside, the whole world is alive. Birds are singing, flowers are blossoming, the sun is setting. Soon the whole sky will be full of stars.”The primitive man lived in the universe as an essential part of it, and he was grateful just to be alive. His gratitude was more authentic than the God-oriented religions’ thankfulness to God. You are being thankful to a fiction.One of the well-known English linguists and writers, Dr. Johnson, had a strange habit, almost neurotic. Whenever he went for a morning walk he had to touch every lamppost. If he forgot to touch some lamppost, he would go back, touch it and then go ahead. Whoever was with him would say, “What are you doing?”He said, “What can I do? I feel such an urgency that it has to be done. I know it looks stupid, and I know there is something wrong with me, but what to do? If I leave one post, it creates so much upset – sentiments, emotions, feelings: ‘What are you doing? Just go back!’ And I have to go back.” A lamppost!I used to go for a morning walk. An old, retired professor of mathematics was also always going for a morning walk, so he became friendly with me and started walking with me. But he had the habit of bowing down.In India you find temples everywhere. Just after a few houses, again a temple – if not a temple, then under the tree, a red stone representing the monkey god.I said, “This is torture to me. Either leave me or leave your gods. What nonsense – in every place! And this whole city is full of temples of this god and that god, and you have to… And I have to stand with you, and I look embarrassed – what kind of companion have I got? So either stop following me – you can go your own way – or you have to stop this stupid habit. All those stones are dead. If you want, then look at something living. And I don’t see you ever looking at the trees, looking at the flowers, or looking at the last star that is disappearing.”And it is such a quiet moment in the early morning: the sun has not yet risen, it is still dark and the last star is disappearing. At this moment, such a moment, Gautam Buddha became enlightened. The last star was disappearing, and as the last star disappeared, something in him also disappeared. Suddenly the sky was there, empty, and he looked inside. There was also utter emptiness: two skies – one outside, one inside – and a great silence. For the first time he bowed down, not to anybody in particular, but to the whole of existence. This is gratitude, this is authentic sensitivity.With private property, the father became important. And when the father was seen in his true reality, was found lacking in omnipotence, in omniscience, in omnipresence – he was not a god – you had to create God as a substitute for your father.So when Jesus falls down on the ground on his knees and calls, “Abba!” in the Aramaic language… Jesus never spoke Hebrew; Hebrew was the language of the highly-cultured scholars, rich people, educated people. Aramaic was the language of the villagers, uneducated people; it is Hebrew but not sophisticated. Abba is father in Aramaic. But the way he fell on the ground and looked at the sky and called “Abba!” shows that he had not grown beyond his childhood. It is childish.And remember the difference between childlike and the childish. The awakened one becomes childlike, he is not childish. And the God-oriented person becomes childish. His behavior is just like a child who has lost his way in a fairground and is searching for the father. “Abba!” he is crying. “Where is my father?” Without his father he is not safe, he is not secure.All these prayers show your fear, all these prayers show your disappointment in your father. You have created a fantasy and the fantasy is sick.A little biographical note before the sutras:Sekito’s enlightenment was realized while he was reading the Chaolun, a work written by Sengchao in the year 400. Sengchao had composed this work while in prison awaiting execution. The passage which inspired Sekito’s enlightenment was: “He who makes himself to be all things of the universe, is not he the real sage?”One who makes himself the whole of existence, is not he a real sage? Just this statement, and there suddenly transpired in him a great revolution. From ignorance he took a quantum leap toward enlightenment.This is what I have just been saying to you: religiousness without God simply means feeling yourself one with the whole universe. Just this statement… Sekito must have been just on the brink, just on the borderline. As he read this sentence, “He who makes himself to be all things of the universe, is not he the real sage?” – just reading this sutra, and a metamorphosis. He became a totally new man. The old personality dropped and he was for the first time an individual, in tune with existence.This man, Sengchao, was also a great master. But the greater a master is, the more the society goes against him. He was imprisoned just because he was talking against the old religion of Japan – which is not much of a religion. It is just as ordinary a religion as Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Christianity. It has no flavor of the genius and the giants.But whenever a genius and a giant appears, the little man in the masses becomes angry, feels inferior, becomes enraged. And he has killed Socrates, and he has killed Jesus, and he has killed Mansoor. He also killed Sengchao. Because the whole crowd was against him, the emperor had to arrest him. He was causing great turmoil in the country by his statements. And his statements are so beautiful that a single sentence made Sekito enlightened.Sengchao’s small book, Chaolun, consists of very condensed statements because he wrote it before he was sentenced to death. But what a man, not bothering about death, but writing his last testament, with no fear of death, no question of death!You will not imagine that his book was written just before he was going to be sentenced. It is a small book. You will not find the shadow of the cross on it. If you didn’t know, you would never dream or imagine that this book was written just before he was going to be sentenced to death. This shows the caliber of the man; this shows the depth and the height of his enlightenment; this shows his grandeur, his splendor.A small statement in that book made Sekito enlightened. And inspired by Chaolun, Sekito wrote a book called Sandokai. It is as beautiful as Chaolun.Very rarely have such cases happened in the contemporary world. It was Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra that inspired Kahlil Gibran to write The Prophet. He wrote The Prophet when he was only twenty-one, and his whole life he must have written at least fifty books. In every book he was trying to go beyond The Prophet, but could not because The Prophet was an inspired book. He was so overflowing with Friedrich Nietzsche’s insights that they triggered him also into new spaces.The Prophet is a great work, but all his other books… He wrote The Garden of the Prophet, a desire to go beyond The Prophet, but failed. He has written at least fifty books: thirty in English; twenty in Lebanese, his mother tongue. But in no other book could he even come close to The Prophet – these books he was writing. Perhaps The Prophet was written under the vast shadow of Friedrich Nietzsche’s insights. It is not to be compared with Thus Spake Zarathustra, but it comes very close.The same thing happened with Sengchao’s Chaolun, and Sekito’s Sandokai. But the difference is that both were enlightened. Sandokai reaches the same height as Chaolun. Neither was Friedrich Nietzsche enlightened, nor Kahlil Gibran, but Friedrich Nietzsche was a giant compared to Kahlil Gibran. Both were unenlightened, but Nietzsche reached the very boundary of the mind. Just one step more and he would have become enlightened. Kahlil Gibran could not reach even to the boundary, that’s why he never went mad.Nietzsche’s madness is a symbol that he was almost ready to become enlightened, but could not find the door. He had no idea that there is something beyond the mind. And he was rushing against the wall, forcing his way beyond the mind. But you cannot force your way. There is a door, you have to know the door; meditation is the name of the door. Otherwise you will hurt yourself by rushing against the wall. That’s how Nietzsche went mad.But Kahlil Gibran never went mad. He never even reached the boundary of the mind; the question of no-mind does not arise. But just the shadow of Nietzsche’s giant intellect triggered in him a tremendous inspiration, and he created The Prophet.These two books, Chaolun and Sandokai stand on the same ground, on the same height. You are going into Sandokai, these sutras are from Sandokai. Each statement is magical.The sutras:The mind of the great sage of India was intimately communicated from India to China.It was intimately communicated because a man of the same height as Gautam Buddha, Bodhidharma, went to China. He was full of the light, full of the joy, full of the ecstasy. His spring had come. He went to China as an awakened one. That’s why the word intimate is used.It was not transferred: before Bodhidharma reached China, thousands of Buddhist scholars had gone there. Hundreds of Buddhist scriptures were translated into Chinese. Almost the whole of China had already become Buddhist before Bodhidharma reached it, but none of those were awakened ones. They were great scholars who had gone, translated…The scriptures were beautiful. China had nothing compared to it. It had only one book written by Lao Tzu on Tao, but that too does not come to the height of Gautam Buddha’s sutras because it was a written book, and written under force, compulsion.Lao Tzu had never written in his whole life, and he never spoke. People used to sit by his side, in silence, and if something happened in the silence, good. If nothing happened… “What can I do?” – that was his answer. A few people became enlightened, but very few. One was Chuang Tzu, one Lieh Tzu, just two persons became enlightened sitting silently by the side of Lao Tzu. To understand silence is not easy, you have to reach that same depth. Otherwise you may be sitting by the side of Lao Tzu, but your mind will be going in circles, a continuous rush of thoughts. You may be silent from the outside, but inside there is too much talk going on.When for the first time talking movies came into existence… Before that there were silent movies. The first name that was given to the talking movies was “talkie.” And in India the movie house is still called the talkies. In your mind that talkie is continuously going on. Whether you want it or not does not matter. In spite of you, it is continuously there.So, although thousands of Buddhist scholars had reached China and the whole of China had converted to Buddhism – the emperor of China had converted to Buddhism – nobody had given the taste; it was not an intimate phenomenon. It became intimate only when Bodhidharma reached China.Now a buddha himself had reached China – a different body than Gautam Buddha, but the same consciousness, a different body but the same height and the same depth. It is perfectly good of Sekito to call it an intimate communication from India to China.In human beings there are wise men and fools, but on the way there is no northern or southern teacher.Neither teachers from India nor teachers from China are of any help on the way. You need a master, you need an intimate communion with the master, not a teaching.You don’t need a teacher in the real religious world, you need a master. You need a buddha who has already arrived, and who can provoke you, challenge you to come. A buddha is nothing but a clarion call to everybody: whoever wants to know can come close. The master has arrived, the teacher has only heard, he has no individual intimate experience of the truth.So in the ordinary world there are wise people and there are “otherwise” people, but on the path neither the wise nor the otherwise are of any help. On the path you need someone who has gone beyond mind, beyond wisdom, beyond foolishness; who has gone beyond intellect and beyond retardedness; who has simply moved into the silence of the beyond. You need someone who has found the truth. Just in his finding the truth, he has become a radiation. Around him there is a field of energy which can penetrate you, which can wake you up.The mysterious source is clear and bright, the branching streams flow through the darkness.As far as the master is concerned, The mysterious source is clear and bright, the branching streams flow through the darkness. But the moment the master speaks, his words start moving toward darkness. By the time they reach to you, they are streams flowing in darkness, branches moving toward darkness. You have to come into deep intimacy with the master, so you can share his brightness, his clearness, his clarity, his transparency. If you only hear his words and note down those words, you are already going wrong. The master does not consist of words. He may use words to call you closer. The master consists only of absolute silence, pure silence.To be attached to the relative, this is illusion…The whole world is relative. It is not only Albert Einstein who brought the word relativity into the world. Long before him, mystics in different lands had found that everything outside is relative. That has created a problem for the philosophers, but not for the mystics. Philosophers have heard the mystics say that everything outside is relative, and whatever is relative is illusory. Why is it illusory? It is a little bit subtle, but you have to understand it.You think yourself homely when you see a beautiful woman. You see a tall man and you feel small – but your smallness is relative. Until the tall man had come, you were perfectly okay, there was no problem. You were not worried about your smallness.In India there is a saying that the camels never like to go to the mountains. They love deserts, where they are the mountains. They live in the desert, they don’t like mountains at all because a mountain makes them feel very inferior.It is very psychological. Why do you feel that you are small, unworthy, that you don’t deserve any respect, that you are a sinner? These are all relative things. That you are beautiful, that you are very educated… These are all relative. Anything relative is illusory, illusory in the sense that if you don’t compare, you are yourself, somebody else is himself. What does it matter if he is tall? What does it matter if you are small? Both of your feet reach to the earth just as the tall man’s feet reach to the earth. It is not that you are small and dangling in the air. What is the problem? Comparison creates relative illusions.Trees are not worried. The rosebush is small, and the cedar is going to be two hundred feet high. Neither is the rosebush worried why the cedar is so tall, nor is the cedar worried why the rosebush has such beautiful flowers. A rosebush is a rosebush, a cedar is a cedar.A Zen master was asked, “Why are we miserable?” He said, “Look at the cypress tree in the courtyard.”The questioner looked at the courtyard and the cypress tree. He said, “But I don’t understand.”The master said, “Look again. By the side of the cypress there is a rosebush. I have never heard the rosebush complaining, ‘Why am I small?’ And I have never heard the cypress tree complain, ‘Why do no roses blossom? I have grown so far in search of the roses – two hundred feet, and no roses? What kind of justice is this?’“No, there is no quarrel. I go every day in the morning – sometimes in the dark, sometimes in the night, just to see whether they are quarreling or having a dialogue and discussion. There is absolute silence. Both are satisfied as they are because no comparison is arising, no relative idea of inferiority or superiority is arising.”The relative is called illusory because it is your creation, it does not exist anywhere. Otherwise you would go mad. You would be passing by the side of beautiful trees, and you will start thinking, “Why am I not green?”You don’t do it because you are not that neurotic yet. Because you don’t compare, there is no problem. But you pass by a woman who is beautiful, and if you are a woman, immediately there is comparison, anger, jealousy. But what is the problem? She just has a nose that is a little longer – and what will you do with a long nose?In the dark every woman is the same. Just put the light off! That is why people make love in the dark. First they put the light off, then every woman is a Sophia Loren. What is the difference? – the same skeleton, the same bones, the same blood, the same mucus, the same deodorant, the same perspiration, the same huffing and puffing.Darkness has a great quality. It makes everybody equal. Who cares? In darkness you can make love to the ugliest woman, thinking she is Cleopatra.I have heard about a drunkard who was brought to the court because he was making love on the beach to a dead woman. The drunkard stumbled into the court, and the judge asked, “Can’t you tell the difference between dead and alive?”The drunkard said, “I can.”“Then why were you making love to that dead woman on the beach?”He said, “I thought she was English. I never thought she was dead.”Ladies behave as dead. That is the difference between a lady and a woman. A real woman will groan and moan and beat you. She will go crazy and scream and wake up the whole neighborhood – that is a real woman! The lady is just a good lay – silently, just like a Japanese doll. You lay the doll down, she closes her eyes; you put the doll back up, she opens her eyes. A good lady is just a doll, cultured, sophisticated, snobbish.So the poor drunkard was not wrong. I am a hundred percent in favor of the poor drunkard. I don’t want ladies in the world at all. The world needs real men, real women. And who cares about the neighborhood? They can celebrate if they want.Whenever you compare, the very comparison brings you into an illusory space.… but to take to oneself the absolute is not enlightenment.That’s what philosophers have been moving into. They think the world is illusory, and that God is the absolute, the nonrelative, beyond relativity. The world is relative, changing moment to moment; nothing is permanent, nothing is stable, it is in flux. God is absolute. The absolute is another name for God. He never changes, he is the same, always the same, from eternity to eternity. This is the philosopher’s idea: because of an illusory world he creates the extreme opposite – an absolute God.One of my professors – S. S. Roy, who is now retired, an old man – loved me very much. It was because of him that I entered the university where he was a professor – he was continuously persuading me… I was in another university, but I used to go for debates, discussions, eloquence competitions to the university where S. S. Roy was a professor.The very first time, at first sight, he fell in love with me. He was a judge – there were three judges – and he gave me ninety-nine out of a hundred marks, and I came first. I won the shield and as I was leaving with the shield, he came by my side and he said, “Wait. I have to apologize to you.”I said, “For what?”He said, “I wanted to give you a hundred percent, but feeling that people will think I am being favorable to you, I cut one point, I gave you ninety-nine percent. Please forgive me. I wanted to give you one hundred percent, but I could not be that strong. I knew that other professors would say that I was being too favorable.”I said, “There is no harm. I won the shield anyway, and others have also given good marks. Somebody has given eighty percent; somebody else has given eighty-five percent. So there is no problem. The other competitors were far below, so your not giving me one point makes no difference.”He said, “It does not make any difference to you, but it makes a difference to me because I went against myself. I wanted to give you a hundred percent.”I said, “Next time. I will be coming again and again” – because I was going to all the universities, to all the colleges, wherever there was any competition for eloquence or for debate.There was only one time that I got the second prize. Otherwise I won hundreds of prizes, always first. The day I got the second prize, the whole audience of the university could not believe it. And I had to stand up. I told the vice chancellor, who was presiding, “I know why I have got the second prize, and you must be puzzled yourself.” A girl had got the first prize. So I said, “I have to be absolutely clear about the matter because I know what has happened. One of the professors, who is a judge, is in love with the girl, and he has given too many marks to her. And the other two judges had no idea. They both gave me highest marks, but that man has given her so many that she has come just one mark ahead.” I said, “You have to ask that professor because I know they have both been walking in the park together at night.“The park is in front of my house, so I know perfectly well. And I can produce witnesses because all the gardeners in the park know that these two people come late at night when the park is closed. They bribe the gardeners and enter the park because it is the safest place in the night.”The girl and the professor both started perspiring. I said, “Look at their perspiration! Nobody in this whole hall” – there were at least a thousand people – “is perspiring. Only these two people. Why are they perspiring?” I said, “Stand up!” so loudly that even the professor stood up.And the vice-chancellor said, “You are creating such trouble, but I can understand.”I said, “You have to cancel this whole debate; it has to be done again, and this man has not to be a judge.”He felt so ashamed that he resigned from the college that very night and escaped from the town.I came across him after twenty years in a train. I said, “Hello.”He said, “My God! I wanted never to see you again.”I said, “Life is mysterious. Where is the girl?”He said, “You have not forgotten yet?”I said, “I have neither forgotten, nor have I forgiven. Where is the girl?”He said, “Because of you, that girl deserted me! She became so ashamed that she stopped meeting me.”I said, “That’s great! Now I forgive you and I will forget you. I wanted to finish that relationship because you were doing an injustice to me. You thought I would remain silent.”And from that day every judge was aware not to do anything because, “This man seems to be strange.” Everybody felt that it was an absolute injustice. The girl was not even worth being fourth!And S. S. Roy became interested in me, because of what I had spoken. He loved it, and he said, “I will arrange every facility for you, a scholarship… Whatever you want I will arrange; just change university. I want you to be my student.” So I changed university. He was a professor of philosophy, and he was a very well-known scholar, particularly on Shankara, whose whole philosophy is that the world is illusion and the God is the absolute truth, and on Bradley, an English philosopher, whose philosophy is the same – the world is illusory and God is the absolute truth. He had his doctoral thesis on Shankara and Bradley.The very first day I entered his class… He had invited me, but he had not been aware that he was inviting trouble. He was talking about illusion and the absolute, the world and God.I told him, “If God is unchanging, he must be dead. Any living thing cannot be unchanging. Show me any living thing in the whole world…every living thing is moving, growing, going. It is in constant flux. Life is a flux. If God is alive, it is not possible that he can remain stable, the same forever. Then how will you differentiate between a dead God and a living God?“Just tell me. Both are sitting in front of you, the living God, the dead God: neither the dead God changes, nor the living God changes. How will you find who is the living God?”He said, “My God! I have a doctoral degree on my thesis, but I never thought about this.”I said, “The very word absolute is a reaction. First you call the world illusory, which it is not. You know perfectly well that you don’t just enter anybody’s house. If it is illusory, what does it matter? Why do you go on entering your own house every day? What does it matter? You can enter somebody else’s house.”He said, “Your philosophical discussion is dangerous. I have discussed problems, but you are telling me to enter somebody else’s house?”I said, “Yes, because if it is illusory, all a dream, what does it matter whether it is your wife or somebody else’s wife? Whether they are your children or somebody else’s children, all is illusory! And your God is only a philosophical concept: because the world is changing, God has to be unchanging. But it is only logic. If there is a God he has to be changing, otherwise he will be dead.”I told him that day, the first day of my encounter in his class, “God is certainly dead, that’s why he is not changing.”This absolute idea of God is only a philosophical concept, that’s why Sekito says: To be attached to the relative, this is illusion…He is not saying that the world is illusion. To be attached to this world is illusion. Remain unattached, the world is perfectly real. Attachment is illusion, not the world – not the woman, but the attachment; not the money, but the attachment; not the body, but the attachment.Sekito is making a tremendously significant statement. No philosopher has said that. They say the world is illusory. Sekito is making a distinction: not the world, but the attachment to the world, to the relative, is illusory.And because of this, philosophers have moved to the other extreme: God is not illusory, he is the most real, the absolutely real.Sekito immediately encounters these philosophers. He says: …but to take to oneself the absolute is not enlightenment. Don’t think in terms of absolute. There is nothing absolute, everything is always becoming absolute, but it is becoming and becoming and becoming, and it never comes to a full stop because a full stop will be dead. The day existence comes to perfection, there is nowhere to go, a full stop. Perfection is death. To be absolute is to be dead.Sekito is saying something which only a mystic, only a buddha can say: “Even the experience of buddhahood goes on growing. There are no limits to its growth. It is not that once you have become a buddha you have come to the full point. No, the path is endless, the journey is infinite, the pilgrimage goes on and on and on. And that nothing comes to an end is the beauty of existence. Everything goes on moving eternally.”So the concept of the absolute is the concept of the philosophers, not of those who are enlightened.Each and all the elements of the subjective and objective spheres are related, and at the same time independent…He is saying the outer world and the inner world are independent but related because their functions are different. They are related because they cannot exist separately. The outer cannot exist without the inner, the inner cannot exist without the outer, so they are related. But their functions are different: the outer is moving toward the objects, and the inner is moving toward subjectivity. Their directions are different, their realizations are different, but they are related at a point.He is making immensely significant statements which will be clear to you only when you stand at your very center – absolutely clear, no dust in your eyes – and you see the objective world has a beauty of its own, a reality of its own, a life of its own, a hidden consciousness of its own, just as the inner has its own stars, its own sky, its own expanse, its own universe. Outside you there is an infinite universe, inside you also there is an infinite universe. Both are related, both are dependent on each other, but their functions are different.If you move on the outer line, you will find yourself becoming more and more scientific. If you move on the inner line, you will find yourself becoming more and more a mystic.…related yet working differently, though each keeps its own place.Form makes the character and appearance different; sound, taste, smell, distinguish comfort and discomfort.The dark makes all things one; the brightness makes all things different.But it is only appearance. In darkness you cannot see, hence everything seems to be one. In light you can see, hence everything seems to be separate. But these separate things are joined in their deepest roots. We are all joined to one center of the universe. As branches, as leaves, we are separate, but as we go deeper into the roots, all the branches, all the leaves, all the flowers are getting nourishment from the same roots. Existence nourishes you and the trees and the mountains and the birds equally.So it is a mystery that one existence manifests in so many ways. This variety of expression makes life beautiful. This variety makes life unboring, the variety is a richness, but this oneness makes life equal. Nobody is inferior, nobody is superior, hence there is no need of any comparison.The four elements return to their nature, as a child to its mother.That’s what I have been telling you. When the source of life also becomes the goal of life, the circle is complete. And whenever the circle is complete, you don’t have to move unnecessarily into birth and death, and again birth, and again death. You have been moving into this wheel of birth and death for millions of years. It is time to jump out of the circle. This very jumping out of the circle is enlightenment.Fire is hot, wind moves, water is wet, earth hard. Eyes see, ears hear, the nose smells, the tongue tastes – one salt, another sour.Each is independent of the other, but the different leaves come from the same root.You taste from your tongue, you see from your eyes, you touch from your hand. All your senses are different: you cannot see with your hand, and you cannot taste with your eyes, and you cannot smell with your ears. They are all separate, but they are all joined in one brain from where they come like separate branches. They all feed the same brain, and the same brain nourishes them.Whatever the hands bring from touch reaches the brain. Whatever the nose brings from fragrance reaches the same brain. Eyes bring their survey of the world to the same brain. These senses are just branches spreading in different directions, to collect different experiences, and to make the brain richer. But they are all rooted in one brain.Sekito is just giving an example. We are all separate, independent, but we are rooted in the same existence. We should be independent, we should be individuals, but we should not forget that finally we are one, waves of the same ocean.Basho wrote:What happiness,crossing this summer river,sandals in hand!To a man who is enlightened, everything becomes a mystery.Now such a small thing! You will say, “What is there?”“What happiness, crossing this summer river, sandals in hand!” You will say, “There is nothing in it. Sandals in hand? The summer river must have become very shallow. What is there to be happy about?”But that is the very point of Zen: you don’t have any reason to be happy. Even this: “…crossing the summer river, sandals in hand” – what happiness!Any act or no act, doing or no doing, becomes utterly blissful. It does not have to be caused by something. When your happiness is caused, you become attached to the cause because you are afraid that if you lose the cause your happiness will disappear. If you are happy with a woman or with a man, you become attached; not only attached, you start creating prisons for each other because without this woman, without this man, you cannot be happy. So your happiness turns into misery for both.Meditation brings you the great experience that happiness need not be caused.When you have found a happiness that is not caused by anything, you are simply happy. Just to be is to be happy – then you don’t create any prisons for anybody. Then you don’t possess anybody, and you don’t destroy anybody’s dignity as a human being. You don’t enslave people. You love, you share, just because of your abundance, not that you want anything in return. Without your asking, much comes to you. The moment you start asking, you have lost the very ground of being happy.Hence I have been contradicting Jesus’ statement. He says, “Seek and ye shall find,” and I say unto you, don’t seek and ye shall find. Jesus says, “Ask, and ye shall be answered,” and I say unto you, don’t ask, and you are the answer. Jesus says, “Knock, and the doors shall be opened unto you.” I say to you, there is no need to knock, the doors are already open. They have always been open, just open your eyes!Maneesha’s question:Osho,Friedrich Nietzsche condemns man for his lack of creativity in not being able to produce a better concept of God than the Christian one – which he regards as the sickest, the most decrepit, which he calls “this pitiable God of Christian monotono-theism.”Do you agree that the Christian version of God is the most ugly?Maneesha, all concepts of God are fiction, so there is no question of any God being ugly or beautiful. God does not exist. Nietzsche has forgotten that God is dead.That’s what happens to people who are not enlightened. He has been writing, “God is dead,” and suddenly starts talking about man not being very creative because he has not been able to produce a better concept of God. That would only be a better fiction, a better lie. He has completely forgotten that he has declared that God is dead. Even if it were a better fiction, it would still have been dead. Fiction is fiction, a lie is a lie. However polished, however refined, you cannot make it true.So Christian God, or Hindu, or Mohammedan God does not matter. God is a fiction, and the fiction comes out of the sickness of the mind. Because he was a Christian and he has no idea of the Eastern gods, Nietzsche only had the idea of the Jewish God and the Christian God. If he had known the Hindu gods, he would not have written this sentence.The Christian God is not the only ugly God; all Gods are ugly in different ways. But in the first place they are lies, so there is no need to refine them. Man is certainly not creative, but that does not mean that he should create a better God. A better God will be a better prison. A better God will be a far stronger chain. A better God will destroy you more efficiently than the ordinary gods are doing. Do you want a better God, a better prison, a better poison?Nietzsche has completely forgotten that lies are lies. There are no good lies and there are no bad lies. Lies are simply lies, you cannot make the distinction. Truth is truth. There is no better truth, you cannot refine it. Lies are lies. You can refine them, but still they will be lies, they cannot become truth.So I cannot agree, Maneesha, with Nietzsche. He has forgotten. That is the trouble with philosophers. He is a great philosopher, but not beyond the mind. He cannot have the clarity of an enlightened person.Man is certainly not creative, but his creativity should not be concerned with God. His creativity should be concerned with making a better world, a better society, better literature, better poetry, better paintings, better sculpture, better human beings. A better God is not needed, a better God will be more dangerous.I hate the very word God. And I would hate it more if somebody refined the concept of God because lies have to be destroyed, and you cannot destroy them unless you hate them. All your love for God has to be completely demolished.Now it is the right time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh. He is a great iconoclast. He destroys things so creatively.Dilly Dump is the manager of the Last Resort Old People’s Home. One morning, he is going from house to house collecting donations throughout the nice, mediocre American suburb called Yuppie Acres.Dilly walks up to the Poke household and rings the doorbell. When Porky Poke answers the door, Dilly says, “Good morning, sir. Would you like to make a contribution to the Last Resort Old People’s Home?”“Okay,” replies Porky. Then he turns around and calls back to the house, “Hey, Grandma! Get your hat and coat on!”The famous psychiatrist, Doctor Mindbender, is sitting in his chair and looking intently at his patient, Moishe Finklestein. Doctor Mindbender closes his notebook, smiles and says, “Yes, Mr. Finklestein, I am pleased to pronounce you a hundred percent cured!”“Rats!” sighs Moishe, looking depressed. “What happened?”“I don’t understand,” replies the shrink. “Are you not happy? I have cured you!”“Happy?” asks Moishe. “Why should I be happy? Last week I was Jesus Christ. And now I am nobody!”It is nine o’clock in the morning, in the Glorious Endings Funeral Parlor on the little Greek island of Crete. Pappa Acidophilus, the undertaker, hears the phone ring and picks it up.“This is Bishop Kretin,” says the voice at the other end. “There has been an accident at the Holy Orthodox Church of Our Blessed Bleeding Virgin. I am sending over the church janitors, Rastus and Leroy, with the dead body immediately!”“Right!” says Pappa Acidophilus. “I will get the formaldehyde ready!” and he puts down the phone and dashes off into his embalming room, rubbing his hands with glee.Three hours later, Rastus and Leroy come in carrying Old Mrs. Suflaki, who is as dead as a dodo. “Jesus Christ!” shouts Pappa Acidophilus, looking at his watch and shaking his fist. “Bishop Kretin called me three hours ago. What took you guys so long?”“Sorry, boss,” drawls Leroy, “but we had to wait until the good bishop had finished preaching to find out which one of the old ladies was dead!”Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent…Close your eyes, and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to go inward. Gather your energies, your total consciousness, and rush toward your center with a great urgency, as if this is going to be your last moment. Only with such urgency can one reach to the center immediately.Faster and faster…Deeper and deeper…As you come closer to the center, a great silence descends over you, just like soft rain, very tangible, very cool.A little closer, and you find a tremendous peacefulness surrounding your inner space. Flowers of the beyond start raining on you.One step more and you are at the center. For the first time you see your original face. For the first time you encounter your eternity. The East calls this original face the face of the buddha, the awakened one.It has nothing to do with Gautam Buddha personally, it is everybody’s original face: peaceful, graceful, with a grandeur, with tremendous clarity, transparency, majesty. Your splendor is great, your treasure is great.Just one quality of the buddha has to be remembered. He consists only of one quality: witnessing. This small word witnessing contains the whole of spirituality.Witness that you are not the body. Witness that you are not the mind. Witness that you are only a witness.As the witnessing deepens, you start becoming drunk with the divine. This is what is called ecstasy.To make the witnessing deeper, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax…Let go of the body and the mind.Just remember only one thing: you are a buddha, a witness, a pure eternal awareness. And by and by you will start feeling a certain melting. Separations disappear, Gautama the Buddha Auditorium becomes an ocean. Ten thousand buddhas disappear into the ocean.This oceanic consciousness is the very essence of Zen, the very essence of authentic religiousness.Gather as much as you can of all the ecstasy, of all the divine drunkenness, all the flowers that are showering on you, the grace, the beauty, the truth, the godliness. You have to bring them with you, and you have to express them in their utter beautifulness in your day-to-day activity.Chopping wood, you are a buddha. Be graceful with the tree, it is also a potential buddha. Carrying water from the well, be a buddha.Every act has to turn into grace, into gratitude. Only then will the buddha be coming closer and closer to you.Before Nivedano calls you back, persuade the buddha to come behind you as a great presence. Persuade him to remain with you twenty-four hours a day.His presence is going to become the alchemy of your transformation.These are the three steps: on the first step buddha comes behind you, you feel his warmth, his love, his compassion, his beatitude. On the second step, you become the shadow, buddha comes in front of you. On the third step, your shadow disappears into the buddha, you are no more, only buddha is. You are no more, only existence is.God is dead, and Zen is the only living truth.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back, but come back as a buddha.Even your movements should be graceful and beautiful, blissful, radiating your consciousness and awareness.Sit for a few moments to remind yourself of the golden path that you have traveled, and the inner space that you have touched, tasted, the fragrance of the beyond that is still surrounding you, and the presence of the buddha who is just behind you, almost touching you.Let the buddha become your very reality, and you dissolve yourself, you disappear completely.You are the disease; the buddha is the cure.You are birth and death; buddha is transcendence from the circle of birth and death.You are momentary, just a soap bubble; buddha is your eternity.Okay, Maneesha?Yes, Osho.

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God is Dead Now Zen is 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

God is Dead Now Zen is 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Cause and effect both necessarily derive from the great reality. The words high and low are used relatively. Within the light there is darkness, but do not be attached to this darkness. Within the darkness there is light, but do not look for that light. Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before and the foot behind in walking. Each thing has its own intrinsic value, and is related to everything else in function and position. The relative fits the absolute as a box and its lid; the absolute works together with the relative like two arrows meeting in mid-air.Reading the above lines you should have grasped the great reality. Do not judge by any standards. If you do not see the way, you do not see it, though you are actually walking on it. When you walk the way, it is not near, it is not far. If you are deluded, you are mountains and rivers away from it.I say respectfully to those who wish to be enlightened, do not waste your time in vain.Friends, I hope you must have enjoyed the ten God-oriented people on the Gateless Gate, shouting pathologically that Jesus is the only savior.We used to have a motto in the commune in America: “Moses earns, Jesus saves, Osho spends.” Saving and earning are just utter stupidity. I have never saved and never earned. I am simply spending. When others are earning and saving, why bother?But you will enjoy such processions more and more because there are more idiots in the world than you can think of. Sooner or later they will all have to come in processions.I don’t move out of my room, and the whole world is concerned about me. Anando goes on bringing news from all over the world – such immense concern about a single man who has nothing to be afraid of. This proves that even nuclear weapons are weak before the words of a man who has arrived at the ultimate home. What are they afraid of?And they find excuses which make them just a laughingstock. The Dutch government is still keeping the law that says I cannot enter their country. And basically, when they made the law, the law minister had reasons, the same reasons that are all over the world – that even a three weeks’ visa for me, and your whole religion, morality, everything is sabotaged. But Holland also had a new idea when they passed the law against me: they cannot allow me in their country because I have spoken against homosexuality – that’s why.I have told them, and I am telling my sannyasins from Holland to tell the government again, to change the name of Holland and make it Homosexual-land. “Because I have spoken against homosexuality”! Homosexuality is a religion or what? “People’s feelings are hurt.” This is so sick, so pathological.But you will have many such circuses coming here. Enjoy them, laugh and dance. These people all had long, sad faces. Anando was there; she told me that the man who was the leader, who was shouting, simply needed a girlfriend. It is just repressed sexuality, which becomes all kinds of perversions. Christianity is one of those perversions.The questions. The first question:Osho,It seems that for God worshippers, the opposite to God is not, in the first instance, that which is “evil,” but that which is natural.What has made man such easy prey for the priests with their concept of a God who is hostile to life?The questioner is very clear and very right. On the surface, Christian theology seems to be saying that God is opposed to evil, but if you look more deeply then you see that it is not actually opposed to evil, it is opposed to the natural.All religions are against nature. It is not only Christianity. Why are they against nature? There is a great psychological strategy. The strategy is that if you are programmed to be against nature, you will live a miserable life, you will live in anxiety, anguish, perversion, guilt.This whole phenomenon can be created only if you are programmed to be against nature. If you are natural, then you will be just as happy as all the birds, and all the trees, and all the animals. They don’t worship God, they don’t go to any church, they don’t have any theology, they don’t have any feeling of guilt. They are simply natural.The priests found out very early in human history that man can be forced to be God oriented only if he is forced to be against nature. Once you are against nature you are schizophrenic: your whole being is a part of nature, only your mind is against it because only the mind can be programmed, not your body.So you may take a vow of celibacy, but that does not change your biology; it does not change your physiology. It is just a mind concept, just words. Your blood will go on creating sexual energy, your body will go on creating sexual hormones.Have you seen the statues of Buddha, of Mahavira and the twenty-three other tirthankaras of the Jainas? You will be surprised. They don’t have any beards, any mustaches. Do you think these people had no beards, no mustaches? But it is the cunning priests who made these statues, to make it clear to you that these people are not sexual – because mustaches and beards come because of certain hormones. Men have those hormones, women do not.To show that their physiology has also changed, their beards and their mustaches have been removed. No photographs exist, and the statues were made three hundred years after they had died, so nobody has any idea, nobody has seen these people. But the desire you can figure out.Krishna has no beard, no mustache. Rama has no beard, no mustache. What is happening to these people? You go on seeing your celibate monks, and they continue to grow beards and mustaches. Their celibacy has failed. The beard and mustache show that your manhood is still the same in spite of your promise in front of the statue of Jesus or any other god that you are going to follow celibacy. Celibacy remains only in your mind, but your whole body, your whole structure is in favor of nature. So you are split into two parts, and a house divided is going to fall any moment.These religions have created insanity and nothing else. That is their only contribution to humanity: insanity, split consciousness, split personality. The mind – which is very impotent; it has no power over the body, it cannot change anything in the body – is programmed according to a certain ideology. And when the mind finds that your body is acting against the program, it feels guilty, it feels miserable. It feels worried that there is going to be great punishment after death, that you will be thrown into hellfire for eternity.Naturally, your body wants: it wants food, it wants nourishment, it wants love. Love is also nourishment. If nobody loves you, you will shrink and die.There are hundreds of experiments done by scientists on monkeys. In one experiment which has been repeated and found to be completely reliable, a small baby monkey was brought to the lab and two mother monkeys were provided. Both mothers were artificial. One was just wires, but it had pipes from which the child monkey could drink milk. But he could not hug the wires, and he could not feel the feelings of a mother, the love, the warmth, while drinking from a pipe.The other baby monkey was given a version of an artificial mother that was just a little different. The wires were covered with woolen clothes, with fur and the mother’s blood. It was artificial, just made-up, but was warm. It was kept warm by electricity, so the child felt the body as warm because of the warm clothing. Inside there were tubes carrying milk, kept continuously warm by the electricity. And it had breasts for the baby monkey, not just like pipes, but almost looking like real breasts – plastic, but warm, and so the milk became warm. And the baby monkey could hug the mother.Strangely, all these experiments prove that the child who gets the warmth and a certain idea that he is with a living mother, lives; the other child dies. Within three months the other child dies, although he is being nourished, taken care of. Only one thing is missing: the warm breasts of the mother. Only one thing is missing: some feeling of love. Even deceptive, artificial warmth helps the child to grow.Just today, I came to know that the Red Indians have almost all been killed in America. A few have remained who live in deep forests in reservations. And they are given pensions because America is using their land. The whole country belongs to them, and they are very few so it is not much of a problem. It is better to give them money than to create any revolution or any revolt from them.The money is very destructive because no work is given. Work makes you feel that you are doing something, you are worthy, you are contributing to life, to existence, you are taking care of people whom you love. But no work is given to the Red Indians. That gives them a feeling that they are not needed at all. If they die, the government will be happy, the nation will be happy, because that much pension money will be saved.And what is a man going to do with money if he has no work? He will drink alcohol, he will gamble, he will go to the prostitutes. And in his drunkenness he will fight, and sometimes he will rape and murder. And when they commit crimes, then immediately the American government forces them into jail.What I am leading you to is the strange fact that almost all the Red Indians who have been forced into jail are declared to have committed suicide – although I know the American jails, I have been in five jails, and there is nothing that can help you to commit suicide. You cannot even wear your watch inside the cell. It is absolutely empty in the cell, there is not a rod that you can hit your head with, there is nothing. Absolute care has been taken so that the person cannot do anything as far as suicide is concerned.But I can understand why those people must have died. Either they were killed or most probably they simply shrank. They died by shrinking – life was useless. It was useless before, now it is even more useless. And they had been sentenced for thirty years, forty years, or for their whole lives. To live in a cell where there is no love, although they are given food, where there is nobody who accepts them as human beings – their dignity is taken.My feeling is that a person can die from shrinking; there is nothing that he could commit suicide with. It is possible that the police and the jail officers thought he had committed suicide. He had not committed suicide. You have forced him into a space where he is not needed, nor loved, nor respected – no pride. He shrinks. There is no meaning, no significance; why go on living in this slavery, in this indignity, humiliation?The whole of humanity has shrunk because of the religions continuously teaching you to be against nature. And you cannot be against nature, so all that you can do is become a dual personality. At the front gate of the house you are a Christian, you are a Hindu, you are a Mohammedan, and you are showing a mask to the people, a false face. And at the back door you are natural. So you start feeling a struggle within your own heart.This struggle is the root of how the priests can exploit you. Because you are feeling so miserable, you are in need of somebody wise to advise you, to give you some way of getting out of this anxiety. So first religions create anxiety, anguish, misery, suffering. And the way to create it is to turn your mind against nature. That is the simplest method. Just be against nature and you will be very sad, empty, not needed; you will lose your whole desire to be alive. Then naturally one wants some advice, and these priests have been bragging that they know the way to get out of misery – prayer: “God will take care of you if you believe in him.”This is the whole strategy of all the religions. First create misery, anguish, guilt, and then people are bound to go to the priests – because for centuries all the priests have been keeping their holy scriptures, which are not very holy at all, as their monopolies.For example, only after the British empire came into existence in India were Hindu scriptures printed for the first time. And Hindus were very much against printing them because once you print them they become available to everybody.They kept handwritten scriptures; particular families had the monopoly. It was passed from father to the son like a heritage, it was their property. And the public was never allowed to know what was in the holy scriptures, so they were the wise men.Half of humanity, women, were not allowed to read holy scriptures. In India, half of humanity, the women, and one fourth of humanity, the untouchables, were not even allowed to enter a temple, or to hear a brahmin chanting mantras from the Vedas. The punishment was death.What was this secrecy? The reason was that if everybody comes to know them, then two things are going to happen. First, people will know that there is nothing holy in the scriptures. Ninety-eight percent is sheer nonsense. In perhaps two percent can you find something which has some beauty, some inspired sayings. So it will be a great exposure: “You have been hiding these scriptures, and there is nothing in them.” And secondly, the priest’s monopoly will be lost; people can look into the holy scriptures for their own consolation.The priests were very much against publishing their books. Finally they agreed because under British rule they had to agree, they had no power. They agreed, but they agreed that the books should be published in Sanskrit, which is not a living language. Only the priests know it, only the brahmins know it. It has never been a living language of the common people. Buddha had to speak in Pali, not in Sanskrit. Mahavira had to speak in Prakrit, not in Sanskrit, because the public has no idea of Sanskrit.Not only have they kept the Vedas secret, they have also kept the language as a monopoly of the brahmins, of the priests. And this has been the case all over the world to different degrees.So you are forced finally to go to the priests. When you are feeling so miserable that you don’t see any light anywhere, and the night is so dark and goes on becoming darker, and there seems to be no hope for the dawn, where are you going to look? The priest, who claims he knows God, who claims that he has the sole monopoly of God’s message for humanity is there.Man easily became a prey because he listened to all these people, and they managed to convince him. They were more educated; they were the only educated people. They knew how to argue, how to convince – all the masses have been kept in darkness – so they argued against nature, and they convinced people. And it is very convincing. For example, everybody is suffering because of marriage, and marriage is a creation of the priests. It is a good device to keep people miserable. You will not find any misery among my people because there is nothing like a bondage.You should live as individuals, in freedom. Out of your freedom you love, but not against your freedom. If you sell your freedom for love, you are going to be in despair. Marriage was one of the devices to keep people harassing each other, fighting with each other, because they cannot separate. No divorce was allowed by any religion, and it is human nature to get fed up. Nobody can eat the same food every day – except me! My cooks, my people who take care of my body, they get fed up. I am eating, and they get fed up, because they have to bring the same food.But unless you are enlightened, you are going to be fed up with everything. It is good when it is new. You have to change your car every year. It does not mean that the new car is better than the old, most probably it is not. The older was stronger, had a thicker body, a stronger engine. The newer is becoming more and more a toy. And because you are going to change it in a year, there is no need to make a very strong car. What are you going to do with a strong car? Strong cars were made to serve you for your whole life.The newest car will be more fragile, and in fact it is for the benefit of the manufacturers that you change your car every year – otherwise how are they going to produce new cars? The factories will close. So there is great propaganda for the newest cars – and what changes is just the bonnet, a little design change, new colors, more shiny colors. But the reason that people change their cars is that they get fed up.One gets fed up with relationships also. In the beginning everything seems to be just great. But how long is it going to be great? Soon you become acquainted with the geography of each other. Once you have seen a woman naked, it is the beginning of the end.Only in India do marriages go on being happy, for the simple reason that the husband and wife cannot see each other in the daylight. They cannot talk to each other before their elders. Families are joint families, so one family may be forty persons all living together. And there are many elders.My mother has told me that not only can the husband not see the wife in daylight, he cannot even play with his own child before the elders. This is a program, centuries old. And when you see your wife in the darkness of the night, you cannot even talk because the joint family is all around. Your elders are sleeping; if you start talking somebody may wake up.So silently under the blankets, without even saying, “I love you,” just make love and reproduce, and get out of the bed to your own bed so that nobody is disturbed. But you don’t know your wife, you have never seen her, so the interest remains. It is the darkness that keeps the interest.But, in the West, it is very difficult to remain interested in the same woman for your whole life. After the honeymoon the marriage is finished. I think the honeymoon is the only time you are happy, and then begins a long journey of misery and unhappiness. Now the same is happening in India because now India is becoming civilized, entering into the twenty-first century.So people get fed up, but they cannot say the truth, that they are fed up with you. So anger comes, violence comes. They both become sad.I was just telling to Zareen the other day… Where she is? She is sitting there, and that Manu – Mickey Mouse – is sitting there. He never used to go to Mumbai for three days per week. Since he has fallen in love with Zareen, it is a difficult job to remain here seven days, the whole week.His son is taking care of his business better than he has ever been able to. He has never earned as much as his son is earning, so there is no problem for him.Now he goes for business to Mumbai. For what business? – just to avoid poor Zareen. And in anger, Zareen goes to Mahabaleshwar. One has gone this way, the other has gone that way. For what is Zareen going to Mahabaleshwar, the opposite direction? And when they are far apart – one is in Mumbai, another is in Mahabaleshwar – they start feeling love for each other. Then they both come back to the campus. For one or two days love remains, and then Manu is ready for Mumbai again, to do some business.It is better to spend a little less time with each other. Twenty-four hours hanging around each other’s neck, nobody is going to be happy, neither you nor the person you are hanging with.Religions have been using all these devices to create misery in people. They have been telling people not to look at anybody’s wife or anybody’s husband. And it is very natural; when you are tired of your woman, you start looking all around for some way out. But all religions are preventing adultery, saying that it is the most sinful act. And I don’t see it.When you become adult, you are bound to commit adultery. I see it as simple human nature, once in a while it is good. It helps you keep your love relationship fresh if some other woman comes at the weekend. It is not against marriage. It can keep the marriage floating forever because in those two days you again realize the old woman was better.So Manu, the Mickey Mouse, moves back to Zareen. And by that time Zareen is also ready, thinking of Manu, because she has been with somebody else and it does not feel… So they are back. Five days a week it is good to be married. Two days at the weekend it is good to be free. And it is perfectly human. You want to explore new experiences, you want to love as many people as possible.It is one of the characters of Jean-Paul Sartre who says, “I would like to love all the women of the earth.” Although it is not possible, the desire, “I would like to love all the women of the earth” is there because every woman is a unique individual, every woman is a different experience. Every woman has her own whims, every man his own insanities. So when two new people meet, it is a meeting of different kinds of cuckoos.It is good because it gives you an opportunity to see that the old one was better: you were settled with the old one; this is an unnecessary trouble. But in five days you will forget; it is also natural to the mind to go on forgetting. After five days living with the old woman, you will again think that it is getting too much.So Manu, stop going for business in Mumbai because that creates suspicion in Zareen’s mind: “Are you having another love affair in Mumbai?” If you are having another love affair I will allow you to go, but not for business! The business is going on perfectly well.Just be honest, and tell Zareen, “I need three days freedom.” Then she is also free for three days, and she is such a nice woman that everybody here… There are so many Romeos, and they will love Zareen. So just a little exchange, and everybody is happy.Why do you think you are so happy? It is because of my continuous corruption of your mind! I cannot see any marriage and resist the temptation to corrupt it because I only see unless you corrupt it, people are going to be sad and then they will be prey to the priests.Your question is important. “What has made man such easy prey for the priests?” His misery. So it is very much a con game. Religion is a con game. First the priest destroys your happiness in every possible way, forces your mind to be against nature: “Nature is a sin.” And once you have become miserable the priest has his shop open, and you can come for advice.A doctor’s son returned from the medical college. He had become an MD. The son said to the old father, “Now I am here, you need not work. You have worked hard your whole life. I will take over your work, you can just rest.”After three days he told the father, “In three days I have cured that old rich woman you have been treating for almost thirty years.”The father just beat his head. He said, “You idiot! That woman has been supporting our family. It is because of that woman you are an MD. It is because of that woman your other brothers are becoming educated. And you cured her? Do you think I was not able to cure her? But to cure her was to destroy your education. She was half my income!”A doctor cures poor people quickly, but with rich people he takes more time. It is natural, there is nothing wrong in it. The rich man can afford it, the poor man is unnecessarily wasting the doctor’s time – not only time, but the poor man may also start asking for medicine to be given to him for free because he has no money.The rich man should be kept. If he gets tired of one sickness, give him another sickness. Just put the idea in his mind that you feel he is going to have a heart attack. Just the idea, and his heart will start pulsating and in the middle of the night he will want to check his heart, whether it is failing or it is still there, beating. Just give him an idea, and then he remains your patient. Tell him, “You need a continuous checkup every week. Your body is in a very fragile condition.”Doctors are living a very contradictory life. They are supposed to cure people, but if they cure all the people, then what will happen to them? If a society is completely healthy, nobody is sick, then the doctors will start getting sick, starving, dying. They will become beggars.It was in China, under Lao Tzu’s influence, that a new method was introduced. It was out of Lao Tzu’s great compassion that he went to the emperor and said, “The whole medical profession is basically wrong because the doctor lives on the diseases of the people, and he is supposed to cure them. You are putting the man in a contradictory position.”The emperor asked, “What do you suggest?”He said, “I suggest that the doctor should be paid by the emperor for keeping people healthy. When people feel they are losing their health, when they become sick, the doctor’s money should be cut: he is not taking care well – just the opposite. He will be paid to keep people healthy, and if somebody falls sick, his pay will be cut. That will bring a totally different perspective to the whole medical profession.”That’s how enlightened people have been giving new perspectives to people, which people don’t understand in the beginning. People could not understand that you have to pay for health. Health is yours, what has the doctor to do with it? And the doctor has to lose money if you fall sick? It looked strange, but that was absolutely right.The same is the situation with the priests. If everybody is without guilt… That’s what they think about me – that I am a dangerous man – because my whole effort is to make you free of guilt, free of sin, free of the idea of morality. I want you to learn only one thing, and that is clarity beyond mind. Then, out of that clarity let everything happen: your love, your morality, your behavior.But this will destroy the priests absolutely. This will destroy religions and churches, and this will destroy God. Who is going to pray to God if you are blissful? If your life is just a dance, who is going to pray to God? For what?If you can be kept healthy, if you can be kept well nourished, if you can live a long life – one hundred and fifty years – and be still young, which has clear-cut possibilities… There are people in the Soviet Union who have passed one hundred and fifty years of age. And there are a few people who have passed the age of one hundred and eighty, particularly in the same region where Stalin and George Gurdjieff came from – both men of steel.In the Caucasus area, people live one hundred and eighty years and they are still working in their orchards, on their farms. They are young. They have completely forgotten how old they are. Who remembers for one hundred and eighty years? Just think, when you are one hundred and eighty years old, will you remember your birthday?So it is understood tentatively – because the oldest people say, “We have been seeing them from our very childhood, so they must be older than us.” And they are all around. You will be surprised to know that there have been marriages happening at the age of one hundred and eighty!The last marriage happened just last year. The man was one hundred and eighty, the woman was one hundred and seventeen. And they got married, fell in love – this is what I call life! The magistrate who married them asked them, “At this age?”They said, “We are still young. Our very falling in love proves we are young, and we want to be together. And why are you worried? If we have survived one hundred and eighty years, we may survive for two hundred years or even more – if one hundred and eighty years have not been able to kill us…”You should remember the arithmetic. It is at seventy-five that the majority of people die. At eighty-five fewer people die. At ninety-five very few people die. Beyond hundred, very rarely does someone die. And beyond one hundred and eighty, there is every possibility you may not die. A simple arithmetic! Who has ever heard of somebody dying after one hundred and eighty? There is no precedent.Scientists say man has the capacity within his body to live for at least three hundred years if everything remains natural. It is the unnaturalness of life, which is imposed by all religions, that makes people’s life not only miserable, but cuts their life from three hundred to seventy-five. Even at the age of sixty people start feeling, “It is better to die. What is the point of living?” You cannot fall in love because everybody will object…An old man married a young girl. He was ninety and the girl was only nineteen. His sons – one was seventy, another was sixty – all told him, “This is not the time for you to marry. Don’t make us all ashamed. Everybody will laugh.”He said, “It is not your business. I have fallen in love, I am going to marry.” And he married, and the doctor who used to look after the old man said to him, “You’re getting married. It is very dangerous at your age. It would be better to have a boarder in your house.” He meant for him to keep some young man in the house who would take care of his wife, but that was misunderstood.After nine months the doctor saw the old man in the market, and he said, “How are things going?”He said, “Great! My wife is pregnant.”The doctor said, “And what about the boarder?”He said, “She is also pregnant.Now this is life!Live totally, and live naturally, and there will be no religion for you, there will be no priest for you, and there will be no God for you, there will be nobody who can exploit you and destroy your intelligence, your life, and make you pathological and sick.Now do you see why I am dangerous?The second question:Osho,Why is the lie of God so successful?Because you are a failure. It is your failure that makes the lie of God so successful. In your life you have not loved totally, you have not lived totally. You have never done anything totally. This is your failure.By failure I don’t mean what you understand. You understand you are a failure if you are not super-rich; you are a failure if you are not a great politician, a prime minister, a president. You are a failure if you are not world famous. That is not failure; that is simply the competitive, egoistic life.And that kind of life is the most miserable because you are continuously fighting, fighting, pulling others back by the legs, rising over people’s heads, using them as if they are steps for you to climb higher. Your life is violent, and a violent life cannot be beautiful. You are merciless; only then can you become super-rich. You don’t have any compassion; otherwise how can you exploit millions of people to such an extent that they are starving, and you are simply accumulating money which you cannot use? There is no point in accumulating more; it has just become a habit for you to go on accumulating.The richest man now in the world is in Japan; he has twenty-six billion dollars. What are you going to do with twenty-six billion dollars? There is nothing that you can do with twenty-six billion dollars, but he is still running for more.The people you think are successful are continuously running after more. Deep down they are not successful.I have heard about a man whose seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated by his friends. But while they were singing and dancing and drinking and enjoying, suddenly they found that the man was missing. So one of his best friends, a great successful attorney, went out in the garden to look for him. He was sitting under a tree, very sad.The attorney went to him and said, “This is strange. We are all enjoying your birthday. For you we have arranged this whole ceremony, and you are sitting here under a dark tree in darkness. What is the matter?”He says, “You are the matter!”The attorney said, “I am the matter. What have I done to you?”He said, “Remember, fifty years ago I came to you saying that I wanted to kill my wife, and asking what the punishment would be. You told me it would be at least fifty years in jail. And now I am feeling, if I had murdered my wife I would have been a free man today. Fifty years have passed. Because of you I suffered. I would have at least rested in the jail for fifty years and today I would have been free, and there would have been a real celebration. It is you who destroyed my whole life!”A man is successful if he follows his own natural way and lives it as totally and intensely as possible. If you want to be a musician, you will not be a very rich man. If you want to be a flutist, you are not going to be a great politician but you will be utterly happy. Maybe there is only just enough to eat, but playing on the flute who cares? You simply disappear in your music. Your flute becomes your meditation. Your song, your dance becomes your meditation.Anything that is totally lived is equal to meditation. You don’t need meditation. And a man who is living moment to moment, absolutely naturally, according to himself, has nothing to regret, is not a failure. Hence, a happy man, a blissful man, needs no God. It is your misery, your failure to be natural, that makes the life of God so successful. God fills your vacuum. But a man who lives totally has no vacuum.I don’t have a God – not because I am philosophically an atheist, no. I simply don’t need a God. I am so fulfilled in myself that I don’t need any religion, and I don’t need any prayer, and I don’t need any meditation. Every moment is so exquisite, so immensely ecstatic, who cares about all these stupid questions of God, heaven, hell? These are questions of an insane humanity, and an insane humanity is bound to be exploited by the priests in the name of God.So first they drive you nuts, then you have to bring coconuts to offer to them! It is a strange game. The game that the priest is playing in the world is the ugliest game. His whole success depends on your failure, and your failure depends on being unnatural.If you understand, my approach is so clean and clear: just be natural, and God will not matter at all – neither heaven and hell, nor any priest. Every moment you will be so much in tune with existence that you will blossom like flowers, you will dance like peacocks, you will sing like cuckoos. Your life will have a totally different flavor. It will have the fragrance of a man who is utterly contented with himself and existence as it is – no desire to change, no desire to make this existence better, no desire to bother about what will happen after death.Socrates’ statement is very significant at this point. Before he died, somebody asked, “Are you afraid that you are going to be poisoned this evening as the sun sets?”He said, “Why should I be afraid? There are only two possibilities: either I will die, then there is nobody there to be worried, or I shall not die, then what is the worry?” Only two alternatives, simple: either I will be completely gone, and gone, there is nobody left. Who is going to worry? Who is going to suffer? Or I will not die. If I don’t die, why should I worry? I know how to live. I have lived my whole life so joyously. If there is any life after death, I will continue to live, I know the art. If there is no life, I will rest. I know how to rest totally, eternally. There is no problem. Either I will be dancing or I will be resting. But I know both are beautiful. Rest has its own beauty – eternal rest, no worry, no despair, no anxiety, no anguish. Or I will be dancing, I know the art. And my dance can go on eternally.A man who is really successful will have the same approach as Socrates. Who cares about death? Only people who have not lived are worried about death.It is a very strange phenomenon. People who have not lived, who have simply hoped to live someday, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, or maybe after death in paradise – those who have been postponing life, are the only people who are afraid of death because they don’t know the art of living.The art of living is simple. Be natural. Don’t be bothered by Manu, Moses, Mahavira, Mohammed – don’t be bothered at all by anybody. They lived their life, they never bothered about anybody.Just learn that secret. Buddha lived his life, not according to any scripture, not according to any Vedas, not according to any discipline. He lived according to his own insight. That is his greatness. That’s what makes him a beautiful flower, a lotus, perfectly open to the sun, to the rain, to the wind, dancing, enjoying. Mahavira lived his own life. All the people who have lived their life totally, without any guilt, without any priest interfering, are successful people.I know only of one success, and that is that your life should be your life, your natural existence. But if you fail to be your authentic nature, then the lie of God is going to be successful. Then you have to look for somebody to take care of you. Then you are worried what will happen after death. Perhaps there is a God: how will you face him if you don’t worship him? It is better to worship. If there is no God, there is no harm; if there is a God, you can always say, “I was worshipping you.” These people are chickens; they are not to be called human beings.Be authentic, be natural, be honest in every act you are doing. And this is possible only if you enter into your being and find the center. That is the only success in the world: to find your center and then let the center guide you. The light will come from the center, radiating from you, and you will be a natural man. The natural man is the buddha.The unnatural man is pathological, sick. Then he is bound to be exploited by the priests or by the psychoanalysts – who are the new priests. They don’t have anything to offer. Their psychoanalysis is as bogus as the religions. They are the new rabbis, the new bishops, the new popes. They don’t give anything, they simply exploit you. And the priests have not contributed anything to humanity, they have simply exploited. They are the greatest parasites in existence.The third question:Osho,It seems the thought of God arises from the feeling that there is something greater than ourselves. Is this “greater” the no-mind or something else?There is nothing greater than you because you are the universe, you are existence. There is nothing greater than you.This idea that the saints are holier than you has been implanted in you. And what are they doing to become holier? Eating only one time a day? But look at their bellies! They eat once, but how many calories?I don’t think any saint has been eating only sixteen hundred calories. That is what I eat – only sixteen hundred calories. Even your breakfast is two thousand calories! In twenty-four hours I eat only sixteen hundred calories. In twenty-four hours your calories must go beyond five thousand, six thousand – if you are not an American. If you are an American, then a thousand more!And they condemn me for being a hedonist. Sixteen hundred calories of food and a hedonist! Each time, just two small slices of bread and a cup of soup – the same breakfast, the same lunch, the same supper, the same dinner: those two slices of bread and one cup of soup.No saint of yours has ever lived on sixteen hundred calories. But I am a hedonist, I am a materialist, I am characterless! And only you know my character. People who have never seen me, people who have never been here, who don’t have the intelligence or the courage or the guts to enter the gates of this campus, think I am characterless because I am not living according to their scriptures.I am living according to my own consciousness. And my understanding is that all the great people of the world – Socrates, or Buddha, or Lao Tzu, or Chuang Tzu, or Rinzai, or Sekito – lived according to their own light. That’s what makes them great and brings a great splendor to their life. Their contemporaries were as much against them as my contemporaries are against me.But I have more enemies than anybody else because all these great people were very local. Sekito was not known outside Japan. Buddha was not known outside Bihar – a small state of India. Mahavira was not known outside Bihar. I am a world-notorious buddha – for the first time. And I live in my room the whole day. I just come to see you in the evening.I can understand what the problem is for these people. It is the same old problem: they cannot accept a lion. They are sheep, they are poor little men, hungry for money, power, prestige. They cannot tolerate a man who lives according to his own insight, according to his own awareness, who does not follow anybody, who has no scriptures and no religion. Such a man becomes the cause of a great inferiority complex in millions of people; otherwise, what harm am I doing to anybody?But because I have been known around the world – I am not a local person, a local buddha – I have enemies all over the earth. I have friends also, all over the earth. Obviously, the friends are going to be a very few chosen ones who can understand my insight and who are ready to live on their own, without looking for any God, without looking for any scripture, without looking for any leader; who have guts and courage to go alone, dancing joyously.There is nothing greater than you, but your religions are teaching that you are sinners, that saints are holier and God is greater, and you are just small creatures crawling on the earth. Religions have given you an inferiority complex. That inferiority complex is always looking for “somebody” who must be greater. But it is not a natural thing, it is implanted, programmed, conditioned. You have been reduced to a subhuman species. All your whole pride, your dignity, your honor, has been taken away. You are left without honor, without self-respect, without dignity. Naturally you think that somebody must be greater.And then you have all kinds of frauds. You know only their outside, you don’t know their inside. On the outside behave as unnaturally as possible, which gives you the idea that unless you go beyond nature you cannot realize God – because religions have been teaching you that.So all that these saints – who seem to be very superior – are doing, is self-torture. To me they are masochists, they need psychiatric help. But religions have been praising them as saints: they are just in the middle between you and God. God is the highest, of course. He lives above you in the skies… But have you ever thought that the earth is round? When I was in America, God used to live just above my head, but here, America is exactly beneath my feet. If you dig here, you will reach Rajneeshpuram in the USA. I’m keeping my feet exactly over Ronald Reagan’s head!God is above, but the earth is round, so what is above and what is below? For people who are living on the other side of the earth, their God is beneath your feet, and your God is beneath their feet. So when you raise your hands in prayer, just think – you are living on a round earth. Don’t be stupid. There is nobody higher, nobody lower. It is one existence.That’s what triggered the enlightenment of Sekito – reading the sutra of an ancient master, that one who feels oneness, one life in all things, one who is in tune with existence, is absolutely one with existence.No one is higher than you, no one is lower than you. There is only one existence, one life. We are different expressions of one life, and it is good that there are so many different expressions. It makes existence beautiful, it gives variety, it gives color, it makes it a rainbow. It is not monotonous, it is immensely interesting.Go on exploring and you will always find something new coming up. Outside, every day science is coming up upon some new truth. Inside, those who have been exploring are coming every moment into new bliss, into new ecstasies as they go deeper. Doors upon doors, doors upon doors – and there is no end to this mystery.I love this mysterious universe, and I love all that has come out of this mystery. It is unfathomable, hence it is inexpressible.The sutra, the Sandokai, the second part, Sekito wrote:Cause and effect both necessarily derive from the great reality.Everything derives from the great reality. There is no other reality; there is only one reality, the great reality. Outside and inside are just two sides of this great reality. Every cause, every effect, necessarily comes from this great reality.The words high and low are used relatively.Don’t take any cognizance of those words, they are relative. But even your so-called great people suffer from strange ideas…Napoleon Bonaparte, whom you will think of as a great, successful man, always suffered because he was only five feet five inches tall. Even his guards were nearly seven feet high. One day he was trying to fix a picture on the wall, but he could not reach it. His guard, his bodyguard said, “I am higher than you, I can do it.”He said, “Shut up! Don’t use the word higher. Just say you are taller than me, not higher.” The guard had touched some very soft wound that he had been carrying his whole life.The man who created the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, suffered his whole life from an inferiority complex. The greatest revolutionary in the world, he was always hiding behind a desk because his legs were shorter than his upper body, so they were dangling, they never reached to the ground. And he could not sit on a smaller chair because that would look odd, “Why are you sitting on a small chair?” So he used to have a big chair, but in front of him there was always a desk covering his legs. He was so conscious about his legs, that he never allowed anybody to come very close. You had to sit just in front of him on the other side of the desk so you could not see his legs.Just feeling unnecessarily inferior…All your ideas of high and low are relative, imagination, because you continuously compare. Everybody is unique, hence all comparison is wrong.Within the light there is darkness……because there is no difference between darkness and light. The difference is only relative. Darkness can be defined as less light, and light can be defined as less darkness – just as the same thermometer can be used for cold water and for hot water. The hot water is a little less cold, the cold water is a little less hot; but these are degrees, and all degrees are relative. They are both the same.Light and darkness are one complete whole, two extremes of one reality. There are animals who see in the night. You know the owl, whose night begins when your day begins. He goes to sleep as the sun rises because his eyes are very sensitive. He cannot open them in the light, it hurts his eyes. His eyes are so sensitive that he can see only in darkness – but in darkness it is all light to the owl, all is light in darkness. So it is only a question of what the capacity of your eyes is. With certain instruments your eyes can see in darkness, your eyes can be brought to the same level of sensitivity as the owl’s eyes.You don’t hear radio waves passing by, but they must be passing because once you put your radio on, it immediately picks them up. So when you are feeling that there are no radio waves around, there are, but your ears are not capable of picking them up.It happened in Switzerland in the Second World War that a man got a bullet in his ear. The bullet was taken out and the ear healed, but something strange followed: the man started hearing the nearest radio station the whole day –nothing could turn it off.He reported it to the nurses. They wouldn’t believe it. “You must be imagining it. It can’t be. How can you hear the radio station?”He said, “Call the doctors.” And the doctors wouldn’t believe him. He said, “Then do an experiment if you don’t believe me. I am going crazy! There is no way to turn it off!”So they finally decided to do an experiment to satisfy him. The man seemed to be absolutely sane, although what he was saying was absolutely insane. So they put a radio in the next room and told the man to go on writing whatever he was hearing. Another doctor was sitting in the other room writing whatever was playing on the nearest radio station. When their notes were compared, they were exactly the same. The man’s ear had to be operated on so he could become normal.But that opened the possibility that one day you will not have those big radios to carry and listen to. You will have small buttons you just fix in the ear, and on the button there will be all the stations. Just push the part you want to hear and your ear will be able to hear directly. There is no need for a big radio or any other instrument.That also leads to another idea which has not happened yet. Just as radio waves are passing, in the same way television waves are passing. So someday there is the absolute possibility that you will just have to change your glasses, that’s all. Your eyes are sensitive, and on your glasses will be all the television stations. So you adjust the television station on the glasses, put the glasses on, and enjoy it silently, without troubling anybody else.We are not aware of many things that are happening around us. We are not aware even of our own being, of things that are happening within us.Sekito is right.Within the light there is darkness, but do not be attached to this darkness. Within the darkness there is light, but do not look for that light. Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before and the foot behind in walking.The two legs of the same man, of the same reality.Each thing has its own intrinsic value, and is related to everything else in function and position. The relative fits the absolute as a box and its lid; the absolute works together with the relative like two arrows meeting in midair.The whole of existence is functioning together with you. This is your success: if you come together with existence and meet like two arrows in the air. This is your failure: if you don’t come from your side – and existence stands there and you go sideways. You can go anywhere, but you will not be satisfied unless you come to existence, meet. Your heartbeat becomes the heartbeat of the whole universe. That is success, and that is enlightenment.Reading the above lines you should have grasped the great reality. Do not judge by any standards. If you do not see the way, you do not see it, though you are actually walking on it.You may not be aware that you are a buddha, but you are carrying the buddha all the time. You may not know that you are reaching the ultimate, but you are walking on the way without knowing. The whole difference is between knowing and not-knowing. Not-knowing, you are miserable; knowing, you are dancing with joy and celebration.When you walk the way, it is not near, it is not far. If you are deluded, you are mountains and rivers away from it.Only in your delusion, in your mind fictions, hallucinations, is it far away – mountains and rivers away. But if you are not deluded, if you are simply silent without thoughts, you are in it. There is no distance between you and the truth, there is no distance between you and existence. This very moment, just a little awareness and suddenly you will find yourself merging with this vast splendor, this great miracle of existence.I say respectfully…Sekito says to you…to those who wish to be enlightened, do not waste your time in vain.That is his last statement: “If you want to become enlightened, don’t waste your time. Don’t postpone until tomorrow.”Put your total energy now and here and you will be enlightened. Enlightenment is your nature, so you are not going to find it somewhere else. You don’t have to go on any pilgrimage. You don’t have to go to any holy place. You don’t have to believe in any theology, in any religion. You just have to dig deeper into yourself, in the present moment, and suddenly the whole of life springs up.And you are in for a great surprise: the buddha was hidden within you, not in any temple. You have always been on the right path, you have always been carrying buddha in your womb as your nature – you just never looked at it.All I teach you is to look inward to find your center. That is the center of the whole existence.Buson wrote:I grow old –sweet bird you vanishinto autumn twilight.He is saying, “I grow old, just as a sweet bird vanishes into the autumn twilight, far away; you see it to a certain point and then it goes into the blue sky…” He is saying, “I am also growing old, sweet bird, my autumn twilight is going to come soon. I will also disappear into the blueness of existence.”These are the words of someone who knows.Death is a door to the divine, death is a door to the deepest mystery of existence. You just have to disappear. You are the only problem, you are the only barrier. Just drop that problem, drop that barrier, and all is just ecstasy and pure bliss.Maneesha’s question:Osho,Friedrich Nietzsche saw man's energy in terms of a lake that up to now has “flowed out into God.” He looked forward to that day when the lake would cease to leak outward, when a dam would be created so man's energies could rise higher and higher.It seems he was on the right track in assessing the need for one to go in, but the damming up of energies sounds dangerously like the idea of the ascetics.Would you please comment?Friedrich Nietzsche is only a thinker, a philosopher of tremendous genius. But whatever he is saying is only a logical, rational, philosophical statement. It is not existential. So try to understand that a man who has not gone beyond the mind can still make certain statements that come very close to the truth. But even to be close is to be at a distance.He is saying that up to now human energies have been just like a lake that has been flowing out into God, outward. “He looked forward to that day when the lake would cease to leak outward; when a dam would be created so man’s energies could rise higher and higher.” He is coming very close to the point of meditation.Your energies are going outward – to objects, to money, to power – and finally, if you become religious, to paradise, to God. But they are all out; you are leaking out your energies and the ultimate result is a feeling of utter emptiness, hollowness, unworthiness – a failure. Nietzsche is only thinking that the day must come when people will start creating a dam to prevent the leakage so the whole energy gathers inward. Rather than spreading outward in thin layers, it starts rising upward like a pillar.He is perfectly right, but it is not his experience. He is just imagining – someday.I am providing you that day that he was imagining. What is your meditation? Just taking all your energies from outside to the interiormost space. And as energies go on gathering, not only do they go higher, they also go deeper, simultaneously, just like the roots of a big tree. Roots go on going deeper and deeper, and the tree goes on going higher and higher.In exactly the same way, your consciousness, your life energy, moves higher and lower simultaneously. It touches the very depth of the earth – that is materialism. And it touches the stars – that is your spirituality. Just as a tree cannot be without roots, any spirituality without roots in the earth is bound to fail.The East knows perfectly well how its spirituality has failed, and still it goes on insisting that materialism is against spirituality. And because of this idea the whole of the East has suffered poverty, starvation. No science, no technology has developed which can help people. And the West has suffered because they think only roots are enough – there is no need for the tree and the flowers and the fruits. What will you do with the roots?The West has roots very deep in the earth in technology, in science, in objective research, but is feeling utterly empty inside. The East has all the branches and huge trees rising toward the stars, but they go on falling because without roots you cannot keep the tree standing. Both need a great meeting point. East and West, materialism and spirituality, the inner and the outer, the higher and the deeper, have to come to a certain synchronicity, then man will be whole.And Maneesha, your worry is unnecessary. You say, “It seems he was on the right track in assessing the need for one to go in, but the damming up of energies sounds dangerously like the idea of the ascetics.” He was not aware of meditation at all, so he used the word damming. But his word dam should be taken symbolically from a philosopher who is still within the mind. The mind of Nietzsche must have been one of the greatest minds that has ever lived on the earth, because he could conceive of something beyond the mind while still living in the mind. Living in a dark cell with no opening, he could still visualize the sunrise in his dreams. He had not seen it. He could visualize beautiful flowers in his dreams, he had never seen them. His capacity to visualize was great and should be appreciated.No, he is not an ascetic. He was absolutely against ascetics, so he cannot mean what you are worrying about. It sounds like holding all your energies inward seems to be creating a prison for the energies there so that they cannot flow outward. This is because he had no experience of the right symbols to use.When you have energies rising like a pillar and going deeper into the ultimate depth, you will have both worlds together – the inner world and the outer world – because the inner and the outer are two aspects of the same energy. Of course you will not be flowing toward God, which is a fiction. You will be flowing toward a real ocean of consciousness, the ocean of consciousness which we are making an effort to create, and you disappear into it.It is not ascetic. Certainly he was not an ascetic, so he cannot mean it. But a man without eyes who talks about the light – and he comes so close to it! – is worth praising. He has no eyes to see, so he has no idea what light is, but just thinking about it, he comes very close. Also he cannot make exactly the right statement, it is only approximately right, but no other philosopher has come even that close. His beauty is great.It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh.Late one afternoon at the Pearly Gates of Heaven, Saint Peter is inspecting twenty married women who have just arrived for judgment.“Now, girls,” says Saint Peter. “If any of you was ever unfaithful to your husband on earth, please take one step forward. And remember, no lying, and no cheating! I have ways of checking up on you.”Immediately, nineteen of the wives move forward, but one woman remains standing alone. Saint Peter nods quietly to himself and walks over to the telephone. He dials up Hell.“Hello! Satan!” exclaims Saint Peter. “I am sending down twenty unfaithful wives to you – but be careful. One of them is completely deaf!”One morning the phone rings in the office of Doctor Shelby Nameless. “Good morning,” says Doctor Nameless, cheerfully.“It may be a good morning for you,” snaps Brenda Chubbs, at the other end. “But ever since you have been treating my husband, Buster, I have not had a single good morning!”“I am sorry to hear that, Mrs. Chubbs,” says the doctor. “What seems to be the problem?”“Well,” grumbles Brenda, “before he came to you, he was a perfect husband and father. But now he has become a rat. He used to tell me how pretty I am – now he calls me an ugly old bitch! He used to love our family life, but now he is critical about my housekeeping, hates the kids, and chases after any loose woman who happens to walk by. I think you have been giving him hormone injections which have completely altered his personality.”“Hmm,” says Doctor Nameless, “I want you to know, Mrs. Chubbs, that I have not been giving your husband injections of any kind. All I did was fit him with a pair of contact lenses!”It is Sunday afternoon at the Holy Orthodox Church of the Blessed Bleeding Virgin, on the Greek island of Crete. Bishop Cretin is preaching a sermon to the remaining four old ladies in his flock.“And I am telling you,” thunders Cretin, “that the morals of today are being horribly corrupted. Just yesterday I went to see a movie called Bambi Goes Berserk, which is filled with disgusting scenes of murder, rape, fornication, cannibalism, homosexuality and other perversions of the worst kind! If anything shows the need for censorship, then this movie is it! Now, ladies, are there any questions?”“Yes,” cry all the old hags, in unison. “Where is it playing?”Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent…Close your eyes, and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to go inward. Gather all your energies, gather your total consciousness, and rush toward your center of being with an urgency as if this is the last moment of your life.Only with such urgency have people become enlightened.Faster and faster…Deeper and deeper…As you are coming closer to your center, a great silence descends over you. It is falling almost like soft rain, cool, very tangible, and very mysterious. Gautama the Buddha Auditorium has become absolutely silent, as if there is no one at all.A little deeper, closer to your being. And suddenly you are surprised, great fountains of peace burst all around you.A little closer, and there arises for the first time a divine drunkenness, a deep ecstasy, a blissfulness you have never known before.One step more, and you are at the very center. Suddenly you see you are no more.At the center is your hidden nature, your original face.We have used Gautam Buddha’s face as a symbol for everybody’s original face. So let me say, you have disappeared, only buddha is. In other words, you are no more, only existence is. And this is the greatest experience, the highest peak of consciousness and the greatest depth, simultaneously.The only thing you have to remember at this point is that buddha consists of only one element, consciousness, awareness, witnessing – different names of witnessing.Just witness the way a mirror mirrors – no judgment, no appreciation, no identification.Witness you are not the body. Witness you are not the mind. And witness you are only a witness.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax… But go on keeping the witness as clear as possible.Buddha used to call this witness, sammasati, right remembering. You have remembered you are a buddha. You are not the body, you are not the mind. You are only a pure consciousness.And as your witnessing deepens, you start melting like ice in the ocean. Gautama the Buddha Auditorium is turning into an ocean, and you are disappearing into it just like ice melting. No waves, no ripples – such silence.You are at the very center of existence. You can now feel your heartbeat to be in tune with the universal heartbeat. Absolutely unknown, unacquainted, flowers are showering over you.The whole existence is rejoicing with your entry into the beyond. Going beyond the mind is going into the very cosmos.Mind is your prison. To go beyond it is your freedom.Collect as many experiences as you can: all the flowers, all the fragrances, the silence, the serenity, the tranquility, the calmness, the peace that passeth understanding, and the divine ecstasy, the great splendor that you are a buddha, that you are one with the cosmos.At this moment you are the most fortunate people in the whole world. The whole world is concerned with trivia. I am calling you the most blessed ones because you are concerned with the ultimate, with the essential, with the eternal.God is dead, and the only living truth is Zen. Zen simply means what you are experiencing at this moment: a pure mirrorlike innocence.One thing you have to remember: don’t forget to persuade the buddha to come along with you. He has to come, it is your nature, and he has been hiding at the center for centuries, perhaps for millennia. And he has been waiting for you to invite him. Invite! Welcome! Request!Unless the buddha comes into your day-to-day life, in your actions, in your gestures, in your words, in your silences… His grace, his presence has to be felt.Unless you are completely possessed by the buddha, and all these experiences of silence and beatitude, and blissfulness and divine ecstasy start overflowing from you in all your actions…In your very presence an energy field is created around you; for the first time you become a mystery unto yourself, a shrine, a holy land; the place where buddha grows comes to its full flowering.This very body is the buddha, and this very earth is the lotus paradise.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back… But come back as a buddha, with the same peace, with the same serenity, with the same silence.Sit down for a few seconds just to remember the golden path that you have traveled, the experiences that you have encountered.Some fragrance must have come with you.Some silence must be hanging around you.Some peace will be overflowing in you.Some drunkenness will still be felt by you.And remember that just behind you there is a new presence standing, the presence of the buddha, the awakened one.There have been thousands of buddhas. The buddha is no one’s monopoly, it is everybody’s birthright.These are the three steps of becoming a buddha.The first step: the buddha comes because you have invited him, following you like a shadow just behind you.The second step: as you become more and more attuned with the buddha, he comes in front of you. You become the shadow behind the buddha. And as you become a shadow you are starting to disappear. The shadow has no existence.The third step: you have disappeared completely, you don’t exist even as a shadow. You are absorbed into the buddha. You have merged into that ultimate consciousness. You have become one with the universe.This is the only existential truth.I don’t teach any philosophy. I teach you existence, the truth, the beauty, and the grandeur. It all happens at the third step without any effort – the metamorphosis from a man into a new man. The new man is the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche, and it is the awakened one, the buddha of the Eastern mystics.My effort is to bring East and West into a meeting, not only a meeting but into a merger, a deep synchronicity between materialism and spirituality, between Zorba and the Buddha. When you are both – the zorba as far as the outside world is concerned, and a buddha, as far as the inner world is concerned – you are a whole man. And the whole man is the only holy man. There is no other possibility.Okay, Maneesha?Yes, Osho.

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God is Dead Now Zen is 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

God is Dead Now Zen is 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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When Impo took leave of Ma Tzu, Ma Tzu asked, “Where are you going?”Impo replied, “I’m going to Sekito.”Ma Tzu warned, “The path on the stone-head is slippery!”Impo said, “I have the pole of an acrobat with me – I can make a show with it whenever I want,” and with that he left.When he got to Sekito, Impo went around Sekito’s Zen stool one time, swung his stick with a shout and asked, “What is the dharma of this?”Sekito said, “How sad! How sad!”Impo didn’t have anything to say, but he went back to Ma Tzu and told him the story. Ma Tzu said, “You go again, and when Sekito says, ‘How sad,’ you start crying.”So Impo went to Sekito again and asked in the same manner, “What is the dharma of this?”At that, Sekito started crying.Impo again was left without any word, and returned to Ma Tzu. Ma Tzu commented, “I told you – the path on the stone-head is slippery!”Friends, first the questions from the sannyasins. The first question:Osho,We humans seem to like to be told what to do. If we don't have a “God,” we have someone else to tell us what is right or wrong and what is good or bad. Why such a resistance to thinking for ourselves?It is not a question of thinking. In fact, you think too much. It is a question of how to stop thinking and see directly into every situation that you are facing. If there is no thought, there is no barrier. There is no dust in your eyes; you can see clearly.And when this clarity is there, you don’t have alternatives of good and bad. With this clarity there is a choiceless consciousness: you simply do what is good. Not that you make any effort to do it – it comes effortlessly to the man of awareness, consciousness, alertness. He simply cannot imagine the bad, the evil. His whole awareness simply points him toward the good.So your problem is not why there is “…such a resistance to thinking for ourselves.” You cannot think for yourself because the vision of good is not part of the mind and you only know the mind; hence the whole problem arises. Because you know only the mind, you don’t have clarity.You have hundreds of thoughts moving continuously in your mind. It is a rush hour, twenty-four hours a day; a crowd of thoughts, clouds, go on moving so fast that you are completely hidden behind the clouds. Your eyes are almost blind. Your inner sensitivity is completely covered by your thoughts. Through the mind you cannot know what is good and what is bad, you have to depend on others. This dependence is absolutely natural because mind is a dependent phenomenon. It depends on others; its whole knowledge is borrowed.All that your mind knows has come either from the parents, or from the priest, or from the teachers, or from the society. Just watch, and you will not be able to find a single thought that is original to you.All is borrowed; mind lives on borrowed knowledge. In every situation it wants somebody to guide it. Your whole life is being guided by others. From the very beginning you are told what is right and what is wrong by your parents. Then your teachers, then your priests, then your neighbors… Not that they know, they too have borrowed from others.This borrowing goes on century after century, generation after generation. Every disease goes on being inherited by the new generation. It is just a replica of the older generation, a reflection, a shadow, but it does not have its own originality. It is because of this you need a God, an ultimate guide. You cannot depend on your parents as you grow older. You start seeing their falsities, their lies. You start seeing that their advice is not perfect; they are fallible human beings. But the small child has believed in them as if they were infallible. It was not their mistake, it was the small child’s innocence; he trusted the father, the mother, who loved him. But finally he comes to know, as he grows toward a little maturity, that what these people say is not necessarily true.One day I was playing – I must have been five or six years old… A man used to come to see my father, an utterly boring man, and my father was tired of him. So he called me and told me, “I see that man is coming, he will waste my time unnecessarily and then it is very difficult to get rid of him. I have to go out, saying to him, ‘Now I have some appointment.’ I have to go out unnecessarily, just to get rid of him. And sometimes it happens that he says, ‘I am coming with you, so on the way we can have good talk.’ And there is no talk, it is a monologue. He talks and tortures people.”So my father said, “I am going inside. You just remain playing outside, and when he comes, simply say to him, ‘My father is out.”And my father was continually teaching me, “Never speak an untruth.” So I was shocked. It was contradictory.When the man came and asked me, “Where is your father?” I said, “He is in, but he says that he is out.”My father heard it from inside, and the man came in with me, so he could not say anything in front of him. When he was gone, after two or three hours, my father was really angry with me – not with the man.He said, “I told you to tell him, ‘My father is out.’”I said, “I repeated exactly the same thing. I told him the same thing: ‘My father says to tell you that he is out. But he is in, the truth is, he is in.’ And you have been teaching me to be truthful whatever the consequence, so I am ready for the consequence. If you want to give me any punishment, give it. But remember, if truth is punished, truth is destroyed. Truth has to be rewarded. Give me some reward, so I can go on speaking the truth whatever happens.”He looked at me and he said, “You are clever.”I said, “That you know already. Just give me some reward. I have spoken the truth.”He had to give me a reward; he gave me a one-rupee note. At that time one rupee was almost equal to twenty-five rupees today. You could live with a one-rupee note for almost half a month. And he said, “Go and enjoy whatever you want to purchase.”I said, “You have to remember this: if you tell me to speak a lie, I am going to tell the person that you have told me to. I am not telling a lie. And each time you contradict yourself, you will have to reward me. So stop lying. If you don’t want that man to visit you, you should tell him directly, that you don’t have any time, and you don’t like his boring talk because he says the same things again and again. Why are you afraid? Why do you have to tell a lie?”He said, “The difficulty is, he is my best customer.”My father had a very beautiful clothes shop, and this man was rich. He used to purchase huge amounts for his family, relatives, friends. He was a very generous man. His problem was just that he was boring.So my father said, “I have to suffer all the boredom because he is my best customer and I cannot lose him.”I said, “That is your problem, it is not my problem. You are lying because he is your best customer, and I am going to say this to him.”He said, “Wait!”I said, “I cannot wait. He must be told immediately that you go on suffering all his boring talk just because he is a good customer. And you will have to give me a reward!”He said, “You are so difficult. You are destroying my best customer and I will have to give you a reward too? Just don’t do it.”But I did. And I got two rewards; one from that boring man because I told him, “Truth should always be rewarded, so just give me some reward because I am destroying one of my father’s best customers.”He hugged me and he gave me two rupees. I said, “Remember, don’t stop buying from my father’s shop, but don’t bore him either. If you want to talk, you can talk to the walls, to the trees. The whole world is available. You can just close your room and talk to yourself. Then you will be bored.”And I told my father, “Don’t be worried. Look! I have got one rupee from you, I have got two rupees from your customer. You owe me, you should give me, one more rupee because I have told the truth. But don’t be worried. I have made him a better customer and he will never bore you again. He has promised me.”My father said, “You have done a miracle!” Since that day the man never came, or even if he did come he would stay just for one or two minutes to say hello and he would go away. And he continued to purchase from my father’s shop.He said to my father, “It is because of your son that I continue. Otherwise I would have felt wounded, but that little boy managed both things. He stopped me boring you and he asked me, requested me, not to stop shopping from his father’s shop. ‘He depends on you.’ And he got two rupees from me and he was saying such a shocking thing to me. Nobody has ever dared to tell me that I am a boring man.”He was the richest man in the village. Everybody was connected with him in some way. People had borrowed money from him, people had borrowed lands from him to work on. He was the richest man and the biggest landowner in that village. Everybody was somehow or other obliged to him, so nobody was able to tell him that he was boring.So he said, “It was a very great shock, but it was true. I know I am boring. I bore myself with my thoughts. That’s why I go to others to bore them, just to get rid of my thoughts. If I am bored with my thoughts, I know perfectly well the other person will be bored, but everybody is under an obligation to me. Only this boy has no obligation and is not afraid of the consequences. And he is daring. He asked for a reward. He said to me, ‘If you don’t reward truth, you are rewarding lies.’”This is how this society is in a mad space: everybody is teaching you to be truthful, but nobody is rewarding you for being truthful, so they create schizophrenia.The Indian Government has the motto “Satyameva jayate” –“Truth is always victorious.” That is their motto, but every politician goes on lying to the people, giving promises which they know they cannot fulfill. In every court “Satyameva jayate. Truth is always victorious,” is written. But in every court it is not the truth that is victorious, it is the more efficient, more argumentative advocate who wins the case. It does not matter whether he is in favor of the criminal or against the criminal.I used to have a vice-chancellor who was one of the biggest legal experts in the world. He had three offices, one in London, one in New Delhi, and one in Beijing, and he was continuously running from one country to another country. He had never lost a single case. All the great cases in which millions of dollars were involved… All the maharajas of this country were his clients. But he was a drunkard.He was fighting a case in the Privy Council in London. That was the highest appeals court for India under the British Empire. The Supreme Court was here, but if you wanted to go against the Supreme Court, the Privy Council was in London. And he was a Privy Council man; he was continuously fighting cases in the Privy Council.One night he was at a party and drank too much. Next day he had a hangover. He was still a little drunk, but he had to go to the court. The case was between two districts of Rajasthan, Udaipur and Jaipur. The two maharajas were fighting for a certain bit of land: to which district it belonged. It was thousands of acres of land. With his hangover he forgot which party he was fighting for, Udaipur or Jaipur.So he went on criticizing the maharaja of Jaipur; all his arguments were against him. Many times his secretary pulled on his coat, but he simply wouldn’t listen. When it was lunchtime, the court stopped for an hour. Then the secretary said, “You have spoilt the whole case. You are fighting for the maharaja of Jaipur and you are arguing against him. And you have created such trouble. The man who is against the maharaja of Jaipur – the man who is fighting you, another great expert – is at a loss what to do because you have already put all the arguments that he has prepared.”Now he was getting over his hangover; he said, “Don’t worry. There is still time.”After lunch he said to the court, “Before lunch I gave all the arguments that the opposite party can give. Now I am going to criticize the opposite party, argument by argument, because I am standing here for the maharaja of Jaipur.” And he criticized his own arguments so cleverly.When he told me this… I used to go often to visit him. He loved me very much. He always told me, “You should join the law department, not philosophy.”I said, “That is not my field.”But he loved my arguments. He said, “It is a loss to the world of law and the constitution. You have such arguments that you would become a world-famous legal expert.”I said, “I am going to become a world-notorious illegal expert. Don’t be worried about me.”But he loved me, so he told me about that incident, and that it is not a question of truth at all, it is only a question of who is a better arguer.On the one hand the government and all the religions and all the preachers go on saying, “You should tell the truth” but society does not reward the truth.Just today I have received a threatening letter from a law firm in Madras, saying that I have offended the religious feelings of their clients. I have told my legal secretary, Anando, to write to them that in the first place there are no religious feelings. A religion is beyond feelings and beyond thoughts and beyond mind. There are only religious superstitions. A man of religion cannot be hurt. He knows the truth. It is the lies that you are living in that are hurt. Truth always hurts lies. So you should tell your clients to be really religious: “Go beyond the mind, go beyond feelings, sentiments, emotions, thoughts and you will not be hurt. But if you want to come to the court, you can.”My whole life I have been fighting in courts on the same point: that people’s religious feelings are hurt, and I have been telling the judges, “If I am telling the truth and somebody’s feelings are hurt, do you think I should be punished for it? That man needs psychological treatment. If his religious feelings are so weak, that shows that they are only beliefs. He does not know what religion is. And if truth hurts people, what do you suggest? Should I start lying?” The judges will look all around – what to do? They cannot say, “You should start lying.” They are in a quandary.In the first court case they gave me the choice of the Bible, the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita. I should take the book of whichever religion I belonged to – all the books were on the table – and take the oath that I would speak only the truth and nothing else.I said, “I cannot do that for one reason: all these three books are full of lies. To take an oath on a book which is full of lies is absolutely absurd; you are an intelligent man. Secondly, I cannot take the oath because I always speak the truth. Taking the oath will mean that I won’t speak the truth unless I take the oath. The implication is clear. You are telling me that I am an untruthful man. You are insulting me in your court. If I insult you, you will say that the court has been insulted. But you are insulting me by telling me to take the oath. I cannot take the oath because I simply speak the truth. There is no question of an oath.”He looked at me and he said, “I can understand, but this creates a problem. Without taking the oath, the case cannot start.”I said, “That is not my problem. Who wants to start it? It is the other party that is starting it. I can go home right now.”He said, “I will make an exception for you because you are saying you will speak the truth.”I said, “I am not saying that. I am saying I only speak the truth. And that’s the problem. These people are hurt by the truth. I have said that there is no God, and they are believers of God. Now they should prove that there is a God. That is their problem, not my problem. I simply repeat again, there is no God. Now they should prove the existence of God with evidence, with witnesses.”“What do you think?” I asked the judge. “Do you believe in God? Do you have any evidence, any witness who has seen God? Can you say that you have seen God?”He said, “It seems you are the judge here and I am the criminal.”I said, “Truth is always victorious. It is just behind you. Read it.”The case was dismissed. Hundreds of cases have been dismissed. But the society goes on rewarding a person who consoles. It does not matter that he is consoling you by a lie.Once it happened…A man died and his wife was really in despair, crying and crying. And one of my neighbors went to her and said, “Don’t be worried, the soul is immortal. Your husband has not died, it is just the body. His soul is immortal and cannot die. So don’t unnecessarily be in despair, be sad and cry, there is no need.”I was listening, standing by his side. I thought, “Let me wait. When somebody dies in this fellow’s house, then I will go.”Two years later his father died. So I went immediately.My father said, “Where are you going?”I said, “The same place you are going,” because he was going to participate in the funeral procession. A neighbor has died and he was an old friend.He said, “He was my old friend, but why are you going?”I said, “I am going to take care of his son, because that idiot was telling a woman whose husband had died, ‘Don’t cry, the soul is immortal.’ Now I have to see whether he is crying or not.”And he was crying. I said, “Stop crying. You were telling that poor woman that the soul is immortal. What happened? Your father’s soul is not immortal? Stop crying.”He said, “You are a strange person. I am in a deep sadness.”I said, “What happened two years ago? When somebody else’s husband died, you told her great and beautiful things. All lies! Your tears prove you were lying. If you were telling the truth, there would be no tears. Your father’s soul is immortal.”He said, “I know it. But what to do? I feel sad.”I said to him, “That woman also knew it.”All knowledge is borrowed; hence all knowledge that is borrowed is a lie. Deep down you are not in agreement with it. Deep down there is doubt.So what you are asking is: if we don’t have a God, suddenly the problem arises, to whom do we have look for guidance about what is good and what is bad? And you feel, you think, it is because there is a certain resistance to thinking. No, it is as you think. It is not a question of resistance to thinking. Thinking cannot solve the problem.For example, a man has fallen into a well. Now is it good or bad to pull him out? Can you decide that by thinking? You may think it is good to save the man; but if you save the man and tomorrow he commits a murder, then you will be responsible, at least fifty percent responsible, for the murder. If you had not saved the man, there would have been no murder.There is a religious sect, Terapanth, in India, which says: don’t interfere in anybody’s life. If somebody is drowning, simply move on; don’t listen. If he is shouting for help, “Save me!” don’t listen, because he is suffering from his past evil acts.If you interfere, you are committing two crimes. First, you are interfering in his personal life. He was suffering because of his personal evil acts. He has to suffer; you are preventing him. He will have to fall again some day. It is better to let him finish with the past evil acts. And secondly, by saving him you are taking an immense responsibility. He may rape a woman, he may kill somebody. He may turn out to be a thief or anything, and you will be responsible. So you have unnecessarily taken a responsibility on yourself which will disturb your own spiritual growth.”So the followers of Terapanth – the head of the panth is Acharya Tulsi – say, “Don’t give any food to a beggar. He is a beggar because he is suffering from his past life’s karmas.” They don’t believe in charity, they don’t believe in compassion, they don’t believe that you should help anybody who is in trouble. You should keep aloof, otherwise you are taking on responsibilities which will become too burdensome for you. First you have to get rid of your own evil acts. Now you are taking on other people’s responsibilities. You will never become enlightened. So the people following Acharya Tulsi have become absolutely inhuman; nothing matters.Thinking cannot decide anything because something may be good in one situation and the same thing may be bad in a different situation. Sometimes even poison can be medicine, and sometimes even medicine can be poison. You have to understand the changing flux of life.So you cannot decide by thinking. It is not a question of deciding as a logical conclusion, it is a question of choiceless awareness. You need a mind without thoughts. In other words, you need a no-mind, just a pure silence, so you can see directly into things. And out of that clarity will come the choice on its own; you are not choosing. You will act just as a buddha acts. Your action will have beauty, your action will have truth, your action will have the fragrance of the divine. There is no need for you to choose.You have to look for guidance because you don’t know your inner guide is hidden inside you. You have to find the inner guide, and that’s what I call your witness, that’s what I call your dharma, that’s what I call your intrinsic buddha. You have to awaken that buddha and your life will shower blessings, benediction. Your life will become so radiant with good, with godliness, that it is impossible to conceive it.It is almost like light. Your room is dark, just bring light in. Even a small candle will do, and the whole darkness disappears. And once you have a candle you know where the door is. You don’t have to think, “Where is the door?” Only blind people think about where the door is. If the light is there, people who have eyes don’t think. Have you ever thought, “Where is the door?” You simply get up and get out! You never give a single thought to where the door is. You don’t start groping for the door or hitting your head against the wall. You simply see, and there is not even a flicker of thought. You simply go out.The situation is exactly the same when you are beyond mind. When there are no clouds and the sun is bright in the sky, you don’t have to think about where the sun is. When there are clouds covering the sun, you have to think about it.Your own being is covered with thoughts, emotions, feelings, and they are all mind products. Just put them aside, and then whatever you do is good – not that you follow certain scriptures, not that you follow certain commandments, not that you follow certain spiritual leaders. You are the guide of your life in your own right. And to be the guide of his own life is the dignity of man. That makes man a lion, transforms him from a sheep which is always looking for somebody else to defend it. But this is not only your problem, this is the problem of almost the whole of humanity. You have been programmed by others as to what is right and what is wrong.So when there is no God, there is also no holy scripture and there is no son of God like Jesus Christ to save you, and there is no meaning in the pope who represents Jesus Christ who is the son of God who does not exist. Can you be a son of someone who does not exist? To be a son of someone who does not exist simply means you are a crackpot – and the pope is representing the crackpot, Jesus Christ, and he goes on saying that he is infallible. And each pope has contradicted other popes. In these twenty centuries there have been many instances when one pope acted in a certain way and another pope demolished it and changed the rule. Both cannot be right. Both cannot be infallible. Both can be fallible, but both cannot be infallible. One has to be fallible. But if one pope is fallible, then what is the guarantee that other popes will not be fallible too?And the pope is elected. Do you elect a buddha? Do you decide who is a buddha by election? Then your politicians will become buddhas, and your buddhas will not have any votes because your buddhas will not go begging for them. A buddha is unconcerned whether you think him a buddha or not.The pope is elected. And you will be surprised to know that even Jesus Christ, three hundred years after his death, was elected as a divine being by a conference under the Emperor Constantine. The conference is known as the Nicene Council. It was decided that Jesus is holy by election, by voting.You cannot decide by election that Jesus is holy. You cannot decide by election whether Albert Einstein is right or wrong – by election, by people who don’t know any mathematics, who don’t know any physics. People who don’t have any experience of the holy are voting for whether Jesus is holy or not. After three hundred years, people who have not known Jesus and people who have no idea and no experience of holiness are deciding by election!It was just because of the power of Emperor Constantine; he forced people to vote for Jesus Christ as a holy man. Because they could not go against the emperor, they had to vote. And then the second thing he wanted them to vote on was that although Jesus Christ was holy, was a messiah, he had failed in his mission. Constantine asked the conference, “Now vote for me. I am the real messiah and a successful one.” He turned the whole Roman empire to Christianity. That’s why the Vatican exists in Italy. Italy’s old name was Rome. The whole Roman Empire under Constantine converted to Christianity. Of course he was far more successful than Jesus.You can’t think of Jesus as a success. He was crucified, poor fellow. You call that success? Crucifixion? On either side were criminals and even they were laughing. They were crucified, but they had committed crimes so there was no question; they knew that it was absolutely justified.Jesus told those two… First, to one he said, “Don’t be worried, you will be coming with me to paradise. I am the son of God so I will help you to enter paradise.” Then he told the other the same thing. Both started laughing and they said, “You cannot save yourself! We know you are not a criminal. You have not committed any crime, and you are being crucified. You cannot save yourself and you are promising us that you will save us?”But Constantine forced the council of Nicene to accept him as the real messiah. He was certainly successful; he converted the whole of the Roman Empire to Christianity.Jesus had only twelve apostles – uneducated, carpenters, fishermen, uncultured. Not a single rabbi, not a single learned man was ever his follower. No educated, no cultured people ever gathered around him.Pontius Pilate, the viceroy of the Roman Empire – Judea was under the Roman Empire – heard about Jesus from his wife. Just by chance his wife was passing when Jesus was preaching to a crowd, so she stopped her chariot. From her chariot she heard Jesus and she loved what he was saying. Those sayings were beautiful. She told her husband, “This man has something, some quality. I have never heard any man speaking with such authority, such beautiful sayings. And he is uneducated and very young,” – he was only thirty years at that time. By thirty-three he was crucified.As viceroy, Pontius Pilate could not go to listen to him, so he just passed by disguised as a soldier and stood under a tree far away, listening to what this man was saying. And his wife was right. Pilate was a very educated man, but he had never heard anybody speaking with such authority – and such beautiful words from an uneducated man! So he was very favorable to Jesus and he wanted to save him somehow from crucifixion. But the Jews were too much against Jesus, not because he had committed any crime, but because he was claiming something which the Jews could not accept. He was claiming, “I am the last prophet for whom you have been waiting for centuries. I have come!”But he was a carpenter’s son, and there was a difficulty even in believing that he was his own father’s son, because he was born just four months after the marriage. That is how the whole story begins about the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost. The whole thing was that the girl was already pregnant when she married Joseph the carpenter – it was not the Holy Ghost, it was some unholy neighbor! Jesus was not God’s son, he was not even the son of his own father.But if you tell the truth, if you call him “the bastard,” then Christians’ religious feelings are going to be hurt. And I am simply telling the truth. They have to prove where the Holy Ghost is, and what the logic behind calling him holy is, if he is raping virgin girls.But people feel hurt because they don’t know what authentic religiousness is. You are living with ideas, borrowed, so when God is no longer there, Jesus is no longer there, popes are no longer there, who is going to guide you?If God is not there, then all your Hindu incarnations of God are phony. When God himself is not there, how can he be incarnated in Krishna, in Rama…? These are just arch-egoists proclaiming something which they cannot prove. Not a single “incarnation of God” has been able to prove on what grounds he is calling himself an incarnation. Self-styled, so-called incarnations of God, self-styled prophets and messiahs – they have all created your morality, your religion, and you have been depending on them. Do you think the truth can come from these people?Truth can only arise within you. Nobody else can give it to you. And with truth comes beauty, followed by good. This is the authentic trinity of a truly religious man: truth, beauty, good. These three experiences happen when you enter into your own subjectivity, when you explore the interiority of your being.You have been living in the porch outside your being; you have never gone in. Once you go in you will find your buddha, your awareness, your choiceless consciousness. Then you don’t have to decide what is good and what is wrong. That choiceless consciousness takes you toward the good without any effort. It is effortless. And because it is effortless it brings you great joy.When there is effort… Have you ever thought about it? Effort simply means repression. Otherwise there is no need for any effort. Do you make any effort to feel hungry? Or do you make any effort to feel thirsty? When you are thirsty you know you are thirsty, when you are hungry you know you are hungry.But you have to make an effort to be celibate. All efforts are futile, against nature. I declare unto you there has never been a single man who was celibate, unless he was impotent. But the impotents don’t count. I say it on the grounds that nobody can go against nature.Those who try to go against nature have to make an effort. All effort is against nature, and all relaxation is in tune with nature. To be in tune is to be religious, to be in tune with the universe. And you don’t have to look for any guide. That very tuning turns you into a beautiful flower, fragrant. It is not an effort on your part, it is simply a natural growth.But all your religions are against nature. This is very strange – and you have never thought about it – that all these religions say God created nature. Yet, if God created nature, then to be against nature means to be against God. It is such a simple argument, it does not need much intelligence. If God has created existence, then the only way of being religious is to be in tune with existence, to be in tune with God’s existence.But, strangely, all religions teach you to be against nature: “Fast!” But fasting is not natural. Perhaps once in a while, but that too is needed only if you have been unnatural with your stomach. If you have been stuffing unnecessary things in your stomach, once in a while you may need to fast. But if you have been natural, and eating only as much as is needed by your body – and not a single thing more – you will never need to fast in your whole life.All religions teach you not to sleep for eight hours, which is natural. They are teaching you to cut your sleep. Saints sleep only three hours, two hours; the greater the saint, the less the sleep.One day a woman came to me, the wife of a sardar, a Sikh. [At this, Sardar Gurudayal Singh laughs heartily.] It was not the wife of Sardar Gurudayal Singh because he does not believe in wives, he believes in girlfriends.She said, “My husband is going bananas.”I said, “What happened to your husband?”She said, “He has been following a so-called saint who teaches him stupid things, and he follows…”The saint had told her husband, “First you should start living on pure food.”And what is pure food according to the Hindu mind? The only pure food is milk. In fact, it is one of the most impure things in the world because it comes out of blood; it is really a transformation of blood. That’s why when you drink milk you start looking red. It is the most impure thing, the worst thing you can think of. But Hindus believe that drinking milk is the purest thing.It is against nature. Have you seen any grown-up animal living on the milk of the mother? Just in the beginning, when the children of any animal cannot digest solid food – it is only a question of weeks – they have to depend on the mother’s milk. Once they start eating solid food, they completely forget about the mother’s milk. It is a temporary phenomenon.It is only man who goes on drinking milk even when he can digest solid food. And the milk is not from his mother, because the mother cannot manage to give you milk for your whole life. Just four or five years are enough to destroy her breasts. A whole life? You are seventy years old and drinking your mother’s milk? You will kill the poor woman! She may be already dead, and you are chewing on the dead body… So you are not able to do that, and no other woman will allow you to. Even your own wife will not allow you. Once in a while it is okay – but every day? In the middle of the night you start crying, “I want some milk”? The wife is not a cow. A few wives are, but very rarely!You are drinking milk from other animals – cows and sheep and goats – and you don’t understand the chemistry. The cow’s milk is for her children, not for you. You are depriving her children – that is one act against nature. And secondly, her milk is for the bulls. So her milk has immense sexuality, and your saints are drinking milk and trying to be celibate. This is such a contradiction – they become bulls!The cow’s milk is not for you, it is for a bull. It has the strength to create a bull. So firstly you are depriving her children, which is an act of violence. Secondly, you are drinking something which is not meant for you, and it is going to create exactly the opposite of what you are trying to do. Why the pure food? So that you can be celibate!So that woman, poor woman, told me, “That saint told him to live only on milk, and to be celibate. So his whole sexuality went into his head; the whole day he is just thinking about sex and nothing else.”That is the situation of all your saints’ minds. You just need to open a little window in their heads and inside you will see Marilyn Monroe standing naked, Sophia Loren standing naked, queues of women. I hope someday we will be able to create windows in the head so people can look.When you are repressing sex it is going to become cerebral. It will go into the head because the actual sex center is in the brain. So it will create fantasies, sexual imagination. Now you will go to the saint for another bit of advice: “What to do? My whole mind is just whirling with one thought, women.” The saint then says you have to cut down on your sleep.So this saint told the poor woman’s husband, “Cut your sleep.” He was sleeping for only two hours, and the whole day he felt sleepy. He could not go to work because the work he was doing was dangerous. He was working in a gun factory. So if he was sleepy he might get killed by the machines all around. He might do something wrong and explode the whole factory, so even his officers told him, “First get cured. The whole day you look sleepy. We won’t allow you to work.”Again he went to the saint. That’s how you go to the guides and the rabbis and the bishops and the priests and the saints, and they go on giving you advice which is not a cure, which is really creating more and more diseases.So the saint said to him, “If you are feeling sleepy the whole day it means…” In Hindu philosophy it is called tamas. Your past lives have been pure darkness; they are surfacing. The darkness is surfacing. “…tamas is coming up. So you have to continue the whole day repeating the name of Rama” – the Hindu God.So then he was continuously repeating, “Rama, Rama, Rama.” Even walking on the street he had to repeat it. The repetition had become so automatic that he did not hear the horns of the trucks or the buses or the cars. He was so full of his own “Rama, Rama, Rama…”The wife was afraid that he would be killed. People had reported to her that he was walking straight at a truck, and the truck was honking its horn but he wouldn’t listen. So she said, “I have come to you. You have to help. And he does not allow anybody else to sleep, so we are all getting sick. He gets up at three o’clock in the morning. He goes to bed at one o’clock in the night, so up to one o’clock in the night, ‘Rama, Rama, Rama’ through the whole house. The children are crying, ‘Our examinations are coming close and this man won’t let us sleep.’ And by three o’clock in the morning he’s back. Even the neighbors are coming to say, ‘This is too much, we cannot tolerate it. From three o’clock, “Rama, Rama”! And he shouts!’” So she said, “Something has to be done.”I said, “Certainly. Bring him to me.”But he wouldn’t listen because he was continuously repeating, “Rama, Rama,” in front of me. I said, “Shut up!”He said, “But it is the name of God.”I said, “Who told you?”He said, “My saint.”I said, “He exactly knows that Rama is the name of God?”He said, “His own master has told him.”I said, “It is just a tale told from one idiot to another idiot, and you are the last in the line. There is nothing holy in it, there is nothing divine in it. It is an ordinary name. There are millions of people in India who have Ram in their name. Do you think they are all gods?”He said, “No.”I said, “What is your name?” And by chance his name was Sardar Ram Singh. “You are an idiot! You are just repeating your own name.”He said, “I never thought about it.”I said, “You have never thought about anything! What else is your master telling you? You are not sleeping well, that’s why you are feeling sleepy the whole day. And because you are trying to be celibate, the mind is continuously thinking of sex. Because you are thinking of sex, your master says to you that your food must be impure, so you should drink cow’s milk. That will make you more sexual – you will become a bull! Soon, Sardar Ram Singh, you will become a bull!”He said, “My God! So what am I to do?”I said, “First, stop drinking milk. Just be a normal human being. Yes, you can drink a little bit in your tea in the morning, but not the whole day. How much milk are you drinking? Your body seems so fat.”The wife said, “He is drinking it the whole day, to make himself celibate. His job has gone, and whatever small balance he had in an account was wasted in purchasing two cows. He drinks all the milk of two cows!”I said, “You brought him at the right time. Soon he would have turned into a bull – he is just on the verge!” So I said to him, “Sell those cows and start eating like a human being. And sleep like a human being. And there is no need to repeat ‘Rama, Rama…’ You can do one thing: in the morning, say ‘Ram’ and then say, ‘Ditto – applicable for twenty-four hours.’ It is just a small thing. You can write it on a page, ‘Ditto – applicable for twenty-four hours.’ Next day again you say one time, ‘Rama,’ and ‘Ditto.’”He said, “This is a great secret! I was getting bored and tired, and I was going deaf because I was continuously repeating, repeating, repeating. Even those two hours in my sleep I was continuously repeating inside, ‘Rama, Rama…’” Because if you are repeating it for twenty-two hours then you cannot leave it just for two hours in your sleep, it will go on as an undercurrent.”I said, “You will be okay within two weeks. Not much is needed, just be normal and natural. And stop going to that stupid man you think is a saint.”He said, “Then can I come to you?”I said, “No. You don’t need anybody outside; you have to go within yourself. First, for two weeks get saner; then you can come to me and I will tell you how to meditate. You don’t have to meditate the whole day, just one hour before sunrise. And there is no need to shout because you are not praying for the neighbors, and there is no God to listen to it, howsoever loud you shout. There is no God to listen to it. Have you ever received any answer?”He said, “No, I have never received any answer, only condemnation from everybody. My children are against me, my wife is against me, all the neighborhood is against me. My boss is against me. I have got into such trouble with this religion…”Everybody is in the same situation, more or less. All religions are driving people bananas. They give you advice that seems to be very significant because all the scriptures are repeating it down the ages; it is so ancient you cannot doubt it.You don’t need anybody to tell you what is good and what is wrong. All that you need is an awakening within you of a consciousness which makes you see things as they are. Then there is no question of choice. Nobody chooses the bad consciously. It is the unconscious, the darkness within you, that chooses the evil.Consciousness brings light to your whole being. Then you become full of luminosity. You cannot do anything that is harmful to anybody, you cannot do anything that is harmful to your own body. You become suddenly aware that you are one with this whole universe, so your actions become good, beautiful, graceful. Your words start having a certain poetry, your silence becomes so deep, so blissful, that your bliss starts overflowing to others.This overflowing of bliss is the only significant sign of a man who is awakened. Just being with that man, just his presence, is enough to give you a taste of the beyond. But it is not according to anybody else, only according to your own awareness.And when I say God is dead, all that is left for you is your own consciousness. Your consciousness is part of an oceanic consciousness that surrounds you. Once you become aware of your inside, you will become aware, all over, that that same consciousness is throbbing, dancing. In the trees, in the rivers, in the mountains, in the oceans, in people’s eyes, in their hearts, it is the same song, it is the same dance – and you participate in it. Your participation is good. Your non-participation is bad.The second question:Osho,Who invented God? Was it man simply not wanting to take responsibility for his own life? Isn't the priest as much a victim of his own fear of looking inside as anyone else?Fear invented God. The priest is as much a victim as you are, but he is more cunning than you are.Man’s fear of darkness, man’s fear of sickness, man’s fear of old age, man’s fear of death needed somebody to protect him. He could not find any protection anywhere. When you can’t find any protection anywhere you have to invent one, as a consolation.Just today I was listening to a song of one of the great Urdu poets, Mirza Ghalib. A sentence says:Hamko maloom hai jannat ki hakikat lekindil ke bahlane ko ghalib khayal achchha hai.“We know perfectly well the truth about your paradise, but it is good as a consolation.” We know it is not there, we know it is a lie, but to console yourself that angels will be there waiting after your death, playing “Alleluia” on their harps, Saint Peter will receive you at the pearly gates, and God will be waiting for you… Ghalib is right: …dil ke bahlane… Just as a consolation it is a good idea.The priests know perfectly well, perhaps better than you, that there is no God. But the priesthood is the most cunning profession in the world, the worst and the ugliest profession, far worse than prostitution. Prostitution is the product of the priest; it is number two. First comes the priest, then comes the prostitute, and then come all kinds of pathologies in the world.The priests saw that everybody was afraid and wanted some protection. So the fear created God, as a security, as insurance after you die. Otherwise, it seems that after death all is darkness for eternity. What will happen? Where you will be? All your friends will be left behind, your family will be left behind, nobody will come with you. You can carry no money beyond death. You will be moving into death, utterly a beggar, naked, just a skeleton, and then, for eternity…? It creates a great anxiety – what kind of life will there be after death?So our fear, our dread, our death, created God. The priest immediately saw a good excuse to exploit people. He became the middle agent. You can’t see God, so there is every possibility that, if there is no priest to persist that there is a God – philosophizing, creating theologies, scriptures, temples, statues, rituals, prayers, the whole drama… He stands between you and God, and he says to you, “I have a direct line to God. You don’t have a direct line. Tell me, confess your sins to me, and I will tell God to forgive you.”Obviously you cannot see God. You feel it a great relief that somebody knows, somebody is there who has a direct connection. And you feel it is cheap. You commit a sin, and you are afraid you will have to suffer in hell. But the priest is there; you just go and confess your sin and the priest says to you, “Put five dollars into the charity box and I will pray for you.”And God is very compassionate; he always forgives. Your sin is forgiven for five dollars. Those five dollars are pocketed by the priest; they never reach anywhere else because there is no God to whom he can give those five dollars.What will God do with five dollars? He is alone, there is no shopping mall, what will he do with five dollars? Up to now he must have collected billions and trillions of dollars – all useless junk. What will he do with those dollars, notes and bills? He does not come to the world to purchase things, and I have never come across in any scripture that there are shopping markets in paradise. Saints don’t need anything. In paradise you don’t need food, in paradise you don’t need anything. Everything is fulfilled; you simply live an eternal life. You are no longer a body, you are just a spirit. And spirits don’t need food, don’t need water, don’t need medicine. The spirit never becomes sick, it never becomes old, it never dies. So what will God do with those five dollars?But every Sunday the Catholic priest collects a good amount. And all the other priests have their own ways. The Hindu priest catches hold of you from the very beginning. Even before the child is born, he is caught hold of by the priest. In the past the Hindu priest even used to tell you on what day, on what night you should make love to your wife, at what time, so you get a really intelligent, holy, saintly child. And the whole of India is a proof that the priest was wrong. I don’t see those holy children anywhere. The child has been got hold of from the very beginning, from even before the beginning. The child is not yet even received by the mother’s womb, and he is telling you on what night, at what time…!I used to stay with one of the oldest MP’s in India. He was an MP for sixty years without a gap. He used to be called “Father of the Indian Parliament.” There are only two persons who remained MP’s for sixty years. One was my friend, Dr. Seth Govind Das, and the other was Winston Churchill in England. They were continuously chosen without any discontinuity for sixty years.Dr. Govind Das was a very fanatic Hindu, so I continuously suffered from his fanaticism. I used to stay with him in New Delhi. Whenever I was talking and giving lectures in New Delhi I stayed with him. And he was so fanatical… In India there are many people of that kind, he was not alone. When he was going back to his constituency, he would ask his priest at what time he should leave the house. He asked the priest to search through the scriptures and astrology – all kinds of charts and his birth chart – and tell him the right moment to leave the house.Now the trains don’t run according to astrology. The train was leaving at twelve o’clock in the night, but his astrologer said, “You have to leave the house at three o’clock in the afternoon.” And I had to sit with him on the railway station from three to twelve.I told him, “It is stupid that we have to wait there. The best would be if you could leave the house at three o’clock and come back through the back door. Unnecessary torture…”But he said, “No, I have to leave.”I said, “There are millions of Hindus who go on asking the same thing, but still accidents happen in trains. There may be many Hindus who have consulted the priest and were told, ‘This is the right time, a good time for you to travel’ and the train gets drowned in a river, the whole bridge collapses!”In India the bridges collapse all the time because it is a very religious country, a very spiritual country: it trusts in God, not in cement! So bridges are made with as little cement as possible; the larger part is just sand. So the bridge is good enough to be inaugurated by the prime minister – that’s enough! The first time the train comes, both the train and the bridge go into the river. And all the Hindus in the train must have consulted their astrologers, their priests, “What is the right time?” There should not be any accidents in India.I said to Dr. Seth Govind Das, “Why are there accidents? In India there should not be.”He himself was in a car accident. When I went to see him, I said, “What happened to your astrology?”He said, “At least at this time when I am suffering from multiple fractures you should not start an argument with me.”I said, “This is the right time to make you clear that you have been stupid your whole life. Did you ask the astrologer or not?”He said, “I asked him.”“Then why this accident?”But people don’t have the guts and courage to go against the past, though it may be completely rotten. Marriages in India are made by the astrologers, and every marriage is a failure. I have never come across any marriage that was not a failure.I used to live in a place called Raipur; I was a professor there. I lived there for just six months. The city was so out of date that I got tired of living with those people. You would find written on the walls everywhere: “If you are suffering from ghosts, then come to me,” and the address. “If you are suffering from witches, come to me. If you are suffering from black magic, I am the right man to cure you.” The whole city was full of black magic, witches, ghosts.Just in my neighborhood used to live a very famous astrologer, and he used to fix marriages by looking at the birth charts. He became friendly with me. I told him it was not working: “It is not working even in your case.” His wife used to beat him.I said, “What happened? You are such a great astrologer. You are arranging hundreds of marriages. People cannot get married without your confirmation because their stars do not meet.”There has to be a certain synchronicity between the stars of both the charts.“What happened? Didn’t you consult the birth chart of your wife?”He said, “I did.”“Then what went wrong?”He said, “Don’t harass me. I am already too harassed by my wife, and now you have come into my neighborhood to harass me.”I said, “I will not harass you. I just want to know if you believe in your own astrology.”He was certainly a sincere man. He told me, “Don’t tell anybody. It is my profession, but I don’t believe in it at all. In fact sometimes it happens that the birth charts are not compatible. But the man is rich and he is going to give me at least a hundred rupees if I tell him ‘Go on, this marriage is going to be very successful.’ So sometimes I change the charts. I make a new chart for the girl which mixes with the boy’s chart.”The priest knows perfectly there is no God. He is the only person who knows it perfectly. But it is his profession, he lives by exploiting people. So he goes on persisting that there is God. God is his business. And when it is a question of business, it is his very livelihood.And there are millions of priests belonging to different religions. There may be different kinds of priests in every country, but all they do is exploit people, give them consolation: “This marriage is going to be great.” And every marriage is a tragedy; I have never come across any comedy.Last night I had talked about Mickey Mouse Manu and the great, beautiful woman Zareen. Now Zareen is looking for German glue to put Manu completely under control; she is thinking to glue him to her body. So, poor Manu follows Zareen wherever she goes and cannot escape to Mumbai in the name of business. Tomorrow morning he is going again.He has written me a beautiful letter, thanking me and being grateful, but again – business. Today they were moving hand in hand on the road. Is it not enough proof that I have some clarity, that I can see things? And I remain in my room, I never go out. But both were happy, like small rats.People can only be happy if they are not married. Then you have freedom. Then it is out of freedom that you are together, not out of any contract, not out of some business deal, not because of society’s enforcement, not because of law, but because of love. You are together just out of love, and when the love fades…And everything fades, remember. It is a fiction created by the poets that love is eternal. No, the love that you know is not eternal and the love that poets know is not eternal. It fades away. It remains if lovers don’t meet.There have been only three or four couples in the whole history of man who are great lovers – because they never met. So there was no quarrel, there was no question of their love being disappointing. The society did not allow them, their parents did not allow them to meet.In India we have the stories of Laila and Majnu, Shiri and Farhad. The lovers never met because society was against them. They belonged to different castes, different societies, different religions, so there was no possibility of marriage. They are thought to be great lovers – their love never faded because it never began! Once it begins, the end is not far away.Every beginning has an end. Even when you are born, death is not far away. Every day it comes closer.And once you are married, the problem becomes more difficult. Out of freedom you can live together because you know you are living in freedom. You can move any moment, in great friendliness, with thankfulness to each other: “We gave each other such beautiful moments, such beautiful days and nights. We lived in poetry, in music, in songs. These few days and nights were all golden. But now the season is gone, the spring is over, the honeymoon finished. It is better for both of us to separate.” With great gratitude; there is no revenge, there is no hate, there is no reason for anger. Both gave whatever they could to each other; they are richer than they were before. The experience has made them richer.But marriage does not allow you to move away. Love finishes, but you have to pretend that you are still loving. And whenever you have to pretend, it is a heaviness on the heart. Whenever you pretend, you are phony – you know it, your wife knows it.When love fades there is no possibility of deceiving each other. Maybe for a few days you can deceive each other by bringing ice cream every day, but for how long? In fact, the moment you start bringing ice cream that is a signal that the old warmth of love is finished. Now the coldness is coming!It is only people like Dale Carnegie… And they can be effective only in America, nowhere else. Dale Carnegie is America’s only philosopher. He has sold his book in a quantity second only to the Holy Bible. The book is How to Win Friends and Influence People – and everything is phony in it. He says, “When he is going to the office, every husband should kiss his wife.” Whether he loves her or not is immaterial; he should kiss her and say, “I love you, honey.” When he comes home he should again hug her, bring a few roses, and say, “Sweetheart, I have been thinking of you the whole day.” At least three times a day and three times in the night he should make her aware that he loves her. The same is true for the wife – and both are following Dale Carnegie. There is no love, but you simply go on saying…The word phony applies to America more than to any other country. It comes from telephone, because on the telephone your voice becomes different, it becomes phony.The husband calls the wife once or twice in the day, just to assure her that he loves her. And while he is calling, his secretary is sitting in his lap! This is happening in every office, without exception. Secretaries are chosen not because they are more efficient than others. When they are brought before the boss for their interview…I have heard about one. A secretary came in and she said that she was very experienced, she had all the certificates and her speed was very good on the typewriter. Another came; she was fresh, younger, but had no experience. Then the third came, then the fourth came; there were at least one dozen. Finally when the manager asked, “Which one have you chosen?” and the boss said, “The one who has the biggest tits.”Secretaries are chosen because of tits? But that’s how things are.Once you start feeling encaged in anything you immediately feel to get out of it. It is a prison. Your God, your priests, all imprison you. They go on creating new prisons for you, of morality, of marriage, of responsibility for the children – all kinds of entanglements and chains for you. Their whole purpose is to keep you miserable because unless you are miserable you are not going to go to the church. Unless you are miserable you are not going to pray. Only in misery do you remember God. You know it! Only when you are suffering do you remember God, do you think about the Holy Bible, do you think about the Bhagavad Gita, do you go to the temple – only when you are in misery.Bertrand Russell is absolutely right when he says, “If we can make the whole of humanity happy, religions will disappear.” And I absolutely agree with him. But he does not know how to make the whole world happy.I know how to make the whole world happy. Out of deep meditation bliss arises, and you are so happy the whole day, the whole night, without any cause – it is just bubbling inside you. It is your very nature, your dharma. Then you don’t need any God and you don’t need any priest, and you don’t live in any kind of misery or imprisonment. The moment you feel that something has become phony, something has become pseudo, something has become just a mask, you simply drop it. You remain truthful to your own consciousness. That is your only responsibility. All else will follow, and your life will be a life of rejoicing.Not only will your life be a rejoicing, your death also will be a rejoicing. Death does not destroy anything. The five elements of the body fall back into their original sources, and the consciousness has two possibilities: if it has not tasted meditation it will move into another womb; if it has tasted meditation, if it has known its eternity, its immortality, it will move into the cosmos and disappear into this vast existence. And that disappearance is the greatest moment of life. You have become one with the source from where you had arisen. You have gone back and disappeared into it.Authentic religion does not need any God, does not need any priest, does not need any prayer. All that it needs is an exploration of your inner world.That exploration I call Zen. In Sanskrit it is dhyana; in Chinese it is ch’an; in Japanese it is Zen. But it is the same word. Going inward, reaching to the very point from where you can look, a door opens into the divine cosmos. Standing on that point, you are a buddha. And your whole life changes; it is a metamorphosis. You have become a new man.We need this new man urgently. It has never been so urgent as it is today. The new man is the only hope for the whole humanity. If the new man does not arrive soon, the old man is ready to commit suicide, global suicide.The third question:Osho,Once, I heard a fanatic Christian say: “Do you realize that a slave is more free than the master? This is because the master has all the responsibility and the slave has no cares in the world. We are lucky to have God as our master.”Would you care to comment?The statement is absolutely right in the sense that if you make somebody a slave, you also become dependent on him. You have to take care of him, you have to take care of his health. You have taken great responsibility.But the slave has lost his responsibility, he has also lost his freedom; he has also lost his dignity, his humanity. He has become a beast of burden, he is just like a machine. You take care of a machine too: you wash your car, you clean your car, you are always aware if something is wrong, has to be replaced. Just as you take care of your machines, you take care of your slaves.So it is true that the master also becomes in a certain way dependent on the slave. But the Christian who told you this does not realize the implication of his statement. If God is his master, it means God is his slave. It is his statement. He is saying, “Do you realize that a slave is more free than the master?” So God is less free than you are!But a less free God becomes inferior to you, a less free God cannot bring freedom to you. He himself is less free. So why bother about a God who is not even equal to you in freedom, nothing to say about his superiority in freedom? He is less free than you.But fanatics don’t understand logic, don’t understand argument. Fanatics are just blind people. Otherwise, this one would not have said, “This is because the master has all the responsibility and the slave has no cares in the world. We are lucky to have God as our master!” He should have said, “We are lucky to have God as our slave because he takes all the cares and all the responsibilities. He creates the world, and he creates the sin, and he creates all kinds of troubles, and he creates all kinds of solutions, and he sends his own son to save the world.”And he sends prophets upon prophets to fight among each other and kill people. He has such a great involvement and business – so occupied! And what does he get in return? Just these fanatics.If there is a God, man is not only a slave, man does not exist. Man is a puppet. If God, the way the Christians believe, made man out of mud and then breathed life into his nose, then man is just a created puppet. All the strings are in the hands of God. Any moment, just as at a certain moment that whimsical God created man…What was he doing before? One simply has to ask it, because according to Christians he created the world only six thousand years ago. It is absolute nonsense because in India we have found cities of great culture and civilization – in Mohenjo Daro, in Harappa, which Christian explorers, Christian scientists excavated, were working on. They could not believe that God destroyed those cities seven thousand years ago, before he created the world! And in China, the skeleton of a man has been found which is called the Peking Man, which is eighty thousand years old.Certainly the world is far more ancient than your God. Perhaps man created God six thousand years ago – that may be right. But idiots are idiots. One great scholarly bishop was very much puzzled about the Peking Man, about Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, and about the claim of a man who lived in Pune – a famous scholar, Lokmanya Tilak – that the Hindu Vedas are ninety thousand years old. And his evidence is such that it cannot be contradicted. His evidence is not logical but scientific, astronomical.In the Rig Veda, a certain constellation of stars is described in absolute detail. This happened, according to scientists, ninety thousand years ago. Unless the Rig Veda was written by people who had seen that constellation they could not have described it in detail, and since then it has not happened again. Perhaps sometime in the future it may happen, but for ninety thousand years it has not happened. The description is such a solid proof that Rig Veda was written by people who have seen the constellation. Without seeing that constellation there is no way for them to have described which star was in which position. And they have described it so scientifically that there is no possibility of making any improvement on it. When this bishop became aware of all these things…And in the Himalayas, on top of the highest peaks of the Himalayas, sea animals’ skeletons have been found. That simply means that at a certain time – perhaps a hundred million years ago – there was an ocean in place of the Himalayas. Otherwise, sea animals cannot move from the ocean, pass across the whole of India, and go on the top of the Himalayas to die there.The only possibility is – and it is now a scientific fact – that the Himalayas arose out of the ocean. And because they arose out of the ocean, the remains of many animals have been found on the top. And because this vast range of mountains called the Himalayas arose, the ocean receded.The Hind Mahasagar, the great Indian Ocean, used to be where the Himalayas are – one hundred million years ago. Those animals prove it, because they are one hundred million years old. There are ways to judge how old a skeleton is, and now those methods are absolutely accurate.The bishop was mad because it was all going against the Bible. So he invented a theory. This is why I say a fanatic will not see the truth; he will try to continue his belief in a lie, will make all kinds of excuses.This excuse is certainly worth understanding. The bishop invented a theory that God created the world six thousand years ago as it is told in the Bible, but, as he is all-powerful, he created sea animals and put them on top of the Himalayas. He created them so that they would appear to be one hundred million years old. He created the Harappa and Mohenjo Daro ruins making them appear seven thousand years old, and the Peking Man as if he is eighty thousand yeas old, just to test the Christians’ faith.What great logic! God seems to be a conman: “It is just a question of your faith.” But the fact is that according to science, this earth is four billion years old. And man is at least a million years old, passing through many different stages up to Gautam Buddha, the highest peak of consciousness, the Everest.This Christian fanatic is saying, “We are lucky to have God as our master.” What about God himself? Is he lucky to have you as his responsibility? If God is responsible for everything, and he should be… If he has created the world, then he is responsible for Adolf Hitler, and the Second World War, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who else? If he is taking care of the world and pulling people’s strings, he pulled the strings of President Truman to drop the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now, Truman is not responsible. God pulled his strings; what could he do?When the puppeteer pulls the strings of the puppet, the puppet dances. When the puppeteer pulls differently, the puppet fights. When the puppeteer drops the puppet, it goes down and sleeps. And whenever the puppeteer pulls the strings again, the puppet is back ready to do anything. If God has created the world, then we are all puppets; we don’t have any spirituality and we are just dust unto dust.Is God happy to have all these puppets creating a mess of the world? And he is responsible! But fanatics don’t look at any logic. His argument proves that God is a slave of his own slaves, he is not a master. You are the master. He is taking care of you.Rather than seeing exactly into the reality of things, people go on creating hypotheses, lies, fictions, imagination, hallucination. Mind has all these capacities. Unless you are beyond mind, you cannot be certain that what you are seeing is real. Once you are beyond mind, only then are you aware of that which is real. And in that reality no God is found.Buddha could not find any God. In his ultimate state of enlightenment, he could not find any God and he could not find any beginning of the universe. Mahavira in his ultimate enlightenment could not find any God, and he could not find any creation either. The world, existence, is beginningless and endless. Twenty-three other tirthankaras of the Jainas could not find any God when they were in samadhi. When they were beyond mind, there was no fear, no dread, no death, there was no need of the hypothesis of God. God simply disappeared like a shadow of the mind, just as dreams disappear when you wake up. Enlightenment is nothing but waking up and all dreams disappearing. And God has been proved a dream by thousands of enlightened people.God is believed in only by the ignorant. God is believed in only by those who don’t have any sense of dignity. The people who have attained to the fulfillment of their potential, who have blossomed like lotus flowers, have all denied God.There are three religions in the world: one that arose out of Gautam Buddha’s inspiration, another that arose out of Adinatha’s inspiration, and a third that arose out of Lao Tzu’s inspiration, Tao. These three are the highest peaks ever reached, and all three have no God. Compared to these three, Mohammedanism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism are just very childish. They are good as toys, as consolation, but they don’t solve any problem and they don’t give you any liberation. They don’t take you beyond birth and death. They only make you slaves.I hate slavery; my whole effort is to liberate you from all that binds you. Only when you are liberated from all bindings will you have a tremendous beauty, a splendor that even emperors will be jealous of.The sutra:When Impo took leave of Ma Tzu, Ma Tzu asked, “Where are you going?”Ma Tzu is one of the great enlightened masters; and not just great, but also very strange. I have talked about Ma Tzu to you. There is no comparison to Ma Tzu anywhere. His whole behavior is just absolutely unique.He walked on all fours, just like an animal. Because he was so much in tune with nature, he dropped the idea of standing on two feet. He said, “Standing on two feet has created the mind.” That’s why animals don’t have any religion, don’t have any God. Even animals are far better: they don’t go to any church; they don’t bow down to any stone cut into the image of God. Animals will simply pass it by – even donkeys don’t care. It is only man who seems to be stupid.If animals had languages – and scientists have the suspicion that they have; they have symbols, they have certain languages, different kinds, not exactly like human beings – then they must be laughing. In secrecy they must be winking at each other: “Look at that fellow who is bowing down before a monkey god!”Ma Tzu’s idea was that the brain developed because man stood on two feet. And there is great understanding in it. The brain cannot develop – science is in agreement with Ma Tzu – the brain cannot develop if you go on moving on all fours because when you are horizontal, moving like an animal, the brain gets so much blood flow that small, very small invisible nerves cannot grow in the brain. The flood of blood destroys them.As man stood on two feet, the blood reaching to the head became less because it is going against gravitation: everything is pulled down and your heart has to pump blood upstairs. It is a difficult task. That’s why only man has heart attacks, not animals. Only man is continuously sick and ill – because he is fighting with gravitation all the time. The earth is pulling everything down and you are taking everything up, against gravitation. So it is a struggle.Ma Tzu moved on all fours just to go beyond mind and be in tune with nature. Everybody laughed. They said, “This is strange!”And he looked like a tiger. He had such shiny eyes that he would look at you like a tiger. The disciples who gathered around Ma Tzu were men of great courage because he used to jump on people, beat them. Ma Tzu devised beating and slapping and jumping on people as methods of meditation. You won’t believe it, but he managed to make more people enlightened than even Gautam Buddha because he had found a secret: when he jumped on you, suddenly your mind stopped. You could not think, “What is happening?” You could not figure it out. It had never happened before.Mind knows only what has happened; mind knows only what you have learned. Nobody has jumped on you; you have not seen anybody walking on all fours. When you first see Ma Tzu walking on all fours, your brain is in a shock – what is the matter? And then he looks at you as if he is a tiger – that gives you another shock – and then suddenly he grabs you, and he is a very strong man, of course, just like any gorilla, and he sits on your chest and asks you, “Got it?”One has to say, “Got it!” because if you don’t get it, he may do something else. He may beat you, slap you; he can do anything. But his very jumping on you stopped your mind functioning. When something absolutely absurd is happening, mind cannot function. Mind is a rational and logical mechanism. It cannot function with absurdity.So when Impo told Ma Tzu that he wanted to go, Ma Tzu asked, “Where are you going?”Impo replied, “I am going to Sekito.”Sekito had become very famous by that time, and many people were going to him.Ma Tzu warned, “The path on the stone-head is slippery!”“You can go, but remember that fellow Sekito Stonehead.” Because he remained always on a rock, sitting on a rock, and he had a shaved head which also looked like rock, he was called Sekito Stonehead. He was a unique master in his own right. Even Ma Tzu recognized his uniqueness, and when Ma Tzu recognizes, it is recognition!Ma Tzu said, “Be careful. The path on the stone-head is very slippery.”Impo said, “I have the pole of an acrobat with me…”You must have seen people walking on a tightrope. Whenever anybody walks on a tightrope he has to keep a pole in his hand, just to balance. He has to continuously balance otherwise he will fall down from the rope. The whole trick is balancing, and that balancing means sometimes you feel you are going more toward the left, then just put the pole toward the right so it balances you. When you feel you are going toward the right, then turn your pole toward the left. That pole is just a help to keep you balancing between right and left; you just remain in the middle. Without a pole no acrobat can walk on a tightrope. The pole is the whole secret. It is his support; otherwise, if he moves toward the left and he has nothing to support him and make the weight balanced, he will fall.This man Impo said, “I have the pole of an acrobat with me.” He used to be a tightrope walker, so he said, “Don’t be worried. Howsoever slippery the way of Stonehead Sekito, I have the pole with me, I have walked on tightropes. Don’t be worried; I will keep my balance impeccable.”“…I can make a show with it whenever I want,” and with that he left.When he got to Sekito, Impo went around Sekito’s Zen stool one time, swung his stick with a shout and asked, “What is the dharma of this?”This is an important question. He is asking, “What is the truth of this?” By striking the stick on the stone where Sekito is sitting, he is asking, “What is the nature of thisness?” – in Gautam Buddha’s language, what is the meaning of tathata, suchness? Buddha’s whole teaching can be brought to this one word: suchness – thisness, isness, the present moment. What is the meaning of this present moment?When he asked…“What is the dharma of this?”Sekito said, “How sad! How sad!”Why did he say that? He is saying it because if you know this, you will not ask the question. And you cannot ask the question if you don’t know this.You see the problem: if you know this – this moment, this suchness, this silence – if you know this, you will not ask the question. And if you don’t know this, how can you ask the question without knowing it?That’s why he said: “How sad! How sad!” “You know only the question, but you don’t understand what you are asking. This question cannot be asked, it can only be experienced. It seems you are a knowledgeable person; you must have read scriptures where it is described.”Again and again, Buddha says, “This very moment is all.” If you can understand the secret of this moment, you have understood everything of existence because existence is always in the present. It is never in the past, never in the future. The past is your memory, the future is your imagination. Existence remains always in the present. It has no past, no future.So if you understand isness, the presence of the present moment, you have understood all the secrets and all the mysteries. There is nothing beyond it.But he is asking the question as a scholar, not as a meditator. That’s why Sekito said: “How sad! How sad! You know the right question, but you don’t know the right experience. And without the experience the question becomes meaningless. If you had the experience you would not have asked it, you would have just sat by my side and experienced thisness. It surrounds this mountain. This silence, this immense tranquility and calmness – you disturbed it by striking your stick on my stone. That was the only disturbance in the silence of the mountain. Otherwise it was so quiet. And I feel so sad for you that you are only a man of the mind, that you don’t know the secret of no-mind.”Mind cannot know anything about existence; it can only know through scriptures, statements of others. All its knowledge is borrowed. It cannot know any direct experience, and only direct experience liberates you.“How sad…” Impo did not have anything to say, he could not figure out what to say. He had never expected that this man would say: “How sad! How sad!” This is not the answer to his question. And now he is feeling embarrassed.Impo didn’t have anything to say, but he went back to Ma Tzu and told him the story. Ma Tzu said, “You go again, and when Sekito says, ‘How sad,’ you start crying.”Ma Tzu is playing a game, just as Sekito is playing a game. Between the two of them they are trying to make Impo aware of this moment. Now Ma Tzu is saying, “You have got into trouble. I had told you from the very beginning that Sekito’s path is very slippery. Now you know. You have come back immediately. Just one question and you forgot your stick! Now go again and ask the same question.” This is the strategy of Ma Tzu. He is putting him into difficulty again. He is telling him, “Go and ask the same question, and when Sekito says, ‘How sad,’ start crying.”So Impo went to Sekito again and asked in the same manner, “What is the dharma of this?”At that, Sekito started crying.This was a great device between two masters who have not talked to each other, who don’t know each other. They never met, but both are enlightened.This monk does not understand the language of enlightenment. When Ma Tzu sent him back with an answer, he knew perfectly well that Sekito is not going to repeat, “How sad! How sad!” again, because no enlightened man ever repeats anything. He always responds freshly to the new situation.Now, this is a new situation. First Impo came without knowing what Sekito was going to say. Now he comes knowing perfectly well what he is going to say. This has changed the whole situation. This man comes now, knowing Sekito’s old response. But the old response is no longer applicable. And somebody else’s answer cannot be your answer.So Ma Tzu gave him the answer, “Go again. He will say, ‘How sad, how sad.’” He knew he would not say that! “When he says that, start crying.” He supplied the answer.But any answer supplied by anyone is of no use because every moment the enlightened person responds afresh. So when Sekito was again asked: “What is the dharma of this?”…At that, Sekito started crying.Now he is saying, “This is too much! I was already sad; now sadness seems not to have affected you. You are still asking the same question. It makes me cry!”Again the poor Impo is left without any answer because he was given the answer “You should cry.” Now Sekito himself is crying. What to do?Impo again was left without any word, and returned to Ma Tzu. Ma Tzu commented, “I told you – the path on the stone-head is very slippery!”“Where is your pole? You slipped twice! You make me ashamed!” That’s what Ma Tzu is saying. “Being my disciple, you slipped twice, and you could not answer.”That reminds me about a small story that will help you to understand.There were two temples in Japan, both antagonistic to each other. One belonged to Shinto, another belonged to Zen. And they had been quarreling for centuries, arguing against each other. Both had masters, and both the masters had young boys because they were old and needed somebody to help them, to bring vegetables or to cook food. Those small boys helped them.Both told the small boys: “Don’t talk to the boy from the other temple – ever! We have been enemies for centuries. We are not on talking terms.”But boys are boys, and because they were being prevented, they were both anxious to… So one day, going to the market to fetch some vegetables, they met on the road. And the boy coming from the Shinto temple asked the Zen boy, “Where are you going?”The Zen boy said, “Wherever the wind takes me.” He had been listening to his master, all kinds of things, so he had got the taste of Zen. He said, “Wherever the wind takes me.”The Shinto boy was shocked at this. What to answer? He wanted to make friends, but this boy seemed to be completely uninterested; he had completely cut him short. There was no way for a conversation… Now what to say? He is saying, “Wherever the wind takes me.”Very sad, he went to his master and told him, “I did not obey you, I am sorry. I was just inquisitive, curious to know about the other boy. I was feeling alone, and I thought he must be also feeling alone. And your temples may have been antagonistic for centuries, but we are just boys. We can be friends. But you were right; it was not good to ask. Certainly those people are dangerous. I asked the boy, ‘Where are you going?’ and he said, ‘Wherever the wind takes me.’”The master said, “I had warned you. Now tomorrow, go again and stand at the same place, and when that Zen boy comes, ask him again, ‘Where are you going?’ And when he says, ‘Wherever the wind takes me,’ just ask him, ‘If the wind is not blowing, then…?’”The boy went. He stood at the same place, watched. The Zen boy was coming. He asked him, “Where are you going?” and the boy said, “Wherever the legs take me.”Now he could not answer with what the master had said, “If the wind is not blowing…” It would be absurd to answer with that. He came back very sad to the Shinto master and said, “Those people are very strange! That boy changed his whole approach. I asked the same question, but he said, ‘Wherever the legs take me.’”The master said, “I warned you! Now you are unnecessarily getting defeated and that means a defeat for our temple. This is not good. Go again. Tomorrow stand in the same place, and when the boy comes ask, ‘Where are you going?’ And when he says ‘Wherever the legs take me,’ ask him, ‘If you were crippled, then would you go anywhere or not?’”Utterly happy, the boy went again, stood in the same place, watched. The other boy came out of the temple. He asked, “Where are you going?” utterly happy that now he knows the answer.And the other boy said, “I am going to fetch some vegetables.”Now the situation again becomes absolutely different. He cannot say, “If you were crippled…” he cannot say, “If the wind is not blowing…” He returned, very angry, and said to the master, “Those people are strange! Even the boy is strange.”The master said, “I have been telling you, but you wouldn’t understand.”This story is exactly the same. The significance is that each moment is so new and so fresh that nothing old is to be repeated. That Zen boy has understood from his master, and his master’s constant dialogue with his disciples, that nothing can be repeated because the situation is never the same.So every moment you have to respond freshly – out of your consciousness, just like a mirror. If a mirror is there and you look into it, you will see your face. And if a monkey looks at it, then the monkey will see his face. If a donkey looks at it, then the donkey will see his face. The mirror is the reflecting medium, it has no opinion. You cannot say that the mirror is very self-contradictory, that it is not consistent: sometimes it shows the face of a man, sometimes the monkey, sometimes the donkey. What kind of mirror is this? One should be consistent!Zen is not consistent with the past, but absolutely consistent with the present. Its consistency is a totally different phenomenon to anything that has happened anywhere in the world. It is unique.Philosophers are consistent with their past statements. Whatever they have said before, they will continue to be consistent with their answers for their whole life, but such a consistency is dead. The day he made the statement, it died. And he goes on repeating the same statement although the situation goes on changing.Zen has a consistency not in time, but with existence. It simply watches existence and whatever comes up. It is not made up. When the boy said the first time, “Wherever the wind takes me,” that was his response in that moment. Of course next time he cannot repeat it because the boy must have come with a ready-made answer, and ready-made answers are not applicable in the world of Zen.Although he is just a boy, he has lived in a Zen atmosphere where he has understood one thing: never repeat because existence never repeats. You will not find two persons similar in the whole world. You will not find two leaves exactly the same on a tree; you will not find two roses exactly the same. Existence never repeats. It always creates an original; it does not believe in carbon copies.Ready-made answers don’t function in the atmosphere of Zen.So you can expect a Zen master to be fresh each time. He is always young and always fresh, and he responds to the situation. He is not concerned with his memory of past answers. He has nothing to do with them. He is always available to the present, just like a mirror.Buson wrote:I leave,you stay –two autumns.What does he mean by this haiku? Autumn is very beautiful in Japan; hence it comes again and again in haikus. It is one of the most beautiful times of the year.Buson is a Zen master, awakened, enlightened. And when he says, “I leave, I am going. You stay,” he is talking to the autumn. The autumn is going and it almost hurts that autumn is going. So he says to the autumn, “You stay. I will go. I am also another autumn; just as you are beautiful, so glorious, so am I. Instead of you, I can go. You remain.”It shows tremendous compassion: “Why are you going when I am ready to go in your place? And people love you, they enjoy you. They dance when autumn comes. Don’t disturb their joy. As far as going is concerned, I am ready to go.”“I leave, you stay – two autumns.” You are an autumn, I am also an autumn. You have blossomed, I have also blossomed. So there is no problem, I can replace you. You be here.It is as if you are talking to a roseflower which is going to drop its leaves and disappear. You feel tremendous compassion for the rose and you say, “Don’t go away. I can go away; you remain. People love you so much. They rejoice when you dance in the wind and in the rain and in the sun. Everybody loves you. And my time is over. I have blossomed, I have come to my ultimate peak. There is no further to go. I have come to the end of the road. I can go; you remain.”Only a Zen master can talk this kind of dialogue because he feels in tune with existence. Whether it is spring or autumn or summer or winter it doesn’t matter. He feels himself in tune with the universe. And he would like whatever is beautiful to remain for other people to enjoy. He is ready to go, to disappear into this vast ocean of existence. It is a tremendously stunning haiku.“I leave, you stay – two autumns.” Just as you are a beautiful atmosphere, I am also just the same inside. My autumn has come, so I can leave. There is no need for you to go. People love you so much.Maneesha’s question:Osho,In his book, Daybreak, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:“In the midst of the ocean of becoming, we awake on a little island no bigger than a boat – we adventurers and birds of passage – and look around us for a few moments, as sharply and as inquisitively as possible, for how soon may a wind not blow us away or a wave not sweep across the little island, so that nothing more is left of us!“We live a precarious minute of knowing and divining, amid joyful beating of wings and chirping with one another, and in spirit we venture out over the ocean, no less proud than the ocean itself.”Is not Nietzsche's trinity – cheerfulness, daring and love for life – of far greater worth than the trinity of the Hindu or Christian God? And is not Nietzsche's insanity more significant than the so-called sanity of the Christian who would die in defense of his fantasies?Maneesha, Nietzsche is a great poet and a very unique poet. He writes poetry in prose – a very rare phenomenon. He never wrote poetry, but all his prose is sheer poetry. Every sentence is poetic, symbolic. Whatever he has said is so beautiful, although he never went beyond the mind.I feel like saying to Nietzsche, as Sekito has said to the inquiring monk, “How sad! How sad!” This man deserved to be a buddha. But just because he was in the West, he could not find the way out of the mind.You are right, the Christian or the Hindu trinity is not comparable to the trinity of Friedrich Nietzsche: cheerfulness, daring and love for life. That’s what I have been teaching to you.The Christian trinity is just a fiction. God, the Holy Ghost, and the only begotten son, Jesus Christ, all are fictions. Jesus Christ is ninety-nine percent fiction, one percent reality. Out of this whole trinity only Jesus Christ has one percent of reality as a human being. But all the miracles are invented. His walking on the water is nonsense; his raising the dead is absurd; his virgin birth, immaculate conception, is illogical, unscientific; his resurrection is a fake and a fraud.He never died on the cross, so there is no question of a resurrection. He simply escaped from the cave. It was a conspiracy between the Roman governor general, Pontius Pilate, and Jesus’ followers. Pontius Pilate was feeling bad; crucifying Jesus was not his desire, but he was absolutely helpless.The tradition was that at every Jewish festival, when criminals who had been sentenced to death were crucified, the Jewish rabbis – particularly the chief priest of the great Jewish temple of Jerusalem – had the right to ask one of the criminals to be released as an act of mercy.Three persons were going to be crucified. Two were murderers. One was the worst kind of criminal, with seven murders on his head, rapes and all kinds of crimes. He was a drunkard, but very strong man, Barabbas. And the second man was also a criminal. Pontius Pilate was hoping that the Jews would ask for Jesus to be released. He was absolutely innocent; he had not committed any crime, he had not done anything illegal. He was absolutely innocent.But the Jews were very angry because he was proclaiming himself to be the son of God. The Jews don’t believe that God has a family because once you have a family, there is no end to it. You have brothers, and you have brothers-in-law, and you have sisters, and you have sisters-in-law, and it goes on and on. Then God will have a wife, then God will have a father and grandfather, and who knows where the line will end? God will become a joint family. Faraway cousins will also claim divinity.The Jews don’t accept any trinity. God is alone; he has no son and no Holy Ghost. So the Jews were angry that this man was proclaiming himself to be the only begotten son of God.Why only? What happened to God? Has he become impotent? Can’t he create, just the way Hindus go on creating? One dozen children is normal in India. Two dozen seems to be a small achievement. God had only one son, not even a daughter for the son to play with. It is absolutely against the Jewish mind; hence they could not ask that he should be forgiven. Pontius Pilate was not a Jew, so he did not understand what the problem was. He was a Roman pagan and they did not believe in any God. So what was the problem? There is no God, and if this man is a little eccentric and thinks himself to be the son of their God, there is no harm in it. This harmless declaration simply shows that he is a little bit out of his mind, eccentric, a banana.But you don’t put bananas on the cross. You enjoy bananas, you don’t put them on the cross. This fellow is a little foolish – enjoy him, laugh at him – but he is innocent. Crucifixion does not seem to be just. So Pontius Pilate was waiting, but the Jews did not ask. On the contrary they all shouted, all the rabbis – and there were two thousand rabbis in the temple… It was the great temple of the Jews, which was later destroyed. And with the head priest of the temple, who was almost the king of the Jews, they all shouted in unison, “We want Barabbas to be released.”Barabbas himself could not believe it. He was also thinking that this young fellow, who was only thirty-three… And he had heard him; Jesus was always talking around the place. He was moving around Jerusalem on his donkey, and whenever he could get an audience he would start talking. He was a street sermonizer, so once in a while Barabbas had heard him talk, and he liked him. The fellow was nice and he was saying beautiful things. Barabbas was hoping that he would be released, but when he was asked for by the Jews, he could not believe it. He was shocked. When he was taken away from the cross, still he could not believe that it was real. He looked back again and again, walking toward the pub. And within seven days he killed another man.So Pontius Pilate was very willing, and the cave in which Jesus was put was guarded by a Roman guard. The Jews could not do it because it was their Sabbath day, a day they cannot do anything. The crucifixion happened on Friday, it was an arrangement…The whole credit goes to Pontius Pilate, not to God and resurrection. It was arranged that on that Friday – because Saturday is the Sabbath day of the Jews, they don’t do anything, everything stops – the crucifixion would be delayed as much as possible, as it could not happen until Pontius Pilate arrived. He went as late as possible, and so the crucifixion happened just after twelve o’clock in the middle of the day. And the Jewish cross is such that if a healthy man is on it, it will take forty-eight hours for him to die. It is a very slow process, a slow torture. Blood starts flowing from the hands and the legs. Only four nails are used: two in the hands, two in the feet. So the blood slowly oozes out. And blood has a tendency to dry. It has a chemical element that dries it.If you don’t have that chemical, then your life is always in danger. There is a disease called hemophilia where your blood goes on flowing, it does not dry.I have heard…That was the situation in Russia before the revolution. The Czar’s only son had hemophilia – the only son – and he was going to succeed. The situation gave power to Rasputin, a village priest, who was absolutely uneducated, but with some knowledge of hypnotizing people. He was called again and again, whenever the son started bleeding. Any small scratch and the blood could not stop by itself; it wouldn’t dry. Rasputin had to be called immediately. He became so powerful that the czar, the emperor of Russia, was almost dependent on him.The wife of the czar was a worshipper of Rasputin, who was just a villager, who knew nothing. But he knew a small strategy of hypnotizing people, so he used to hypnotize the boy, and in hypnosis he used to tell him, “Your blood will stop.” In hypnosis everything is possible. Hypnosis is a very powerful method, and because he was the only person who could make the blood stop… No doctors were able to do anything; there is no cure in any medical science.It takes forty-eight hours for a person to die on the Jewish cross because the blood goes on drying again and again, and people have to remove the dry blood so that fresh blood starts coming again. It takes forty-eight hours, and Jesus was only six hours on the cross, from twelve to six. As the sun was setting, he had to be taken off the cross because on Saturday nothing can continue. Everything stops; even crucifixion has to stop. In six hours a young man of the age of thirty-three cannot die. This is a scientific fact.And no Jew would be ready to guard him because that would be against his religion; he would be doing some duty, some work. So a Roman was on guard: that was perfect. The stone was removed from the opening of the cave, and Jesus’ followers took his body. He was alive, just wounded – they took him out of Judea, which was a very small country, and kept him for a few days till he was healed. Then they suggested that he should not go back to Judea – “They will crucify you next year, they won’t leave you alone” So he came to India.He had come to India before – that’s why India was known to him – from thirteen years of age to thirty. The Bible has nothing to say about what happened to Jesus in those seventeen years, or where he was. He was in India studying – in Nalanda, in Takshsila – and he was in Ladakh and perhaps Tibet.Buddha had died just five hundred years before; still his fragrance was around. Takshsila and Nalanda were two universities, the most ancient universities in the world, which were mostly teaching meditation because Buddha’s whole message is meditation. So he was learning the Eastern approach. These seventeen years are missing; there is no record in the Christian Bible. But there are records in Ladakh, in a Buddhist monastery.A hundred and fifty years ago, a Russian explorer saw the records in the monastery in Ladakh where Jesus was described exactly: that he visited the monastery, he remained there for three months, he was a Jew, and he had come from Jerusalem, that he had been crucified but escaped after six hours. Everything was there.And this Russian wrote a book, which is available, in which he describes the whole thing. But as Christians came to know this – and the country was under British rule – they destroyed those pages from the Ladakh monastery in which Jesus’ description was given. Just those two pages are missing. And one can see that two pages are missing because all the pages are numbered. You can see in that Russian explorer’s book that exactly those two pages are mentioned with their page numbers. It was the British Empire which destroyed those two pages to make sure that nobody claimed Jesus was here in India and Ladakh, and perhaps Tibet.But there is a grave in Kashmir, near Pahalgam… It is such a coincidence that there is Moses’ grave, and just by the side of it is Jesus’ grave. Both came to India. Moses came in his old age in search of the lost tribe of the Jews who had come to Kashmir and settled in Kashmir. He was too old then to go back to Jerusalem, and Kashmir really looked like God’s land, it was so beautiful. There is nothing comparable to Kashmir in the whole world. He remained and died there. Jesus came and he remained long enough… He lived up to one hundred and twelve years of age. Everything is written on his grave.Those two graves are the only graves of Jews in India because in India there are no Jews. And the inscription is in Hebrew. In India nobody knows Hebrew, and in India only Mohammedans make graves; Hindus burn the body.Mohammedans’ graves have to be directed toward Kaaba; the head has to be toward Kaaba. Even when dying, the dead man cannot be allowed to have his feet toward Kaaba; that would be insulting. So in all Mohammedan graves the head is directed toward Kaaba. Only these two graves are not directed toward Kaaba because they are not Mohammedan graves. Out of all the graves in India – and I have looked in so many cemeteries just to find one grave – only those two graves are not directed toward Kaaba.All the other Jews who had settled in India have been forced to become Mohammedans. When Mohammedan rule came over India they turned all the Jews into Mohammedans. Only one Jewish family has been left to take care of those two graves because Mohammedans respect both Moses and Jesus. So that family, traditionally, generation after generation, has been taking care.The name of the nearest village is Pahalgam; in Kashmiri it means the village of the shepherd. Jesus used to call himself the shepherd. He used to call humanity the sheep – and he was the shepherd! So Pahalgam makes sense; it is the village of the shepherd. And just outside Pahalgam are those two graves.Jesus never died on the cross and was never resurrected. All that is just fiction created by Christians. No contemporary literature of Jesus’ time even mentions his name. You cannot believe it: if a person walks on water, cures people just by touching, if blind people start seeing, the deaf ones start hearing, the dead come alive, do you think the whole country will not be talking about him? All the newspapers, all the literature will mention him. Such a man cannot be neglected. But no contemporary literature even mentions his name.So only one percent seems to be real – the carpenter’s son, Jesus Christ – out of the whole trinity.And the Hindu trinity is not even one percent real. It is absolute fiction. One man with three heads; it will be a constant trouble! One wants to go this side, one wants to go that side, the third wants to go another way, and they cannot go anywhere unless all three agree. All three have wives… I am just puzzled because the body is one, so the sexual mechanism is one – but with three heads, and three wives? How are they managing?This is absolute mythology, an ugly mythology, obscene. And when I say such things, then religious feelings are hurt – but what can I do? It is your scriptures that are hurting your religious feelings. Just bring cases against your religious scriptures. They should be destroyed!Nietzsche’s trinity is certainly beautiful: cheerfulness, daring and love for life. These can be called the attributes of every sannyasin: cheerfulness, daring and love for life.Now comes the time of Sardar Gurudayal Singh.This is the greatest time after such serious discussion, a great laughter is absolutely necessary as an antidote.Muffin Snuffler is suffering from what appears to be a case of shattered nerves. So after a long spell of heavy drinking and deep depression he finally decides to pay a visit to Doctor Mindbender, the psychiatrist.The shrink asks Muffin a few questions and begins to get the picture.“Mister Snuffler,” declares Doctor Mindbender, “you are in serious trouble. You are living with some terrible, evil thing – something that is possessing you from morning to night. You must find out what it is and destroy it!”“Shhhhhh, doctor,” whispers Muffin, nervously. “Not so loud! She is sitting out in the waiting room!”Things are looking bad for the members of the Catholic Church. Their image is being damaged by stories of sex and perversion within the ranks of the priesthood. Their so-called celibacy is becoming a worldwide joke.So Pope the Polack calls his press secretary, Bishop Benny Diction, and orders him to create a cover-up campaign.“Well, Your Holiness,” says Benny, “I have already given this a lot of thought. I am convinced that we need to change our style of dress. Right now, people look at us and all they see is a bunch of dirty habits!”“Yes,” says the pope, “perhaps you are right. So what should we do?”“Simple!” replies Benny Diction. “What I have in mind is a complete change of image. We will cover the city with posters of a nun in a bikini!”“What?” cries the Polack pope. “A nun in a bikini? How is that going to promote celibacy in the world?”“Well,” explains Benny Diction, “the model for the photograph is going to be Mother Teresa.”Big Bertha, the circus fat lady, marries Max the midget, and for a short time everything seems to be going just fine.But then one day, Big Bertha arrives at Judge Grump’s divorce court wanting a divorce on the grounds that her husband is a midget.“But surely you knew he was a midget before you married him!” exclaims Judge Grump. “Did you not realize the difficulties this marriage would involve?”“How was I to know?” sobs Bertha. “Everything was great except for the sex.”“Sex?” asks the judge. “What does his being a midget have to do with sex?”“Well, judge,” replies Big Bertha, “when we are nose to nose, his toes are in, and when we are toes to toes, his nose is in! And when he really puts it in, he disappears altogether – and Oh, Your Honor! I get so lonely!”Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent. Close your eyes and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to go inward.Gather all your energy, your total consciousness, and rush toward your center of being – with an urgency as if this moment is going to be the last moment of your life. Unless such urgency is there, nobody gets to the center of his being.Faster and faster…Deeper and deeper…It all depends on your intensity. The distance is not great.As you start coming closer to your center, a great silence descends over you, almost like soft rain falling. You can feel the coolness.A little closer, and you start being surrounded by a great peace, what mystics have called the peace beyond understanding.Just one step more, and you are at the center.Suddenly you feel drunk with the divine. A great ecstasy arises in you; you become luminous, all darkness disappears. You are no more. You suddenly realize your original face.In the East, we have used Gautam Buddha’s face as the original face of everyone. It is only symbolic. You are encountering Gautam Buddha, not from the outside but from his innermost source. You have become his very heart.Just remember one thing, and that is witnessing. That constitutes Buddha’s whole being. Call it awareness, call it total consciousness, call it what Buddha used to call sammasati, right remembering, but witnessing is the most important word out of all these.Just be a witness that you are not the body. Be a witness that you are not the mind. And finally, be a witness that you are only a witness, nothing else.At this moment you enter into the secretmost part of your center.This is the beginning of a long pilgrimage, of disappearing into the cosmos. This is the door opening into the cosmos. We are one with the whole.Just go on witnessing, and everything becomes deeper, deeper, deeper…To make the witnessing more clear to you, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax.Let go. But go on being a witness.As your witnessing becomes more and more clear, you start melting like ice in the ocean. Gautama the Buddha Auditorium is turning into an ocean of consciousness. Ten thousand buddhas have melted into one consciousness – universal consciousness, eternal consciousness, immortal consciousness, consciousness beyond birth and death.This is your authentic being.What has disappeared was only a personality. Now, only the essential, existential, experiential has remained. And this existential consciousness is not only yours, it belongs to the cosmos. You are just dewdrops who have fallen from the lotus leaf into the ocean.Rejoice in it.You are the most fortunate people in the world. At this moment, when everybody is concerned with trivia, you are exploring the most majestic, the most splendorous experience. You are entering the most divine, sacred space.Collect all these experiences – this blissfulness, this witnessing, this silence. This is it. Get hold of it, and persuade the buddha to come with you.He is your nature, he is your dharma, he is your ultimate secret. Bring him with you.These are the three steps of enlightenment: first, the buddha will come behind you as a presence. You will feel it, it will surround you, it is an energy field; it will change your whole behavior, it will give you a new sense of direction in life. It will give you a new morality of your own, a spontaneity in existence. It will give you a love for life, a cheerfulness you have not known, and a courage. The moment you know you are eternal, all weakness disappears, all inferiority disappears.On the second step, the buddha comes in front of you, you become the shadow.On the third step, your shadow withers away. You are no more, only the buddha remains. He is your eternity, he is your truth, he is your beauty, he is your godliness.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back. But come back with the same grace, with the same silence, with the same peacefulness. And sit down for a few seconds just to remember the path you have followed inward. It is a golden path. The center that you have reached is not only your center, it is the center of the whole existence.At the center we all meet. The birds, the trees, the rivers, the mountains, everyone meets at the center. We are different on the circumference but we are one at the center.And to know this oneness is enlightenment.This evening has been beautiful on its own, but your intensity, your search, your inward journey, has made it a magical evening – an evening of transformation, of metamorphosis.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Clear the Mind (to Li Hsien-Ch’en)Buddha said, If you want to know the realm of buddhahood, you must make your mind as clear as empty space, and leave false thinking and all grasping far behind, causing your mind to be unobstructed wherever it may turn. The realm of buddhahood is not some external world, where there is a formal “Buddha”: it’s the realm of the wisdom of a self-awakened sage.Once you are determined that you want to know this realm, you do not need adornment, cultivation, or realization to attain it. You must clear away the stains of afflictions from alien sensations that have been on your mind since beginningless time, so that your mind is as broad and open as empty space, detached from all the clinging of the discriminating intellect, and your false, unreal, vain thoughts too are like empty space. Then this wondrous, effortless mind will be unimpeded wherever it goes.Mindlessness (to Hung Po-Ch’ong)An ancient worthy had a saying: “To look for the ox, one must seek out its tracks. To study the path, seek out mindlessness. Where the tracks are, so must the ox be.” The path of mindlessness is easy to seek out. So-called mindlessness is not being inert and unknowing like earth, wood, tile, or stone; it means that the mind is settled and imperturbable when in contact with situations and meeting circumstances; that it does not cling to anything, but is clear in all places, without hindrance or obstruction; without being stained, yet without dwelling in the stainlessness; viewing body and mind like dreams or illusions, yet without remaining in the perspective of dreams’ and illusions’ empty nothingness.Only when one arrives at a realm like this, can it be called true mindlessness. No, it’s not lip-service mindlessness: if you haven’t attained true mindlessness and just go by the verbal kind, how is this different from the perverted Ch’an of “silent illumination”?“Just get to the root, don’t worry about the branches.”Emptying this mind is the root. Once you get the root, the fundamental, then all kinds of language and knowledge and all your daily activities as you respond to people and adapt to circumstances, through so many upsets and downfalls, whether joyous or angry, good or bad, favorable or adverse – these are all trivial matters, the branches. If you can be spontaneously aware and knowing as you are going along with circumstances, then there is neither lack nor excess.The great Zen teacher Ta Hui comes from the same lineage as Bodhidharma. He was born four hundred years after Bodhidharma had left for the Himalayas, to disappear into the eternal ice, the eternal silence there.I have called Ta Hui the great Zen teacher – not a master…it has to be explained to you clearly. The master is one who is enlightened. but sometimes it happens that the master may be enlightened, but is not articulate enough to give expression to what he has known. That is a totally different art.The teacher is not enlightened, but he is very articulate. He can say things which the master, although he knows, cannot bring to words. The teacher can say them, although he does not know.The teacher he has heard…he has lived with enlightened people, he has imbibed their energy, he has been showered by their flowers. He has tasted something transpiring from the enlightened ones, so he has a certainty that something like enlightenment happens, but he has no authority of his own; his authority is borrowed. And if the teacher is a genius, he can almost manage to express things over which masters have faltered, or they have remained silent.The teacher has his own utility. He is more available to the people – he belongs to the people. The master is on a high sunlit peak. Even if he shouts from there, only echoes reach to the people’s ears. But the teacher lives among the people, knows their life, knows their language, knows how things should be expressed so they can understand. The master remains committed to his experience, while the teacher is more committed to the people, to spread the message.Once in a while it happens that the master cannot express at all. For example, Ramakrishna was an enlightened man, but utterly uneducated, uncultured, knowing nothing of great literature, knowing nothing of what other enlightened people have said. He experienced the beauty of his inner being, but he was absolutely handicapped as far as conveying it to others. He had to take the support of a man, Vivekananda, who was not enlightened but was a great genius – very intelligent, rational, logical, intellectual, well-versed, well-educated. He became the mouthpiece of Ramakrishna. He went around the world spreading his message.Whatever exists today as Ramakrishna Mission, is completely the work of Vivekananda, but he himself died in utter agony. The agony was more intense because he had been spreading the good news of ecstasy, but inside he was empty. His whole message was only verbal, but he managed it so cleverly that many started thinking of him as enlightened.The same thing happened with Ta Hui. When he was just sixteen years old he was so intelligent…he left the world, and after one year of preparation he was initiated as a monk, when he was just seventeen. Then he went from master to master, seeking the right enlightened man who could show him the way.He found his master in Yuan Wu. It seems almost the same situation: Yuan Wu knows, but cannot say it. Ta Hui does not know, but can say it. Just living with the master, imbibing his energy, watching his grace – the way he walks, the way he sits, the way he remains silent…Rarely, once in a while, Yuan Wu speaks a word or sentence. His statements are collected in a small book, Blue Cliff Record, but they are almost impossible to understand. They don’t seem to be related to each other, relevant to each other; they look fragmentary. They don’t create a system.Even though his words were recorded in Blue Cliff Record, Yuan Wu never addressed the people. On the contrary, he simply asked Ta Hui just to look into the Blue Cliff Record and express his opinion, say what he thinks of them. He was not certain that he had been able to say what he wanted to say, and whether what he had said conveyed anything or was just a futile exercise. In every case Ta Hui completely comprehended the subtle meaning.The older master exclaimed, “You must be someone who has come again!”By saying this he is saying, “You must have been born almost enlightened, just a little bit is missing; perhaps you may be able to manage it in this life. But you have understood my expressions perfectly well.” This was his seal, when he said “You must be someone who has come again!” – you cannot be new. You have been on the path for a long, long time; although you have not achieved the ultimate end, you are very close.But the master could not be deceived just by Ta Hui’s understanding of the words, which any intelligent man of great talent like Ta Hui could have done. Yuan Wu again said to Ta Hui:“It was not easy for you to get to this stage…”you have struggled hard“…too bad that having died, you are unable to come back to life.”This will be clear to you if I refer to Jesus who says, “Unless you are born again, you will not understand the truth.”There are two parts of the path. The first part is to let your ego die. It is strenuous, arduous, difficult, because you know only your ego, you don’t know your authentic self. You are jumping into an abyss, not knowing whether you will survive or not; that Ta Hui has done. But the second part – of resurrection, of giving birth to your new individuality, or your authentic being – has not happened.“It was not easy for you to get to this stage – too bad that having died…”died as an ego“…you are unable to come back to life. Without a doubt, words and phrases are a great disease, but haven’t you seen the saying:”and it is a beautiful statement from the master:“Hanging from a cliff,let go – and agree to accept the experience.”That is the most important part in it:“Hanging from a cliff,let go…”That is accepting death of the ego. But don’t do it with effort, with tension. Don’t do it to achieve anything based on greed or ambition; just do it simply to discover your real self. The right way of doing is:“…agree to accept the experience.”Yuan Wu tells Ta Hui: You have not agreed to accept the experience, so only the first half is complete. The ego has died and has left you in a limbo, because you have not been absolutely total in your let-go. Let-go you managed – but it was a managed let-go, it was not a spontaneous acceptance. You have not enjoyed the let-go. If you had enjoyed, then:“After annihilation, come back to life –I could not deceive you.”He was a man of few words. It is unfortunate…very rarely a few people become enlightened, but out of those few the major part never say anything. The few who say anything say only fragments, and in a language…unless you are enlightened it will not be possible to comprehend their meaning. And a few never say a single word. They don’t leave any trace on the sands of this bank, of this shore; they simply disappear into the other shore.Ta Hui, hearing this saying from the master Yuan Wu:“Hanging from a cliff,let-go – and agreeto accept the experience.”If you can manage this falling into the abyss as a celebration, with a joyful heart, then:“After annihilation, come back to life…”…then there is no problem: you will come back to life. In fact, what you used to think of as life was not life; now you will come to the eternal life. But the bridge between the two is total acceptance.Yuan Wu must have seen in the eyes of Ta Hui some doubt, some question mark. That’s why he adds:“I could not deceive you.”Ta Hui remained with Master Yuan Wu; he fell in love with the master. When the master could even see in his mind just a little doubt, and had to say:“I could not deceive you,”it was clear that he had come to the right man, who could look into his very being and could say in exact words what had happened to him. Half of his journey was over, but because he had not been in a total accepting mood, the half had been incomplete… “Now accept totally, and resurrection will happen on its own.”Naturally Ta Hui would have doubted; that is the nature of intellect, to doubt, and he was a very intelligent man, young, fresh, and belonging to the genius category. He must have realized that the master had even seen the unexpressed doubt in his mind, and that is why he is saying:“I could not deceive you.”He remained with the master. Listening to the master, imbibing his spirit, his presence, slowly, slowly he became very articulate, although enlightenment perhaps was still far away… And it became even farther away, because he started receiving honors from the people – even from the emperor, from the government – as a realized man. These are very dangerous things. When you are not realized and the government recognizes you, and great honors are conferred on you, you can get into a deluded state about yourself. You can start thinking, “Perhaps I am enlightened.”Two things can do this. One: he has learned in moving from master to master everything that Zen teaching is. So if you listen only to his words, it is very difficult for you to find that he is not enlightened. Unless you are enlightened, you will not be able to see the flaws, the small gaps, which are bound to be there because it is not his own experience; it is simply clippings from other masters that he has collected – collected with tremendous intelligence. He almost deceived the Imperial Power. They honored him as the “Buddha Sun,” as the “Sun of Enlightenment.”Emperor Hsiao Tsung bestowed the title “Ch’an Master of Great Wisdom” from which the name Ta Hui comes.Ta Hui means the “Great Master of Wisdom.”Only at the last moment it seems he attained enlightenment, just before he died, but then he did not say anything except a small verse. So I have called him “The Great Teacher” – and he was certainly a great teacher. He influenced millions of people; he was a great leader in the sense that anybody who came in contact with him was immediately intellectually convinced. But he had no presence, and he had no inner silence. It seems that only at the last moment he attained the goal, he completed the journey.It was 1163, on the 9th day of the 8th month, after showing signs of illness, when Ta Hui told the congregation of monks, nuns, and lay people, “Tomorrow I am going.”That is the first indication that he knows when he is going to die. The second:Toward the pre-dawn hours, his attendant asked Ta Hui for a verse.That is an old tradition in China: when a great master dies, as his last statement, his last gift to the world, people ask him to write a verse.In a serious voice Ta Hui said, “Without a verse, I could not die.” He took up the brush, and wrote:Birth is thusDeath is thusVerse or no verseWhat’s the fuss?This is the whole idea of Gautam Buddha’s philosophy of suchness condensed. Birth is thus… thusness or suchness mean exactly the same. There is no reason to think why it is: it is there.Birth is thusDeath is thus….There is no reason why you are dying. A tremendous acceptability is part of the philosophy of thusness, or suchness. Everything that happens, the man of understanding simply accepts it – this is how things are, this is how nature functions. There is no complaint, there is no grudge.Birth is thusDeath is thusVerse or no verseWhat’s the fuss?Then he let go of the writing brush and passed on.Perhaps in this moment, when he was writing this verse, he completed his journey.The discourses that are going to follow were given when he was not enlightened, but he was very clear in explaining everything to the ordinary people. He moved among laymen, he talked to the ordinary people, and he talked in a way that they could understand. His whole approach was that the great masters are not available to the people; they are available only to very intimate disciples, or perhaps only to the devotees – who will take care of the millions? So he started moving among the people, and the people were rejoicing; that’s why the emperor honored him as a great master, as a sun of awareness.Masters don’t move, they don’t go to the people; they know the gap between them and the ordinary people is too big, almost unbridgeable. Unless somebody comes close to the master on his own accord, there is no way for the master to penetrate his being.But Ta Hui was not a master, he was a very articulate teacher. He was not talking Zen; he was talking about Zen. All that he had gathered…and he had gathered really very consistently, very logically. Only once in a while will I tell you that he has committed a mistake – which is natural, because he has nothing inside himself to compare it with. He has no criterion except his intelligence, his logic, his reason. But enlightenment is beyond your mind, beyond your rationality, beyond your intellect. That ultimate criterion is not within him. But he is certainly of immense cleverness, although blind; he has not seen the light. He describes the light as if he is a man who has eyes. He has only heard people who have eyes. But he has collected every piece of information in a very systematic way. So remember this: he is a teacher, not a master. And I make an absolute distinction.A teacher is one who transfers knowledge which he has collected, borrowed from others. He can be very articulate. If you face a master and a teacher perhaps you may choose the teacher, because he will be more appealing to your intellect and mind.The master will look a little crazy. He will be jumping from one point to another point without creating a systematic philosophy. But the master has the real treasure, the teacher has only heard about it. The teacher is poor, howsoever clever.The sutras:Buddha said, If you want to know the realm of buddhahood,– the world of ultimate awareness –you must make your mind as clear as empty space.It is another way of saying that you should move beyond mind into a state of no-mind, because there is no such thing as empty mind. That’s why I say such flaws will be there. Empty mind? Empty space? A man of enlightenment would have simply said, “You should move beyond mind to no-mind.”There is a very famous book by a rabbi, Joshua Liebman. It has sold millions of copies in many languages. It is a beautiful piece of work; the name of the book is Peace Of Mind. Naturally, everybody wants peace of mind.I wrote a letter to him, saying “Your very title shows that you don’t know anything about meditation. Peace of mind is a contradiction in terms: when mind is there, peace cannot be; and if peace is there, then mind cannot be. They cannot both be there together.” In fact, mind is your anxiety, your anguish, your tensions, your thoughts, your emotions, sentiments, moods, ups and downs – everything is mind. Peace is possible only if you go beyond mind.So I told him, “If you are really sincere, in the next edition you should change the title. Peace is equal to no-mind.” I had made it so clear in many ways to him. But this is the situation of our intellectuals – he never replied, because there was nothing to reply. He must have seen that what I am saying is a fact.But I can forgive Joshua Liebman because he knows nothing of Eastern meditation. He is an American Jew, and meditation is simply a strange phenomenon to them. Peace of mind…? Perhaps my letter was the only one that had objected to the title. I said, “When the title is wrong I cannot read the book, because I know perfectly well that when a man writes a book and even the title is wrong, his book is worthless. If you ever change the title…but just the change of title won’t do – you will have to change the whole book according to the title.”And leave false thinking and all grasping far behind…Now he is saying exactly what I mean by no-mind, but no-mind would not have been conceivable for him. He is a mind, and everything that he has understood is through mind. And the people who are listening to him are able to make a bridge between his understanding and their understanding because all are minds. A mind can talk to another mind very easily.So he has collected these words, empty space, and leave false thinking and all grasping far behind. But I would like to make you aware how even the most intelligent people can fall into traps. He is saying, leave false thinking – what about right thinking? A man of enlightenment will simply say, “leave all thinking.” Thinking as such is a problem – either false or not. Mind can conceive that that which is wrong can be left, and that which is good can be kept. But you cannot divide the wrong from the right. They are two sides of the same coin, and you cannot have a coin with only one side; the other side will be there.If you protect right thinking – whatever you think is right – underneath will remain wrong thinking. If you try “love”…of course love is not wrong thinking; it is one of the most beautiful emotions, and the thought of love is one of the great thoughts. But just behind love there will be hate hiding, and love can change into hate anytime. Right thinking can become wrong thinking anytime.If it had been his own experience, he would not have said, leave false thinking and all grasping far behind; he would have said, leave all thinking and all grasping far behind, causing your mind to be unobstructed wherever it may turn.But these are the qualities of no-mind.The realm of buddhahood is not some external world where there is a formal “Buddha”: it is the realm of the wisdom of a self-awakened sage.He has collected the right words.Once you are determined…. In Sanskrit and in Hindustani, the word which has been translated as determined is far deeper and more significant. The word is nishchaya. Determined has a quality of stubbornness, adamantness. It has a quality of something that belongs to the ego, such as, “I am determined to do it.” The word nishchaya does not have all these connotations.Nishchaya is a very beautiful word. It means when you come to the master, just his presence, his fragrance, his eyes, his gestures, his words, his silence give you a tremendous trust within. It is not your determination; it is the deep impact of the enlightened man in your heart.Instead of saying determined, I would like to say that once you are in trust, in nishchaya, no doubt arises. All doubts have disappeared; you feel completely at ease.This nishchaya – that you want to know this realm – is bound to create in you a longing, not a desire. These words may mean the same in the dictionaries, but in actual existence they are so far apart. When you have attained to nishchaya – “This is the man to whom I belong, this is the man whom I have been searching for lives. These are the eyes I have seen in the silences of my heart, this is the face I have been looking for in so many, many ways in so many lives” …suddenly a nishchaya, a trust which knows no doubt. It is not a belief; belief is always about doctrines. Trust is always about persons.It is not what the master is saying that you believe; it is what the master is that creates a nishchaya, a trust in you. And that trust will start growing into a deep longing – you would also like to enter into the same world of awareness, into the same world of blissfulness, into the same paradise where your master is.You do not need adornment, cultivation, or realization to attain it.…your longing will just go on becoming deeper and deeper and deeper. You will be waiting with tremendous love. You will not demand of existence, “Give me this state,” because any demand on existence is ugly. You will simply wait; you will not even pray. You will simply feel thirsty, and existence is compassionate enough. You cannot dominate it, but if you are simply thirsty, you will find existence fulfills your longing.He has at least heard well!You do not need adornment, cultivation, or realization to attain it. You must clear away the stains of afflictions from alien sensations that have been on your mind since beginningless time, so that your mind is as broad and open as empty space…You can see the discrepancy! If you say that your mind is as open as empty space, it is no longer mind. It is as if you are saying, “When your fire is as cold as ice” – then why call it fire? Just calling it ice will be the right thing! But for an intellectual it is difficult; he is simply collecting opinions. And nobody is going to raise a question, because they don’t know that he is committing a mistake either.…so that your mind is as broad and open as empty space… How much space is there? Do you know? The whole universe is empty space. The mind does not have the capacity to be so broad.…detached from all the clinging of the discriminating intellect, and your false, unreal, vain thoughts too are like empty space.But he goes on making the distinction that you should keep your good thoughts.In a state of absolute silence and peace there are no good thoughts, no bad thoughts. Thoughts as such are a disturbance, whether they are good or bad. The sinner may be having bad thoughts in his mind, and the saint may be having good thoughts in his mind, but both are in the mind. There is no qualitative difference between them.The true sage, the buddha, has no mind at all.He lives without mind, he acts without mind.It comes from his very innermost being; hence, it has a quality, a freshness, a great splendor. Thoughts are always dusty and old. The sage always acts afresh, not out of any old thoughts; he responds to the situation moment to moment. There is no need for him to think. It is almost like a blind man: if he wants to go out of this auditorium, he will have to ask, “Where is the way?” And then, with his walking stick, he will find the way and go out. But you never even think about it when you want to go out; you simply see the way out and you go. There is no thinking involved in it, and certainly no walking stick.I have heard about a blind man whose eyes were operated upon. He had come with his walking stick, and after a few days the doctor opened the bandage on his eyes and told him, “Now, slowly, slowly open your eyes. Your eyes are perfectly good; now you can see.”He was amazed at what he had been missing, all the colors, the sun, the moon, the stars, people’s faces – everything he had been missing. He thanked the doctor, but out of old habit he took his walking stick. The doctor said, “What are you taking that walking stick for? Leave it.”But he said, “Without it how am I going to find my way?”The doctor said, “You are an idiot. Now you have eyes, there is no need to find the way; the way will be clear to you. Just put that walking stick on that pile.”There were many walking sticks. All the people he had cured had come with their walking sticks, and he had been collecting them as souvenirs, showing how many people he had cured. And he said, “It is not only you! Every blind man, when I cure his eyes, immediately picks up his walking stick to start going out.”Unconscious habit…too long he has had the walking stick; he cannot believe that life is possible without it.The same is the situation of all who have lived with the mind for millions of lives. That has been their guide, whatever they wanted to do. It is inconceivable for the mind that you can live even for a single moment without it. But it is just a walking stick for a blind man.There is far more consciousness beyond the mind – so broad, so spacious, so silent that you need not think. It simply goes on responding. In the mind you have to think what to do and what not to do. It is always a question of either/or.The moment you are beyond mind there is no question of either/or. You simply know what has to be done and you do it, and there is no repentance, ever. You never look back, you never feel that you have done something wrong – you cannot do wrong.These are the reasons why I have not called Ta Hui the great master. I am simply calling him a great teacher; perhaps at the last moment he became enlightened – but at the last moment. These teachings were given before it.Then this wondrous effortless mind will be unimpeded wherever it goes.He goes on using the word mind for no-mind. Because he has been collecting, and he has no inner criterion, you will come across many contradictions. In the second sutra, which is called mindlessness…now what has happened to the mind that he was talking about in the first sutra?An ancient worthy had a saying: “To look for the ox, one must seek out its tracks. To study the path, seek out mindlessness. Where the tracks are, so must the ox be.”The ox is an old symbol in Zen tradition for the lost soul, the lost self that you have forgotten all about. Mindlessness will show you the path, will indicate to you the soul; it will become an arrow, and you have simply to follow without any tension, without any effort.The path of mindlessness is easy to seek out. So-called mindlessness is not being inert and unknowing like earth, wood, tile, or stone; it means that the mind is settled…Again he starts using the word mind. This is the trouble with a teacher.It means that the mind is settled and imperturbable when in contact with situations and meeting circumstances; that it does not cling to anything, but is clear in all places, without hindrance or obstruction; without being stainedBut it is still there. Then why did he start calling the sutra Mindlessness? The mind again comes in. It is settled, but that which is settled can be unsettled any moment. It is imperturbable, but that which is imperturbable can be perturbed.…that it does not cling to anything…but it is there. And clinging is an old habit; it can start clinging tomorrow, if not today. It can fall back.…but is clear in all places without hindrance or obstruction; without being stained. If it is there, there is every possibility of its being stained. Mindlessness is the right word to explain pure space, without any possibility of falling back.…yet without dwelling in the stainlessness; viewing body and mind like dreams or illusions…You can see his mind continuously wavering, because all these statements he must have collected from different people. Some may have been enlightened, some may have been just teachers, some may have been just learned people. He has made a good collection – but I can see that there are inconsistencies in it, because I have a criterion within me.…viewing body and mind like dreams or illusions… If mind and body are illusions, then what is the need of making them broad, making them spacious, making them non-clinging? If they are like dreams or illusions, just wake up and they are finished. That wakefulness is mindlessness.…yet without remaining in the perspective of dreams’ and illusions’ empty nothingness. Only when one arrives at a realm like this can it be called true mindlessness.He is utterly messed up! He may have been helpful in bringing people to the masters, but he himself is not yet clear on what he is saying.No, it is not lip-service mindlessness: if you have not attained true mindlessness and just go by the verbal kind…– and that’s what he is doing –…how is this different from the perverted Ch’an of “silent illumination”?These people commit many mistakes because of their attachment to a certain school. Now, he is attached to a certain school – Mahayana also has different sects. First Buddhism was divided into two sects, Mahayana and Hinayana; then they started dividing into different sects. In all, there are now thirty-six sects. A man of unenlightenment is continuously trying to defend, to criticize, the other sects.In China there has been a sect called “The Sect of Silent Illumination.” I don’t see that there is any problem – all illumination happens in silence. Silence is the illumination. But people fight over words: because they don’t call it enlightenment, they call it illumination, that has created a rift. But you can understand very easily that both words mean the same. Illumination or enlightenment – both are simply declaring that darkness has disappeared. What you choose to call it is immaterial.“Just get to the root, don’t worry about the branches” –He must have got this from an enlightened master. “Just get to the root, don’t worry about the branches,” because once you have cut the root, the whole tree will wither away. But just cutting the branches is not going to help; the foliage may become, on the contrary, thicker.Emptying this mind is the root.Not just emptying…in the first place, there is no way to empty the mind. You don’t have any control over your mind. It goes on in its own way, filled with dreams and thoughts and emotions and feelings and reactions, sadnesses, happinesses – there is no way to empty it. How are you going to empty it? From one side you will be emptying it, and from the other side a great flow will go on coming in. The only way to empty it is to go beyond it – to become awareness.Watch the mind, and the mind disappears.Once you get the root, the fundamental, then all kinds of language and knowledge and all your daily activities as you respond to people and adapt to circumstances, through so many upsets and downfalls, whether joyous or angry, good or bad, favorable or adverse – these are all trivial matters, the branches. If you can be spontaneously aware and knowing as you are going along with circumstances, then there is neither lack nor excess.That is one of the most important experiences of Gautam Buddha. He says that if you are just in the middle of any two polar opposites – find exactly the middle, neither lack nor excess – if you are exactly in the middle, you will go beyond.The middle is the beyond.If you go to the extreme, then you will start clinging to it; from the extreme you cannot go beyond.That was a great contribution to spiritual science and to humanity, that the middle is the beyond. Just keep yourself balanced in the middle, and suddenly you will see you have gone above both the extremes – neither good nor bad, neither ordinary nor extraordinary, neither knowledgeable nor ignorant.This beyondness is his nirvana. Just to think about it you will feel an immense peace. Just visualize it and you will feel a great silence descending on you. And this is only visualization – what will happen in actuality if you come to the middle? You cannot conceive the ecstasy of it, the blissfulness of it, the benediction of it.I have chosen Ta Hui to help you understand the difference between the teacher and the master, because many religions have lost their masters. For example, Jainism in India has had no masters, no enlightened persons at all, for centuries – only teachers.Without an enlightened being, the religion loses its soul. It is only the small stream of enlightened people that keeps the religion breathing and its heart beating, that keeps it alive, flowering.And one enlightened person is not just a singular phenomenon; he spreads his illumination all around. Wherever he is, he carries a certain energy field, and whoever is receptive will be pulled into the energy field. The teacher has no energy field. He is just repeating mechanically like a parrot.But Ta Hui was certainly a great teacher, because he collected…he went to dozens of enlightened masters. He was so young when he was initiated into monkhood, and he gathered like a bee gathers honey from thousands of flowers. So on the one hand he is very rich; he has brought so much honey from different flowers. But on the other hand he is very poor; he has not contributed anything from his own being. But I am happy that at least in the end, at the very end of his life, he became enlightened. His small verse is certainly of great beauty:Birth is thus – just a happening in a dream.Death is thus – just a happening in a dream.Verse or no verseWhat is the fuss?He has entered into a realm of ultimate serenity and silence. It does not matter whether it is life or death. It does not matter whether he is following the tradition of writing a verse, or not writing it.Then he just let go of the writing brush and passed on.Passed on into eternal existence. It does not matter when you become enlightened. Even if you become enlightened at the last breath of your life, it is perfectly good. You have not lost anything. You will see the whole life that you have lived as a dream.And the moment you can see your whole life as a dream, it has lost all its impact on you. You have become totally free – free from all bondage of the body and the mind, free from all limitations. You are ready to enter into the limitless consciousness of existence itself.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Tend the OxSince you’re studying this path, then at all times – in your encounters with people and responses to circumstances – you must not let wrong thoughts continue. If you cannot see through them, then the moment a wrong thought comes up you should quickly concentrate your mental energy to pull yourself away. If you always follow those thoughts and let them continue without a break, not only does this obstruct the path, but it makes you out to be a man without wisdom.In the old days Kuei Shan asked Lazy An, “What work do you do during the twenty-four hours of the day?”An said, “I tend an ox.”Kuei Shan said, “How do you tend it?”An said, “Whenever it gets into the grass, I pull it back by the nose.”Kuei Shan said, “You’re really tending the ox!”People who study the path, in controlling wrong thoughts, should be like Lazy An tending his ox; then gradually a wholesome ripening will take place of itself.Do Not Grasp Another’s Bow“Do not grasp another’s bow, do not ride another’s horse, do not meddle in another’s affairs.” Though this is a commonplace saying, it can also be sustenance, for entering the path. Just examine yourself constantly: from morning to night, what do you do to help others and help yourself? If you notice even the slightest partiality, or insensitivity, you must admonish yourself. Don’t be careless about this!In the old days Ch’an master Tao Lin lived up in a tall pine tree on Ch’in Wang mountain; people of the time called him the “Bird’s Nest Monk.” When minister, Po Chu-Yi, was commander of Ch’ien T’ang, he made a special trip to the mountain to visit him.Po said, “It’s very dangerous where you’re sitting, Ch’an master.”The master said, “My danger may be very great, minister, but yours is even greater.”Po said, “I am commander of Ch’ien T’ang: what danger is there?”The master said, “Fuel and fire are joined, consciousness and identity do not stay: how can you not be in danger?”Po also asked, “What is the overall meaning of the Buddhist teaching?”The master said, “Don’t commit any evils, practice the many virtues.”Po said, “Even a three-year-old child could say this!”The master said, “Though a three-year-old child can say it, an eighty-year-old man cannot carry it out.” Po then bowed and departed.Tending the ox is a very ancient symbol in the history of Zen. There exist ten paintings in China; the tenth painting has been a cause of great controversy. I would like you to understand those ten paintings, and the controversy, before we start Ta Hui’s sermon on tending the ox.The ten paintings are immensely beautiful. In the first, the ox is lost. The man to whom the ox belongs is just standing, looking all around in the thick forest, and he cannot see where the ox has gone. He is simply bewildered, confused. It is getting late, the sun it setting; soon it will be night, and then to go into the thick forest to find the ox will become more and more difficult.In the second picture he finds footprints of the ox. He feels a little happier; perhaps there is a possibility to find the ox – he has found the footprints. He follows the footprints.In the third picture he sees the back of the ox standing in the thick forest. It is difficult to see, but he can figure out that it is the back of his ox. In the fourth he has reached the ox; he can see the ox now, its whole body. He rejoices.In the fifth painting he takes hold of the ox’s horns. It is a great struggle to bring it back home, but he wins. In the sixth picture he is riding on the ox, coming back toward his home. These are beautiful paintings!In the seventh picture the ox is tied down in his place. In the eighth picture the man is so full of joy that he starts playing on his flute. The ninth picture is an empty frame – there is nothing painted in it.In the tenth picture, which is the cause of a great controversy, the man is going with a bottle of wine toward the marketplace, almost drunk. You can see, he cannot even walk. This tenth picture has caused a great controversy which has been raging for two thousand years.One sect, which is the major sect of mahayana, believes that the ninth is the last picture. It represents the no-mind; you have achieved the goal. The ox is your innermost self which you have lost, and the whole series of pictures is in search of your inner self. You have found the self in the ninth. There is immense silence and peace. It is nirvana, it is no-mind.Beyond the ninth…the people who say this is the end of the journey think that somebody has added the tenth picture, which seems to be absolutely irrelevant. But the people who belong to a small sect of Zen believe in the tenth picture too. They say that when one has become enlightened this is not the end. This is the highest peak of consciousness, it is the greatest achievement, but one has to come back to the human world, to the ordinary world. One has to become again part of the greater humanity. Only then can he share, only then can he provoke others for the search. And certainly when he comes from such height, he is absolutely drunk with ecstasy. That bottle of wine is not an ordinary wine. It is just symbolic of an ecstatic state.When these pictures were brought to Japan, just twelve or thirteen hundred years ago, only nine pictures were brought. The tenth was troublesome; it was left in China.I was puzzled when I first looked at the Japanese pictures. They seem to be complete. Once you have achieved nirvana, what more is there? And then I found in an old Chinese book ten pictures. I was immensely happy that somebody had the insight two thousand years ago that a buddha is not a buddha if he cannot come back to the ordinary humanity, if he cannot become again just simple, innocent, carrying his nirvana, carrying his ecstasy in the bottle of wine, utterly drunk with the divine but still going toward the marketplace.I could see that whoever painted the tenth picture was right. Up to the ninth, it is simply logical. Beyond the ninth, the tenth, is a great realization.According to me, up to the ninth a man is only a buddha; with the tenth he also becomes a Zorba. And this has been my constant theme: I have been insisting that the tenth picture is authentic, and if it were not there, I was going to paint it. Without it, ending in nothingness looks a little sad, looks a little serious, looks empty.All this effort of finding yourself, meditating, going beyond the mind, realizing your being and ending up in desert of nothingness…no, there must be something more to it, something more beyond it, where flowers blossom, where songs arise, where dance is again possible – of course, on a totally different level.But these pictures of tending the ox have been found to be tremendously significant in explaining the whole path step by step.Ta Hui says,Since you are studying this path…Remember what I have said about Ta Hui – he is a teacher; otherwise no master can use the word studying. The master will say, “Since you are following this path, since you are on this path…” Studying? – that is not the way of the seeker; that is the way of the curious student who wants to know something – more information, more knowledge – but who is not interested in actually transforming himself.But Ta Hui is a teacher. Although he tries in every possible way to pose like a master, he cannot deceive anyone who is enlightened. Here and there will be loopholes, but he cannot imagine that they will show his masterhood to be just a hypocrisy.It would have been absolutely correct if he had said, “I am only a teacher.” But he is not saying that. When there is a possibility to be accepted as a master – even the emperor accepts him as a great master of Ch’an – then he keeps quiet. He must have known, because he seems to be a very intelligent man, he must have been aware that he is not a master. He is a very good teacher, and I would like you to remember on every point how he shows his unawareness.Since you are studying this path… Studying belongs to students. A seeker does not study the path, a seeker gets involved. He participates in the whole pilgrimage. He is a pilgrim, he is not a student. He has no desire to know about the path; he wants to reach the goal – path or no path. He wants to come back home.Then at all times – in your encounters with people and responses to circumstances – you must not let wrong thoughts continue.Again, a loophole. The question is not of wrong thoughts and right thoughts; all thoughts are wrong as far as going beyond the mind is concerned. He is not even aware of the fact that the right and wrong are never separate; they are always together.Can you separate love from hate? Millions have tried but not a single person has been able to succeed, because you are going against the very nature of things.Can you separate darkness from light? Although they look so different, scientific inquiry into light and into darkness has proved something against common sense. The difference between darkness and light is only of degrees. Darkness simply means less light, and light simply means less darkness.That’s why there are animals, like owls and others, for whom in the night it is as day. They have better eyes than you have, so even in lesser light – which looks to you like darkness – for them it is full light. Their eyes are more capable than your eyes. In the day they cannot open their eyes, because their eyes are so sensitive that the daylight is dazzling. In the daylight their eyes simply close; naturally they see darkness. When for you it is light, for the owls it is night. And when for you it is night, for the owls it is day, full light.So the difference between light and darkness is only of degrees. You cannot have light without darkness, and you cannot have God without the devil.It is strange that the religions who believe in God automatically believe in the devil too. They have to, it is just a logical necessity. And the religions who don’t believe in God don’t believe in the devil either. For example, Jainism has no God, therefore there is no devil. It is simply out of the question. But all the religions that believe in God have to accept his polar opposite, the devil.Why this necessity? Because existence always needs a polarity. Birth is polarized by death, love is polarized by hate, compassion is polarized by cruelty. Look around life. Everything has its polar opposite, and if you can take away the polar opposite then the other will also disappear. They can exist only together.What is a good thought and what is a bad thought? And how can you separate them? Only a teacher does not know that the final approach toward your being needs all thoughts to disappear – it does not matter whether they are good or bad. We are not talking here of morality; we are talking here of authentic religion.Of course in morality there are good thoughts and bad thoughts, and they are all arbitrary. Because for Mohammedans, to have four wives is not a bad thought, but to everybody else in the world the very idea of having four wives is a bad thought.To the ancient Hindus, even a woman having five husbands was not a bad thought; the woman who had five husbands is worshipped as one of the five great women of India! Of course five husbands is not the right number because the weekend remains – what to do with the weekend? Every day for five days the poor woman had to change husbands, and two days were just a holiday. So the weekend is not something new and American; it is very ancient and Indian! Nobody has condemned it as an ugly situation. No Hindu thinker or philosopher or theologian has condemned it; it was acceptable.Yudhishthira, the eldest of the five brothers who shared one wife, is thought of by Hindus as one of the most religious men that has ever lived on the earth. He is called Dharmaraj, the “king of religiousness”. And this fellow Yudhishthira was a compulsive gambler; he gambled to the extent that he staked his whole kingdom, his whole treasury, and finally he staked his wife! All five brothers were present, and they consented. And nobody has condemned it. They still go on calling Yudhishthira one of the greatest religious men – and he has treated this woman worse than he would an animal, as if a woman were just a dead piece of property, like furniture, that you can gamble with.So what is right?For the Mohammedans the Koran is their holy source, and the Koran says God created all other animals for man to eat. Now if God says it, there is no harm in eating animals. Except for man, all animals can be butchered and eaten without any problem. No question of nonviolence ever arises. Then there are Jainas. Their monks keep a mask on their nose because when you exhale the air becomes hot, and in the atmosphere there are very tiny invisible living cells that hot air can kill. To protect those cells which you cannot see, they are continuously keeping their nose covered with a cloth, so by the time their hot air reaches out through the cloth it is no longer hot; the cloth is preventing it and cooling it. Now who is right?There are Hindu monks who shave their hair, their mustache, their beard – every hair has to be removed. The reason is that they consider that hairs are dead parts of the body. In a way they are right. Dead cells in your body are being thrown out continuously in different ways. That’s why when you cut your hair you don’t feel hurt. If they were living you would have felt the pain. So hairs are just as dead as any corpse. Why carry dead things? Hindus and their monks remove them.If you look at different people, different traditions, you will be simply surprised. But how to decide what is right and what is wrong?In China, even eating snakes is not thought to be anything strange. It is in fact one of the most delicious foods. They just have to cut the snake’s head, because its poison is only in the mouth – just a small gland in its mouth has the poison. They chop the head, and the remaining part is just vegetable. If you are a guest in a Chinese house, they will certainly serve you with it, just as a welcome, and those who have eaten it say it is delicious.There is not a single animal, bird, insect, which is not being eaten somewhere. It will create nausea in you – what kind of people are these? But traditionally they have accepted it as right, and once something is accepted as right, it becomes right to that tradition, to those people. They simply laugh at you – you are missing such beautiful food.In ancient India, and even now in the South of India, the temples are nothing but whorehouses. It was a custom that everybody should donate his eldest daughter to God, but God is just a stone statue; the priest exploits the poor woman sexually, in the name of God. Then so many women start gathering in the temple, and rich people start coming to the temple. These women are called devadasis, servants of God, but their actual function is to attract the rich people to the temple. They function as religious prostitutes, and because of them the temple goes on becoming richer and richer.You will be surprised to know that just a few days ago, in Mumbai, a survey was made of the prostitutes. Thirty percent were found to be devadasis from the temples of South India, because if the priest finds someone beautiful enough, then it is better to sell her in the Mumbai market rather than keep her in the temple. That way the priest can get a lump sum of money. Thirty percent of the prostitutes that were offered to God had reached the market of the prostitutes in Mumbai. And no Hindu has objected to it – not even today. The government takes no notice. It continues because nobody wants to irritate anybody, nobody wants to annoy anybody. Everybody is trying to look good in other people’s eyes.Millions of women in this country have been burned alive! They had to die with their husbands; they had to jump onto the funeral pyre with the dead husband. That was called the tradition of suttee. Those women who managed this suicide – a very painful suicide – were called great women, very religious women.But the real idea behind it was not religious; there was nothing good in it. The real idea behind it was that the man does not want that his wife, when he is dead…who knows? She may fall in love with somebody else. He wants to keep her as his possession even after death. So the only way is – because leaving her he cannot trust – that she should also die with him, just to satisfy his masochistic, male chauvinistic, stupid idea of being the owner.They respected these women, they made memorials for them. I have been asking shankaracharyas and learned and wise Hindu monks, “If this is the case, why has not one single man in the whole history jumped with his wife when she has died?” And they have nothing to answer. They simply look embarrassed, they want to change the subject. But with me it is very difficult to change the subject! I said, “If it is something great, then man has proved himself lower than women.”But the truth is that man has always thought that he is the master, and the woman is the possession – why should he die for the possession? He can have as many women as he wants.In fact, in ancient India women were sold in the marketplaces – as they were sold all over the world – as slaves. And you will be surprised that the great Hindu saints, sages – because nobody looks behind the curtain – even they were going into the places where women were auctioned, and they were purchasing women.They had wives and alongside they had purchased women. For these purchased women a special word was used. For the wife the word is patni and for the purchased woman the word is vadhu. Now the distinction is lost, because now there is no auction place for women.But it was accepted as being perfectly right. Even the so-called seers, saints, whom you would think have gone beyond all worldly things, were not so sensitive as to have revolted against this brutal process of auctioning women, purchasing them just like any other thing you purchase in the market.What is right? And what is wrong?So the question is not, You must not let wrong thoughts continue. You must not let thoughts continue – no question of right, no question of wrong.In other words: every thought is wrong.All thoughts have to be removed from your mind so the screen of the mind is completely empty, so you have a vast sky open and nothing moves in the mind. That is authentic Zen. But that can be said only by an enlightened master.Ta Hui has collected, from here and there, whatever he felt seems to be significant. But he had no inner criterion to judge what is the authentic path of self-realization. He was going to all kinds of teachers, and he was collecting all kinds of contradictory thoughts.He was an intelligent man, but intelligence alone is not able to conceive the nature of your being. It falls short.If you cannot see through them, then the moment a wrong thought comes up you should quickly concentrate your mental energy to pull yourself away.First, every thought is wrong.Second, you don’t have to pull your mental energy away, because mental energy is the root of all your thoughts. It is the mother of all your thought processes, good or bad. The mental energy has not to be pulled away. You have to get out of the mental energy, out of the mess of mental energy; you have to pull yourself out.You have to stand out of your mind, as a watcher. Whatever is going on in the mind, you don’t even interfere. You simply watch. You simply go on seeing it, as if it is somebody else’s mind, and you have nothing to do with it – it is none of your business.In this indifferent aloofness, all thoughts disappear.And with thoughts disappearing there is no mind, because mind is nothing but a collective name of thoughts.Ta Hui does not know anything about meditation. He has never meditated.If you always follow those thoughts and let them continue without a break, not only does this obstruct the path, but it makes you out to be a man without wisdom.He knows nothing about wisdom. He is using a wrong word. Whatever he is saying…only one thing can be said: If you allow thoughts to continue without a break, this will not only obstruct the path, but it makes you out to be a man without knowledge – not without wisdom.That also has to be clearly seen. Knowledge is absolutely relevant in science. The very meaning of the word science is knowledge, and the whole effort of science is to go on changing the unknown into the known. The ultimate goal of science is that one day there will be nothing left unknown – everything will be known.All will be reduced to knowledge. And this is the point where religion differs. And the difference is of tremendous value.Religion says that there are not only two categories in the world, the categories of known and unknown. There is a third category which is more significant than the other two, and that is the category of the unknowable, the mysterious, the miraculous. You can live it, you can be it, you can rejoice it, you can sing it, you can dance it. But you cannot know it. Knowledge is not possible.To enter into this realm of the unknowable is wisdom.Wisdom is not knowledge.Wisdom is innocence and a deep feeling of the miraculous.A wise man’s eyes are full of wonder; just a small flower makes him wonder. It is so mysterious – why is it there?It happened one night…Socrates did not return to his home. His wife was very much disturbed, the whole neighborhood was disturbed. They looked all around – where has he gone? He was not a man to go anywhere; from the school where he used to teach, he used to come directly home. It had never happened before, it was unprecedented. Snow was falling, and they were very much concerned whether he had got lost somewhere in the forest. By the morning they found him. He was standing by the side of a tree, supporting his back with the tree, and looking at the sky. When they reached him he was almost frozen, because there was snow up to his knees.They shook him – “What are you doing here?” He said, “What am I doing here? The night was so wonderful and the stars were so mysterious that I just went on gazing and gazing and gazing. Many times the thought came that it is getting late, but I was almost hypnotized by the stars and their beauty. I knew that snow was falling, I was shivering – but I could not move.”Now this man is a man of wisdom. There are millions of people in the world who go on running here and there, never looking at the sky. It is just on top of them – no fee, no ticket, no standing in the queue before a movie house – and such a splendor! And you own it, because nobody else owns it.A full moon night, and nothing stirs in your heart?A rosebud opens, and nothing opens in your being?A cuckoo starts singing its song, and you don’t get cuckoo?Wisdom is a totally different thing than knowledge. Knowledge de-mystifies existence; wisdom mystifies it. Wisdom belongs to the mystics; knowledge belongs to scientists, to philosophers, to theologians – but they are not the people of religion. They don’t know the heartbeat of the universe.Only people who enter into the realm of the mysterious open doors upon doors of mystery and suddenly find themselves, not in a mundane world which is meaningless, but in a fairyland where everything is so significant, so poetic, so musical, so beautiful.This whole experience is the experience of a religious being. And this experience is possible only if you can put your mind aside. Mind is a collector of knowledge; it has no interest in mystery.In the old days, Kuei Shan asked Lazy An, “What work do you do during the twenty-four hours of the day?” An said, “I tend an ox.” Kuei Shan said, “How do you tend it?” An said, “Whenever it gets into the grass, I pull it back by the nose.” Kuei Shan said, “You’re really tending the ox!”Zen is full of such small dialogues, which are very special to Zen. In this small statement, just a few words are transferred between two men, but everything that has to be said about Zen has been said.An was known in the history of Zen as a lazy man. His name became Lazy An, because he never did anything. Kuei Shan asked him, “What work do you do during twenty-four hours of the day?” – because you don’t do anything, just sitting silently.People loved Lazy An. He was a beautiful man, of a great presence. His very being in a place made it almost holy, he had such an energy – although he was never doing anything. People used to bring food to him. He never even went to beg, which was the way of all Buddhist monks, but people took care of him. They were concerned about him. If it was cold they would bring blankets; if it was raining they would make some arrangement.An was so lazy he would not even walk; people would have to carry him! People knew that there was no point saying anything to him, you just do whatsoever you do. And he never prevented anybody, or asked, “Where are you taking me?” Even that much was too much – to ask, “Where are you taking me?” He is a special character.Kuei Shan was also a man of great understanding, so he asked, “What do you go on doing for twenty-four hours a day?”An said, “I tend an ox.”He refers to those ten pictures of tending the ox. Just a small statement…and he didn’t say anything more.Kuei Shan said, “How do you tend it?” An said, “Whenever it gets into the grass, I pull it back by the nose.” Kuei Shan said, “You are really tending the ox!” And that is the end of the dialogue.But Kuei Shan has given his agreement that this is the way of meditation. When your consciousness starts getting involved in the mind, pull it back. Remain aloof, stand aside. Keep a distance between your self and the mind…and there is no need to do anything else.Kuei Shan really was satisfied that Lazy An is not lazy at all; he is doing great inner work. Outside of course he looks lazy, but one can see from his aura, his energy field, a certain sweetness surrounding him, a certain fragrance.He does not do anything; still, wherever he is, people take care of him, on their own accord. They suddenly feel that it is their responsibility to take care of Lazy An; it is as if he is just a small child, so innocent, that anybody will immediately start taking care of him – and he was an old man.Nobody ever told him to do something. He was doing what can be called the real doing. He was constantly doing only one thing: not allowing his consciousness to be involved in the grassland of the mind, where thoughts grow like grass, wild grass. He just went on pulling his ox back.And it does not take much time. Once your consciousness becomes accustomed to not being involved in the mind, you don’t have to pull it again and again; to be out of the mind is so peaceful, so joyful, so blissful, that consciousness itself becomes aware that to be in the mind is to be in hell.Now it is up to you. If you want to be in hell, you can be; otherwise it is not compulsory, it is optional. Hell is optional!People who study the path…again he goes on using the word study…in controlling wrong thoughts – again he goes on saying wrong things – should be like Lazy An tending his ox.He has not understood what Lazy An is doing. He is not controlling his thoughts. He is simply pulling his consciousness out of the world of thoughts, out of the area and the territory of the mind….then gradually a wholesome ripening will take place of itself.Do Not Grasp Another’s Bow“Do not grasp another’s bow, do not ride another’s horse, do not meddle in another’s affairs.” Though this is a commonplace saying, it can also be sustenance for entering the path.It is an ancient saying in China: “Do not grasp another’s bow, do not ride another’s horse, do not meddle in another’s affairs.” It is tremendously beautiful, although it is just the wisdom of the people. They are saying, “Do not borrow anything from anybody.” Depend on your own resources, because unless you depend on your own resources you can never be free, and you can never be an individual. You will always remain a slave.Ta Hui says, “Though this is a commonplace saying, it can also be sustenance for entering the path.” Once in a while, he says something which he must have gathered from someone who knows it.Just examine yourself constantly…But immediately he falls back into his own state. This is the trouble; if you are repeating somebody else’s knowledge, you cannot go on long. Soon you will say something which will expose you.He says, Just examine yourself constantly.That is not the way of Zen.That is the way of psychoanalysis, which was not existent in those days, and which is not existent in the East even today. And if the West is not adamant, is not prejudiced, and is open to understand, psychoanalysis will disappear even from the West.Examining yourself makes no change in you.You can go on examining yourself constantly. Examining is another word for analyzing – why this thought, why that thought? What is the cause of it? Why did it come to me? What should I do with it? You will get into a madhouse.No, that is not the way of the East.The East says, “Remain aware of yourself constantly.”And being aware is not examining yourself.Being aware is simply being aloof, but alert. Whatever the mind is doing, let it do; whatever is going on in the mind, let it be. You simply be out of it. You should not be a participant – that’s all that is needed, and mind dies its own death.By your examining you are entering into the territory of the mind. And mind is such a subtle phenomenon – the moment you enter into it, it starts exploiting your energy for its own purposes.This is the experience of all the Eastern mystics. Do not analyze, do not examine, do not justify, do not condemn. Don’t make any evaluation. Simply stand aside, as if the road is full of traffic and you step by the side of the road and stand there, without bothering who is going, who is coming, who is good, who is bad.This discovery of awareness has been such a miracle: the traffic simply disappears, just by your stepping out of it. You don’t have to examine, you don’t have to control, you don’t have to dispel anything. You don’t have to do anything at all – just pure awareness is enough to kill the mind.From morning to night, what do you do to help others and help yourself? If you notice even the slightest partiality or insensitivity, you must admonish yourself. Don’t be careless about this.He is simply talking like a moralist teacher, a Catholic priest! He has forgotten that once a man is aware of himself he does whatever is right, and he never does whatever is wrong. It is not a question of choice. His awareness is enough to take him toward the right, and never toward the wrong. He simply remains choicelessly alert and aware, and his whole lifestyle changes. Then whatever he does, it is always beneficial. Then he is a constant blessing to the whole world. But it is not a decision on his part. It is simply his spontaneity. It is simply his nature just to be good. Just as on a rosebush roses blossom, on the bush of awareness roses also blossom – roses of goodness, roses of beauty, roses of grace, roses of all kinds of blessings for others, for himself.In the old days Ch’an master Tao Lin lived up in a tall pine tree on Ch’in Wang mountain; people of the time called him the “Bird’s Nest Monk.” When minister Po Chu-Yi was commander of Ch’in T’ang, he made a special trip to the mountain to visit him.Po said, “It’s very dangerous where you’re sitting, Ch’an master.”The master said, “My danger may be very great, minister, but yours is even greater.”Po said, “I am commander of Ch’ien T’ang: what danger is there?”The master said, “Fuel and fire are joined, consciousness and identity do not stay: how can you not be in danger?”What he is saying is tremendously significant. He is saying, “I am sitting in a bird’s nest in a pine tree.” It is obvious that there is danger of falling, but are you aware that if you fall from your position you will be in a far greater danger? And your fall is possible any moment. You are commander-in-chief, the enemy is not far away. You and your enemy are just like fuel and fire joined. Just close by is fire, very near to it is fuel; they can join any moment. Any moment there can be an explosion. You are sitting on a volcano.“I am certainly in danger if I fall – perhaps I may break a few of my bones. But it is not much of a danger. Your danger is far greater…consciousness and identity do not stay. Your consciousness is so small; that is the greatest danger in the world, because any moment you can slip into unconsciousness. Then in unconsciousness whatever you do is going to harm you. My consciousness is absolute. I can sit in a bird’s nest in this tall pine tree; I know I will not fall, because I am alert. Even when I am asleep, I am alert.”Once Ananda had asked Gautam Buddha…he used to sleep in the same room, to take care of anything Buddha needs in the night if he suddenly feels sick. Buddha was fragile, he was old, and he was working so hard, walking continually, till his very last breath. Gautam Buddha used to sleep in the posture which is called the Lion’s posture, because it is just the way the lion sleeps. But Ananda was surprised that once Buddha had taken the posture, he remained in the same posture the whole night; he did not move his feet, he did not move his hand, he did not move anything. He remained almost like a statue. Ananda was surprised – one day perhaps one can manage, but day after day, month after month, year after year…? Finally he could not contain his curiosity. He said, “I have to ask, do you sleep or not? – because you never change your posture.”Buddha said, “The body sleeps, the mind sleeps, but my awareness is eternal, it knows nothing of sleep. And secondly: you toss and turn because you are trying to find the right posture. I have found it – why should I toss and turn? What are you doing tossing and turning this way and that way? In fact you are trying to find the right pose. I have found it, Ananda. Now there is no need to change it. And as far as awareness is concerned, even in the night there is a small flame of awareness eternally burning within me, even in sleep.”So the old master was right when he said, “My danger may be very great, minister, but yours is even greater.” Your consciousness is so small, and your identity is so false. You think yourself commander-in-chief, but behind your uniform you are just a mortal. Just a bullet will finish you; just an order from the emperor that you are retired or demoted and you will lose your identity.“Nobody can take my identity back from me.”“Nobody can tell me to retire – I am retired already. Nobody can tell me, ‘You are demoted.’ Where else can you throw me? I am already in such a situation that nobody would like to change places with me.“Rarely people come here. You are a strange fellow, taking so much trouble to come to this mountain, to this lonely spot, and to talk to a strange man who just lives in the pine tree and never gets down.“My identity is within my own hands. Your identity is given to you; it can be taken away – your danger, minister, is far greater.”Po also asked, “What is the overall meaning of the Buddhist teaching?”The master said, “Don’t commit any evils. Practice the many virtues.”That is absolutely wrong, and I don’t think that it has been said by the Ch’an master Tao Lin; he cannot say this. This must be Ta Hui’s addition, because this is not the teaching of Buddha, and he’s asking the overall teaching of the Buddhist philosophy – just the gist.The gist of Buddha’s philosophy is simply vipassana – in one word, meditation. Everything else is secondary and nonessential. What Ta Hui is saying is all nonessential: Don’t commit any evils. Practice the many virtues – that is not Buddha’s teaching.That is where Buddha is unique – different from any other master of the world: his teaching can be reduced to a single statement: “Be silent, go beyond mind, then whatever you do is good.”Po said, “Even a three-year-old child could say this!”The master said, “Though a three-year-old child can say it, an eighty-year-old man cannot carry it out.”That is true, because the only way to carry it out is not mentioned.The only way to carry it out is silence.Out of silence all the flowers blossom.It is difficult even for an eighty-year-old man not to commit any evil and to practice all the virtues, because they are by-products. And you can not do anything which is a by-product. You have to go to the roots.For example I will tell you… I remember a small incident in Mao Zedong life when he was very young, and his father had died. His mother was very much interested in growing roses of all colors and all varieties; she had such an aesthetic sense, and she had made such a beautiful garden around her house.Her sister became very sick, and she was very much concerned about her roses. Mao was very young, not more than twelve years old. He said, “Don’t be worried, mother. You can go – it is only a question of a few days – you can be with your sister. As far as your garden is concerned, I will take care.”The mother went, and Mao took as much care as you can conceive; the whole day from morning till evening he was looking after the roses. But it was very strange, they were dying – trees were dying, flowers were dying – and he could not think what he would say when his mother came back. Her whole garden looked deserted, and he had been doing so much hard work.His mother came. She looked around the garden and laughed, because Mao was standing there with tears in his eyes. He said, “I worked continuously from morning till evening.” The mother said, “I knew this was going to happen, so don’t be worried. I just came silently and stood at the gate and watched what you were doing.”What he was doing? – he was washing each flower with water, taking away the dust with his small brush. Naturally all the flowers…he had taken great care, but to take care of the flowers you have to take care of the roots. You don’t have to bother about the roses, they will take care of themselves; you simply take care of the roots. He never bothered about the roots – he had no idea of the roots. He never bothered the roots; he simply washed the flowers.The trees died, the flowers died and the poor boy was in utter misery. The mother said, “I have seen…standing outside I just wanted to see what is going on, and I could see that you have destroyed the whole garden! But there is no need to cry and weep.”His mother said to him, “This is what human beings are doing all over the world. Everybody is taking care of the flowers and nobody is concerned about the roots. And the real thing is the roots. Flowers come automatically. You don’t have to take any special care for them.”So without meditation, even an eighty-year-old man cannot carry it out, although it is so simple that a three-year-old child can say it.The master said, “Though a three-year-old child can say it, an eighty-year-old man cannot carry it out.” Po then bowed and departed.This is an incomplete statement. He must have heard it from someone – secondhand, thirdhand – because the old master Tao Lin could not have left out mentioning the roots. Unless meditation is mentioned you don’t know anything about the teachings of Gautam Buddha. And he must have mentioned it: if he had not mentioned it, then Po would not have bowed down and departed. Po was absolutely satisfied, but in this conversation there was no reason to be satisfied.My way of seeing things is very straightforward. I don’t see from this conversation why Po should be satisfied, but he must have been satisfied because he, with great honor, bowed down and departed. Certainly something is missing, something essential is missing…and it always happens. A man who does not understand, who has not experienced meditation himself, will talk about all the things which are by-products, and will forget about meditation.This has happened so many times, in so many traditions, that it can be accepted as a rule. For example Mahavira…. It was thought by his disciples, by his followers for twenty-five centuries, that he was teaching nonviolence, that he was teaching non-possessiveness, that he was teaching being authentic and truthful.Now these are all by-products. But Jaina monks have been following them, and I have seen their faces: they don’t show any signs of joy, of fulfillment, of contentment, of reaching to any great silence or peace or bliss. They look absolutely dry, dead. Although they are following the discipline as accurately as possible, they are just missing the foundation.All these three things – nonviolence, non-possessiveness, authenticity and truthfulness – arise without any effort on your part…if you succeed in meditation. A man of meditation cannot lie. A man of meditation cannot hurt anybody; hence he is nonviolent.A man of meditation knows perfectly well that all things are ephemeral. You came into the world without anything, and you will have to go from the world without anything; so you can use things – but you cannot possess them. You can use things just the way you use the railway train. Just because you are sitting in the railway train you don’t start declaring that you are the owner of the train! You are using it for a time being; at one station you get in, at another station you get out.Life should be taken just the same way. Whatever life gives to you – use it, but don’t become the owner. Don’t cling to it, and then when it goes out of your hands, you are not sad, you are not frustrated; you don’t start thinking of committing suicide just because you have gone bankrupt, or just because your wife has escaped with somebody else.I have heard about a man who went to the post office and started telling the postmaster, “Please write down that my wife has escaped.” The postmaster said, “I am sorry that your wife has escaped. Perhaps you are in such a disturbed state that you don’t see that this is a post office. The police office is just in front – you go there.” He said, “I am not going there and I am not telling you to take the report without knowing that it is a post office.”The postmaster said, “This is strange. You know that this is a post office, and still you are telling me to report that your wife has escaped with somebody.”He said, “Yes, seven days ago. And I am not going to the police station, because last time she escaped I reported it to the police station, and those idiots brought her back. This time I have remained silent for seven days to let them go as far as possible. But then my conscience started pricking and I said, ‘This is not right. At least I should report it.’ So I thought that it is better to report it to the post office. You just take the report and free me from my pricking conscience.”The postmaster said, “It’s strange. If such is the problem, then why bother? It is good that she has escaped.”He said, “I am not bothered about her; I am bothered about the man with whom she has escaped. What will be happening to that poor fellow? I am accustomed to her; he is new. She will kill him. Seven days have passed, and nothing has been heard.”“Don’t you feel any problem – anything?” asked the postman.“I am not bothered about my wife; I am bothered about the man she has got hold of. I cannot report it to the police office – you can understand my problem – but I am praying every day in the temple. Have mercy on the poor man. Save his life.’”People are living in such misery. But even if they have been miserable with the wife or the husband, they will not separate. They will not allow freedom to each other. But why go on suffering? There is no reason at all.This life is to rejoice.If you can rejoice together – good.If you can rejoice separately – even better.All that is needed is a certain deepening of your consciousness, and that happens through meditation. Then all your actions, your behavior, your life starts changing on its own accord; you start seeing things clearly. Right now you see things through such smoke that nothing seems to be clear.A woman went to the doctor and asked, “What kind of prescription have you given to my husband? He was so good, so obedient and suddenly, since you have given him the prescription, he has escaped.”The doctor said, “I have not given him any medicine. I have simply prescribed new lenses for his glasses, so naturally he must have escaped. I can see you – that’s enough. He had the wrong prescription, he was not able to see you. The moment he saw you clearly, he escaped. There is no problem in it.”All that you need is clear eyesight…into your life, into your actions, into your relationships, into everything that surrounds you. Just a clear insight – and that will change everything, without any arduous effort on your part.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Do Not Grasp Another’s BowNow if you want to save mental power, do not be concerned with whether or not a three-year-old child can say it, or whether or not an eighty-year-old-man can carry it out. Just don’t do any evil and you have mastered these words. They apply whether you believe or not, so please think it over.If worldly people whose present conduct is without illumination would correct themselves and do good, though the goodness is not yet perfect, isn’t this better than depravity and shamelessness? One who does evil on the pretext of doing good is called in the teachings one whose causal ground is not genuine, bringing on crooked results. If, with a straightforward mind and straightforward conduct, you are able to seize supreme enlightenment directly, this can be called the act of a real man of power. The concerns that have come down from numberless ages are only in the present:. If you can understand them right now, then the concerns of numberless ages will instantly disperse, like tiles being scattered or ice melting. If you don’t understand right now, you’ll pass through countless eons more, and it’ll still be just as it is. The truth that is as it is has been continuous since antiquity without ever having varied so much as a hairsbreadth.Matters of worldly anxiety are like the links of a chain, joining together continuously without a break. If you can do away with them, do away with them immediately! Because you have become habituated to them since beginningless time, to the point where they have become totally familiar, if you don’t exert yourself to struggle with them, then as time goes on and on, with you unknowing and unawares, they will have entered deeply into you. Finally, on the last day of your life, you won’t be able to do anything about it. If you want to be able to avoid going wrong when you face the end of your life, then from now on whenever you do anything, don’t let yourself slip. If you go wrong in your present doings, it will be impossible not to go wrong when you’re facing death.There’s a sort of person who reads scriptures, recites the Buddha-name and repents in the morning, but then in the evening runs off at the mouth, slandering and vilifying other people. The next day he does homage to Buddha and repents as before. All through the years till the end of his life he takes this as daily ritual – this is extreme folly. Such people are far from realizing that the Sanskrit word ‘kshama’ means to repent faults. This is called “cutting off the continuing mind.” Once you have cut it off, never continue it again; once you have repented, do not commit wrongdoings again – this is the meaning of repentance according to our Buddha which good people who study the path should not fail to know.The mind, discriminating intellect, and consciousness of students of the path should be quiet and still twenty-four hours a day. When you have nothing to do, you should sit quietly and keep the mind from slackening and the body from wavering. If you practice to perfection over a long, long time, naturally body and mind will come to rest at ease, and you will have some direction in the path. The perfection of quiescence and stillness indeed settles the scattered and confused false consciousness of sentient beings, but if you cling to quiescent stillness and consider it the ultimate, then you’re in the grip of perverted “silent illumination” Ch’an.Ta Hui reminds me of an incident in Charles Darwin’s life. His sixtieth birthday was celebrated. The children of his neighborhood also thought of something to present to him. Great people, rich people, were going to present him many things – he had become by that time a world renowned scientist – but children have their own way of seeing things.Charles Darwin’s whole life was devoted to the study of animals, birds, insects, fish. He was working out in what steps human evolution has happened, how man has come to be. He never believed in the theory of creation. No man of intelligence can believe in it, for the simple reason that every day new things go on happening. Creation would have been a closed circle: God created everything and there was no question of any new inventions, new discoveries. God’s work has to be perfect; hence there is no space for evolution. Evolution can happen only when things are imperfect.The children found a way. They collected many insects, dissected them – took out some insect’s head, some other insect’s leg, some other insect’s body, and piece by piece they joined and glued a totally new insect which God has not created. And they went to Charles Darwin, saying, “We have brought an insect that perhaps you would love to know. We have never seen this. Just today we have found it.”Charles Darwin himself was a little taken aback: he had gone around the world, but he had never seen such an insect. Then he looked closely and he saw that the head belonged to some other insect – he could see the glue and he could see the children’s inventiveness – and the children wanted to know the name of the bug.Charles Darwin said, “I know it. Its name is humbug.”Ta Hui reminds me…he is a humbug. He has been moving from one master to another master and he was collecting things – something from one person, something from another person. He has made a good collection and glued it perfectly well, but he cannot deceive one who knows the truth. And all the masters he had visited may not have been enlightened. Some certainly must have been enlightened, because there are a few statements which only an enlightened man can make. But there are a few others which only unenlightened moralists, puritans – that kind of people – can make. They are good people; they mean well, their intentions are good, but they don’t know that just to mean well is not enough.You should be at the very source of your being, where you can feel these three things: goodness, beauty and truth. In India we have called it the experience of sat-chit-anand – that is one expression. The other expression of the three is satyam, shivam, sunderam. I would like you to understand both statements, because they contain the very gist of the religious experience.Sat-chit-anand is made of three words: sat, which means ultimate truth; chit, which means ultimate consciousness; anand, which means ultimate bliss. That is one set which denotes the experience of enlightenment.But enlightenment is vast. There is another set: satyam, which means truth; shivam, which means good; sunderam, which means beautiful.Why is this difference there? – that too is significant to understand. The first statement comes from people who are of a philosophical bent: truth, consciousness, bliss. The second set comes from people who are basically poetic. Truth remains in both the sets, but the other two qualities change. To the poet, beauty is more important than anything else – and also the quality of goodness.So the first set comes from people who have become enlightened, but they have been of a philosophical mind. And the second group comes from people who have been poets. The only thing that joins them is truth – and truth is a vast sky – it contains all great experiences. You can choose any according to your own inclination.Ta Hui has come across mere moralists who don’t know the source of good, but talk about good. They are ethical, not religious. He has also come in contact with some enlightened masters – I will tell you from where he has made this humbug teaching. The difference is so vast, qualitatively so different, but even a man of Ta Hui’s intelligence could not figure out that they don’t meet anywhere. You cannot glue them together – the distance is so vast. But it will be a good discipline for you – that’s why I have chosen Ta Hui. It will be a good discipline for you to learn a little discrimination; otherwise you get impressed by any nonsense.Just the other day somebody brought a book about a woman I had known. She was just a very ordinary woman, living with Swami Muktananda – serving him, cooking his food. After the death of Muktananda, she has taken his place. Now her name is Gurumayi, the feminine of the Guru – Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, and she is followed by many people. The book has been sent to me because she is touring around the world and many people are impressed by her. She is the successor of Muktananda. He himself was a perfect idiot – now where to put this woman? You cannot be more perfect than Muktananda was.But the problem is people simply listen to the words and they don’t have any criteria to check whether these people are saying things out of their own experience, or they have collected them from books, from other people, and are simply repeating. You can see it very clearly in Ta Hui. He is a perfect specimen.Now if you want to save mental power…Buddha’s whole teaching is that all the power that mind has is given by you. Mind has no power of its own; it is given by you through identification. Because you identify yourself with it, the mind becomes powerful. It is your power.Mind has no power at all; mind is just like the walking stick of a blind man. The stick walks, but the power is coming from the blind man. The stick cannot walk on its own, although it is called a walking stick. The blind man walks, and all the power that the stick has belongs to the blind man.Your mind is a blind man’s walking stick.The moment you open your eyes and understand the identity, you can withdraw your power from the mind. You have given it, and the moment you withdraw your power, mind simply collapses. So to talk about mental power, he must have heard some teacher.Do not be concerned with whether or not a three-year-old child can say it, or whether or not an eighty-year-old man can carry it out. Just don’t do any evil and you have mastered these words. They apply whether you believe or not, so please think it over.Now he goes on committing mistakes…if you compare him to any enlightened man’s statements. First: Just don’t do any evil. No awakened being of the world has ever said that because awakening makes one clear. You go on doing evil acts because of your unconsciousness. Evil acts don’t have any grip over you.Gautam Buddha used to say that if a house shows light from the windows, from the doors, then thieves remain away. They know that the owner of the house is yet awake. The light is enough indication for a thief not to take the risk. But if the light is put off then the thief can come closer; it is a good opportunity. In darkness he can manage to steal something.He used to say that the situation of human beings is the same. If your eyes show light, if your very existence shows illumination, if you radiate…then evils don’t come close to you. Then whatever you do comes out of your blissfulness, and blissfulness cannot do any evil.To teach people not to do evil is absolutely absurd.If they are unconscious they are bound to do evil. They can try; they can force themselves to do good and not to do evil, but it will remain superficial. They don’t have even the awareness of what is evil and what is good.Once a man, a very rich man of Calcutta, came to Ramakrishna. He wanted to do some good act. He was becoming old, and he was very rich, and he thought it would be good to donate one thousand golden rupees – at that time there were gold rupees. The word rupee simply comes from gold. It is a Sanskrit word, raupya; in Hindi it has become rupaya; in English it has become rupee – but it comes from gold. Now even a paper note is called a rupee; the word has lost all meaning, it has no relevance. But that’s how things go on changing, and we go on using the same words for new realities to which they do not belong at all.In the beginning people used to use horses. They were the fastest vehicle, but still people ask, “How much horsepower does your car have?” Strange…horses have gone, but our old mind still manages to think about a car in terms of horsepower, and nobody thinks about the stupidity of it.This man brought one thousand gold rupees. He was feeling very great and thinking, “Ramakrishna will be surprised, nobody will have given him such a gift. I’m going to do a great good work.” It was for the temple of Ramakrishna where he lived in Dakshineshwar, just near Calcutta.The first thing he did was to pour from his bag all one thousand gold rupees in front of Ramakrishna…so loudly! They made so much sound that everybody in the ashram gathered: “What is happening?”Ramakrishna said, “Do you want to exhibit what you are doing? You could have silently given the bag to me. There was no need to pour out all those one thousand rupees in front of me. That was almost as if you were trying to make everybody in the ashram curious to come and see what is happening. This is not a good act. Deep inside you it is an ego trip, but I will accept the rupees. Now put them back in the bag.”So he put them in the bag and Ramakrishna said, “Now, are the rupees mine or yours?”The man said, “Of course they are yours; I have offered them to you.”Ramakrishna said, “That’s good. I offer them to the Ganges. Can you help me a little?”The man said, “What kind of help?”“Just go – behind the temple is the Ganges. Throw the whole bag into the Ganges. Now it is my money not yours, so you need not be worried about it.”The man was in shock – “I got caught in unnecessary trouble. One thousand gold rupees…people would certainly say that this man is mad – offering it to the Ganges?” But he was committed, so he went to the Ganges. Hours passed.Ramakrishna said, “What is the matter? Throwing the bag away cannot take that much time.”He sent somebody who brought the news: “That man takes one rupee out of the bag and throws it on the stone rocks around the Ganges. A big crowd has gathered because those rupees are making so much noise and they are pure gold. Then the man throws one rupee far away in the Ganges. Then he takes another rupee, again hits it on the rocks…and more and more people are gathering there. He is making a great show.”Ramakrishna had to go himself. He said, “You are not only an egoist, you are stupid too. One checks whether rupees are authentic or not by throwing them on the stone so that he can hear the sound of gold, and if they are not authentic, they will not give the same sound. But that is when one is collecting them. You are throwing them away! Whether they are authentic or not makes no difference.“Secondly, one counts rupees when one is collecting them. You are throwing the rupees away. What does it matter whether there are exactly one thousand, or one rupee less or one rupee more? But perhaps you have not realized that in the name of doing good, you are just doing something stupid. This is not going to bring any blessings to you. Your one thousand rupees have gone in vain.”But everywhere this is being done. We may think we are doing good. We may think we are not doing evil. But thinking has nothing to do with good and evil.Good is that which comes spontaneously from your awareness and evil is that which never comes spontaneously out of your awareness.The man of awareness does only good.His action and his awareness are in a deep synchronicity. Evil cannot enter into the lighted house of that man.But moralists have no idea of enlightenment or meditation. They go on teaching people disciplines: Do this, do that; this is right, that is wrong. And finally Ta Hui says, …so please think it over.Thinking can never bring you to any conclusion.Thousands of years of philosophy…the greatest geniuses thinking all over the world have not come to any conclusion at all. It has been such a great wastage of intelligence and genius. They cannot even think on small matters.Immanuel Kant, a great German philosopher who belongs to the highest category of philosophers, was told by a woman, “I love you. I have waited long hoping that perhaps you may take the initiative. But you don’t seem to take initiative so I have to ask you to marry me.”He said, “You could have asked before, but first I have to think it over. I never do anything without thinking.”He consulted all the libraries, all the books on marriage; he collected all the pros, all the cons. The difficulty was that for three years he worked, but the pros and cons were equal. So there was no decision coming… Finally, on the pro side, one thing appeared that was more than on the con side. He came across a book that said: It is always good to experience a thing even if the experience proves to be wrong. It will give you maturity. It is never good to avoid any experience, because avoiding any experience is avoiding maturity.This was the only point that was more in favor of marriage; otherwise both sides were equal. Seeing that he had found the solution, he rushed to the woman’s house and knocked on the door. The girl’s old father opened the door and asked, “What do you want?”Immanuel Kant said, “Your daughter has asked me to get married to her and I have been thinking. It certainly took a long time; thinking is a long process. It took three years. I worked hard day and night and finally I have come to the conclusion that I should marry.”The old man said, “That’s good, but my girl has married long ago. She already has two children. She could not wait. And in these three years you never showed your face even a single time.”He said, “I was so much engaged in thinking – consulting ancient scriptures, all the manuals of marriage. It was a tremendous job to come to the conclusion.” Immanuel Kant remained unmarried his whole life.Thinking is not the way to find the truth.Non-thinking is the way.Thinking always creates more muddle. Non-thinking brings clarity, spaciousness, purity and a great straightforward insight. It is not a question of pros and cons; you simply know in what direction you have to go. It is a simple understanding.Ta Hui must have listened to some other teacher who was telling his disciples to think it over.If worldly people whose present conduct is without illumination would correct themselves and do good, though the goodness is not yet perfect, isn’t this better than depravity and shamelessness?These are not the words of those who have arrived. These are the words of very superficial mental activity.One who does evil on the pretext of doing good is called in the teachings one whose causal ground is not genuine, bringing on crooked results. If, with a straightforward mind…But it remains still the mind, and mind is never straightforward. You all have minds, so it is not a problem to understand that the mind is always crooked. It is never straightforward.The Eastern mystics have used the tail of a dog to symbolize mind. They say even if you keep the tail of the dog straight in a hollow bamboo for twelve years, whenever you remove the bamboo the tail will again go crooked. You cannot expect that it will remain straightforward; that is just the nature of the tail.The situation with the mind is the same – it is crooked. It never goes directly, immediately, straightforward. It is cunning, it is clever. It tries to find a way in which it can pretend to be good and yet enjoy all the pleasures that evil offers.I have heard about a bishop who was in the confessional, and a young, beautiful woman came to confess. She said, “Father, I have been raped – and not once, but three times in the night.”The bishop said, “But if you have been raped, you don’t have to confess. The man who raped you has to confess. You have not committed any sin.”The woman said, “You don’t understand. I enjoyed it – that’s why I have come to confess and pray to God to forgive me – otherwise I could have done everything not to be raped. It was the same man who raped me three times in the night, and I did not scream or shout. I really enjoyed it.”The father said, “This case is very serious. You come to the side of the room, because you have to explain to me the exact details of what that man did. He seems to be just a born devil.” Then the father kissed the young girl and asked, “Has he done this?”The girl said, “Yes, Father.”The father said, “He is really a devil.” Then he started playing with her breasts and asked, “Did he do this too?”The girl said, “Yes, Father.”And the father said, “That man should be condemned to hell! And did he tell you to undress?”The girl said, “Yes, Father.”He said, “That man needs eternal hell fire! You undress.”And the father made love to her and asked, “Did he do this too?”The girl said, “Yes, Father.”He said, “Let that man come to my confessional. He will have to come.”But the girl said, “He did one thing more too.”The father said, “What! More?”The girl said, “He gave me gonorrhea. I have told you beforehand; he is really a very evil person.”Your so-called good people go on doing, in the name of good, all kind of evil acts – and it is bound to be so. It is not their fault. They have been brought up with a wrong teaching. They have been told to do this, to do that, but nobody has ever gone deep into their psychology – why are they doing it? What is the root source of their evil acts? And, unless that root is cut…Man’s nature in itself is basically good. You just have to remove the wild weeds that have grown in his nature. Meditation is the only method to take out all that is evil, without much effort, and then what remains is good. Then whatever the man does, he has not to think about it – about whether it is good or evil. He simply does it. He feels a deep harmony with existence and he cannot go against that harmony.Evil is going against nature’s harmony.It is creating discord.And only people who don’t know the beauty of harmony and the joy of harmony can commit evil acts. But don’t say to them, “Do this, do that.”I have heard that God, in the beginning, first asked the Babylonians, “Would you like a commandment?”They asked, “What is the commandment?”God said, “Don’t look at another’s wife with an evil thought.”The Babylonians said, “That is impossible. Keep your commandment to yourself, because if some beautiful woman comes in front of us, it does not matter whose wife she is. The evil thought arises on its own accord. We cannot do anything; before we even think anything, it is there.”God went to the Egyptians and asked, “Would you like a commandment?”They said, “First we want to know, what is the commandment?”And God said, “Always do good.”The Egyptians said, “You go to others and give this commandment to them, because if somebody gives evil to us, how are we going to defend ourselves? An eye for an eye…if he is doing evil, we will do greater evil; only can we put him right. If he is doing evil and we go on doing good, we will be crushed. Forgive us, we don’t want your commandment. You can keep it.”Then he went to Moses and asked Moses, “Do you want a commandment?”And Moses asked, “How much does it cost?” He did not bother to ask what the commandment is. The real thing is how much it costs.God said, “It costs nothing.”Moses said, “Then I will take ten!”If it is free, then why not take ten? That’s how Jews have ten commandments. But in those ten commandments there is no commandment for meditation. They are all just moralistic, superficial teachings.If, with a straightforward mind and straightforward conduct, you are able to seize supreme enlightenment directly, this can be called the act of a real man of power.All this is simply crap. It is just putting things upside down.The enlightened man is really a man of power – not power over others but simply a source of power, not a power that dominates, enslaves, but just a deep strength, stamina, courage. It is his inner source. It has nothing to do with anybody else. It is simply his power that radiates all around him. Anything that he is saying comes from that power. Then the conduct is straightforward, then the mind is straightforward. But you cannot first put the mind straightforward and your conduct straightforward, and then attain supreme enlightenment directly.Enlightenment has to be the first thing and everything else is just a by-product. As the tree grows, the roots are needed first, although the roots are invisible. Perhaps that is the reason why thinkers have missed the basic point: roots are invisible, but once the roots are there, the tree starts growing. Foliage comes, beautiful greenery, flowers come – psychedelic and colorful – fruits come which can give great nourishment, but they are all coming because of the hidden roots.It is not vice versa: that first you hang a few flowers and a few fruits, bring some foliage, tie it together – and then the roots will grow. It does not happen that way; that is not the course of nature. But this is what people have been taught: first become good, first become moral, first follow a certain discipline. Then you will attain to enlightenment and enlightenment will give you great power.Enlightenment itself is power. But it has to come first, it cannot be second. And everything else will follow.The enlightened man cannot do wrong, cannot do evil. His every breath is in the service of good, his every act is in the service of the divine. He himself is totally surrendered to the whole – allowing the whole to use him in whatever way it wants.This is the difference between morality and religion: a religious person is moral, but the moral person is not religious.The moral person is only a hypocrite.But the problem has arisen because we have seen enlightened people like Gautam Buddha, but we don’t see their enlightenment. Their roots are hidden. We see their actions, their fruits, their flowers, their foliage. And the natural logic of the mind is that if we also start doing the same acts as they are doing, we will become enlightened.You can see the logical fallacy, but it appears very rational: Buddha eats one time a day, so you eat one time a day; Buddha has only three sets of clothes, so you have only three sets of clothes; Buddha never uses any vehicle, always walks from village to village, so you always walk. You can imitate every action of Buddha without difficulty, you can repeat his words exactly the way he says them, but still you will not become enlightened, because the roots are missing. And with roots the problem is that they are always hidden; they are secret.So Buddhists, for twenty-five centuries, have been continuously imitating: Christians have been imitating Christ, and the same is true about other religions. They have all created great imitators, but inside they are just as ordinary, as unenlightened, as anybody else. They have taken the whole thing from the wrong end.The concerns that have come down from numberless ages are only in the present.This sentence he must have got from someone enlightened, because he could not manage to think of it himself. It is a very pregnant sentence.The concerns that have come down from numberless ages are only in the present: if you can understand them right now, then the concerns of numberless ages will instantly disperse, like tiles being scattered or ice melting. If you don’t understand right now, you’ll pass through countless eons more, and it’ll still be just as it is. The truth that is as it is has been continuous since antiquity without ever having varied so much as a hairsbreadth.Now these words cannot come from a teacher. The insistence on now and the implication behind now is immensely great. He is saying that you may have committed thousands of crimes in the past, but the past is no more. Only memories of the past have remained in your mind. You may have imagined committing many crimes and evils in the future, but they are only in the mind. They are all now: your past, your present, your future are all in this moment.This is a very tremendous statement. It means you don’t have to get rid of your past by doing good acts. It means that you don’t have to be punished for your past – because it was an unconscious action. You were not aware. If you can become aware right now, all that has been a heavy load on you will melt away like ice.Now there is no question of doing good and there is no question of doing evil. Now the only thing is bringing a deep understanding of the present moment, an awareness of the present moment.And that’s what meditation is. It does not care about the past, it does not care about the future; it simply becomes a pillar of light in the present. In that pillar of light in the present, all past and future simply disappear. They don’t have any actual existence.It is as if you have slept the whole night, doing good acts and bad acts – sometimes escaping with your neighbor’s wife, sometimes becoming a saint – but in the morning when you wake up, you know you have not done anything. It was only the sleepiness that created all those dreams.To the man of understanding, all that you have done has been done in your unconsciousness; so the only way is just to become conscious, and you will be awake. And all your past will disappear just as dreams disappear when you are awake. This statement can certainly be said to come from a source of enlightenment.Matters of worldly anxiety are like the links of a chain, joining together continuously without a break. If you can do away with them, do away with them immediately!.That’s why I was saying that he has done a good patchwork. He has deceived even the emperors by doing his patchwork.Once in a while, he has got hold of the words of somebody enlightened. But in the meantime he goes on collecting all kinds of advice from teachers who have collected them from others. And they are so mixed up with each other that it is very difficult to make a clear-cut division.But I wanted to take it whole; otherwise I could have cut out all that is nonsense and left only that which is true. I wanted to give you a certain insight in how to distinguish whether it is coming from a source of enlightenment or it is just intellectual gymnastics.Because you have become habituated to them since beginningless time, to the point where they have become totally familiar, if you don’t exert yourself to struggle with them, then as time goes on and on, with you unknowing and unawares, they will have entered deeply into you. Finally, on the last day of your life, you won’t be able to do anything about it.Do you see how he forgets himself? If things can be done now, in a single moment of awareness, why can’t you do it at the moment of death? That too will be a now and a single moment. And it will be easier to do at that time than it is now, because now you can postpone for tomorrow. When death is standing in front of you, there is no question of postponing; either you have to do it or not do it. And who would like to carry all his nightmares with him?Ta Hui himself became enlightened just a minute before he was dying. Death can be of immense help, it can be a blessing in disguise, because now there is no future, no tomorrow. You cannot say, “Today I am busy, tomorrow I will meditate.” You have to drop all business. Now the only significant thing to be done is to be alert and aware, get rid of all your past, and move into death – innocent, clean, clear, unburdened. Then your very death becomes the entry into the divine. Then you are not dying; you are entering into eternal life.But Ta Hui says as a thinker, as a teacher, Finally, on the last day of your life, you won’t be able to do anything about it.Nothing has to be done. If one has only to become aware, he can become aware any time, whether the next moment is death or not. But death can become a great incentive to do it immediately. Just the idea of tomorrow makes you say, “It’s okay, there’s no hurry. If not today, then tomorrow” – and tomorrow never comes. It is always today. And you become habituated to postponing for tomorrow. Death for the first time makes you aware that now there is no tomorrow. If you want to be aware, be aware. And the shock of death helps awareness.Many people at the time of death have become enlightened, although their enlightenment remains unknown, because after it they simply die. Their enlightenment never helps anybody else because there is no time, but still it is great – at least they have managed it for themselves.If you want to be able to avoid going wrong when you face the end of your life, then from now on whenever you do anything, don’t let yourself slip.He goes on, up and down. Those few sentences were absolutely right. Now again he has come to doing.If you go wrong in your present doings, it will be impossible not to go wrong when you’re facing death.Meditation is not a question of doing at all. Meditation is a question of awakening.There’s a sort of person who reads scriptures, recites the Buddha-name, and repents in the morning, but then in the evening runs off at the mouth, slandering and vilifying other people. The next day he does homage to Buddha and repents as before. All through the years till the end of his life, he takes this as daily ritual – this is extreme folly. Such people are far from realizing that the Sanskrit word ‘kshama’ means to repent faults. This is called “cutting off the continuing mind.”Now what he is saying is absolutely applicable to him – he is repeating good words, he is repeating scriptures. He may be worshipping the Buddha, being a Buddhist monk. What he is saying seems to be his own experience.It is true. Millions of people in the world are doing the same – whether they are Christians or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists or Jainas, it does not make any difference. They are the same people. When they are in the temple they pretend to be religious. This one hour of religion is not going to help because twenty-three hours are canceling it continuously. Twenty-three times more they are irreligious. This one hour religion is just a self-deception.And you can see how he goes on mixing things. The Sanskrit word kshama does not mean repenting faults. kshama means forgiving, forgiving others and forgiving yourself too – forgiving because you were unconscious and others are unconscious. This forgiveness will bring some awareness to you.Every year Jainas have one day, Kshamavani, the day of forgiving, when even enemies have to meet each other and forgive each other. And the miracle is that after the day is gone the enemies are still enemies; nothing has happened, it’s just a ritual.We can make a ritual of every great thing. You step on somebody’s feet and you say, “I am sorry.” Do you really mean it or is it just a social convention? It makes life smooth, but it does not come from your very being. You don’t even think about it.But certainly he catches hold of a sentence which is not from ordinary teachers: This is called “cutting off the continuing mind.”You can see the contradiction. A person who lives in repentance cannot be said to be “cutting his mind.”Repentance is always about the past.It is a feeling of guilt – “I have done wrong.”“Cutting the mind” means that the past is no more – “it was a dark night and I was unconscious. Things that have happened were out of my sleep; now I don’t have any connection with that old past.” Not having any connection with the mind means not having any connection with the past.Your mind is your past.The whole past is continuously gathering in the mind. Cutting the mind away from yourself, you are cutting your past and you are starting anew, fresh.This is what the great masters have said: Die each moment to the past, and be reborn for the new, for the fresh, for that which is coming – dying each moment because past is being created every moment.Your present is nothing but continuously becoming past – why go on gathering an unnecessary weight? It is better that each moment you go on cutting yourself from the past. Don’t carry any scratches from the past and remain available and open to the future. Soon the future will also become past.The moment anything becomes past, cut yourself away from it. Then you can die just like an innocent child, then your death will be just like a birth: no past, an innocent mind.And this is the right death because it is not an ending of life, but a beginning of a greater life – of a life which will not be encased in the body, but will be spread all over existence: you will dance in the trees and you will smile in the flowers and you will shine in the stars. Your freedom will be total and you won’t have any boundaries.Once you have cut it off, never continue it again; once you have repented, do not commit again – this is the meaning of repentance according to our Buddha.He does not know the Buddha. Buddha does not teach repentance; he simply teaches awareness.Repentance is a dangerous technique. It is just like Catholic confession. Every religion has managed to create some cheap substitute that everybody can do and feel good. You go to the church, you confess to the priest, and you think that you are freed. Now the priest will tell God and you are forgiven. But in reality what happens when you come out of the confessional is that you are again ready to commit the same things. There is no problem. Next week you can again confess.Hindus go to the Ganges to take a bath. Every twelve years a great gathering – perhaps the greatest in the world – happens in Prayag. Hindus from all over the country, and even from outside the country, just come there to have a dip in the Ganges, because it is thought that the moment you take a dip in the Ganges all your sins, even all your wrongdoings, are washed away.I used to go to Prayag many times, but I have never taken a dip in the Ganges. I love swimming and I have been swimming in many rivers, but never in the Ganges. I used to stay with a family. They said, “This is strange. You love swimming, you always go to the rivers when you are in other cities, but here where the whole country comes to take a dip…”I said, “That is the reason – so many sins must be afloat here and for centuries people have been dipping in it. It is very dangerous. I keep away from the place because if their sins are really washed away here…as long as we can remember – at least ten thousand years – millions and millions of people have been washing their sins here. This is the dirtiest place in the whole world. I cannot step in it.”The man was very much shocked because he was always bragging that he lived near the Ganges and took a dip in it every day. I said, “You are an idiot. Every day! You must have gathered so many sins that now even God cannot help you.”He said, “But nobody ever thought about it.”I said, “Who thinks? People simply go on doing what others are doing. And you are a doctor, well educated, well known in your area – at least you should not be so superstitious and stupid. If sins can be washed away by the Ganges, that simply means you are again ready to commit sins. What is the problem? Go on committing as many sins as you want to commit. The Ganges is there – just go and have a dip.”These are the religious priests exploiting people so cunningly, giving them hope, giving them simple tricks to deceive even God.When you have nothing to do, you should sit quietly and keep the mind from slackening and the body from wavering. If you practice to perfection over a long, long time, naturally body and mind will come to rest at ease, and you will have some direction in the path. The perfection of quiescence and stillness indeed settles the scattered and confused false consciousness of sentient beings, but if you cling to quiescent stillness and consider it the ultimate, then you’re in the grip of perverted “silent illumination” Ch’an.This small school of silent illumination is one of the highly evolved methodologies about awareness, but Ta Hui does not belong to that small line of illumined people.The mind always thinks of doing something.When you are doing something, mind is nourished. When you are not doing anything, mind starts dying. Mind is almost like a bicycle. If you go on pedaling, the bicycle goes on moving. If you stop pedaling, it may go a few feet because of the old momentum, but finally it has to fall. Mind needs continuous doing. Do something…that is the pedaling that keeps the mind going on.This school of “silent illumination” Ch’an, which Ta Hui speaks continually against, is of a far higher quality than Ta Hui can understand. These people simply sit silently. They don’t do anything – good or bad. They simply don’t do anything. If somebody offers food they can take it; if nobody offers food they remain hungry, but they don’t do anything for it.And existence is so compassionate that if a certain person is simply sitting silently, he creates a field of silence around him. Somebody is bound to be attracted toward him. No “silent illumination” Ch’an adept has died of hunger or cold. Somebody has come to cover him, somebody has brought some food, somebody has brought water. Not even a single man of that lineage has died…and they have attained to the highest peak of illumination.It seems Ta Hui feels a certain jealously that these people don’t do anything and still they are worshipped. These people don’t do anything; still they are thought to be living buddhas. His own leanings are for moral works, good works, service to the people. He is an intellectual. But it seems before he died he became tired of his intellectual approach, because he had not gained anything.At the last moment of his life, he must have realized that he had wasted his life unnecessarily wandering in a desert where nothing grows. This realization, in a single moment, changed his whole character, his whole being. His whole life he was only a teacher, but he died as a master. If he had lived a little more, perhaps he would have asked forgiveness from the people who belong to the “silent illumination” ch’an. We don’t know. Perhaps inside his own being he must have asked for forgiveness.But he seems to be jealous because he is teaching, he is doing good, he is serving people; he is moving from town to town bringing people to the feet of Gautam Buddha, and these people don’t worship Buddha. They don’t even chant Buddha’s name. They simply sit silently. They don’t have any records because they don’t say anything. Their whole being is their statement. They are themselves buddhas. Why should they chant the name of Buddha, why should they worship Buddha, why should they go to the Buddha’s temple?My own sympathy is not with Ta Hui. My own sympathy is with those “silent illumination” Ch’an people. They are the very salt of the earth.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Do Not Grasp Another’s BowActively try to clear out your mind, then you won’t go wrong; since you don’t go wrong, correct mindfulness stands out alone. When correct mindfulness stands out alone, inner truth adapts to phenomena; when inner truth adapts to events and things, events and things come to fuse in inner truth. When phenomena fuse with their inner truth, you save power; when you feel the saving, this is the empowerment of studying the path. In gaining power you save unlimited power; in saving power you gain unlimited power.This matter may be taken up by brilliant, quick-witted folks, but if you depend on your brilliance and quick wits, you won’t be able to bear up. It is easy for keen and bright people to enter, but hard for them to preserve it. That’s because generally their entry is not very deep and the power is meager. With the intelligent and quick-witted, as soon as they hear a spiritual friend mention this matter their eyes stir immediately, and they are already trying to gain understanding through their mind’s discriminating intellect. People like this are creating their own hindrances, and will never have a moment of awakening. “When devils from outside wreak calamity, it can still be remedied,” but this reliance on intellectual discrimination amounts to “When one’s own family creates disaster, it cannot be averted.” This is what Yung Chia meant when he said, “The loss of the wealth of the dharma, and the demise of virtue, all stem from mind’s discriminating intellect.”The Mind’s Conceptual DiscriminationThe obstruction of the path by the mind, and its conceptual discrimination, is worse than poisonous snakes or fierce tigers. Why? Because poisonous snakes and fierce tigers can still be avoided, whereas intelligent people make the mind’s conceptual discrimination their home, so that there’s never a single instant – whether they’re walking, standing, sitting, or lying down – that they’re not having dealings with it. As time goes on, unknowing and unawares they become one piece with it – and not because they want to, either, but because since beginningless time they have followed this one little road until it’s become set and familiar. Though they may see through it for a moment and wish to detach from it, they still can’t. Thus it is said that poisonous snakes and fierce tigers can still be avoided, but the mind’s conceptual discrimination truly has no place for you to escape.The great problem with people like Ta Hui is their own intellect. Even if they are talking against intellect, it is nothing but their own intellect. The intellect is capable of creating an illusion that you are going beyond intellect, but the illusion can be easily detected.The things that Ta Hui is saying in these sutras, he must have heard from a very right source. But he himself is only an intellectual; hence everything that passes through his intellect changes its form. This change is so subtle that unless one becomes enlightened himself, he will never see where the intellect has deceived him.Just listen to what he is saying:Actively try to clear out your mind.Who are you? Do you know yourself as distinct from the mind? If you know yourself as distinct from the mind, the mind is cleared away. The question of actively trying to clear out your mind does not arise. The mind is there because you are not there; you are fast asleep, you are not alert. The darkness is there because you have not brought even a single candle, and just a small candle is enough to dispel vast darkness. This is how the mind misinterprets – and still it feels that one is going on the right path.The enlightened man can say to you, “Dispel all darkness.” But the only way to dispel darkness is to bring light in. The intellectual will understand that dispelling darkness means actively fighting with darkness, throwing it out of the house. But can you manage to empty your room of darkness just by bringing out buckets full of darkness and throwing it away? The room will still remain dark. The only thing that will happen will be a tremendous frustration, tiredness, disgust with the whole idea. But if you had an understanding that is not from the mind, but from the beyond…that comes only through meditation, and this man is not talking about meditation at all.It is only through meditation that your inner light, which is dormant, becomes suddenly active and alive. It is an eternal source of light. Once the light is there, darkness is automatically dispelled. Even to say dispelled is wrong, because darkness does not exist; it is only the absence of the light. Darkness does not have its own existence, so you cannot do anything directly with it.Whatever you want to do with darkness, you will have to do something with light. If you want darkness, put the light off. If you don’t want darkness, put the light on. But you can act only with light, because light is a positive existence. Darkness is simply an absence of light – and so is the state of our mind.Mind is your absence. The moment you are present, there is no mind.So the absolute emphasis of all the buddhas of all the centuries has been simply this: Come to consciousness, become a presence, and there will be no place for the mind and all its ingredients – greed, anger, delusion, dreams, hallucinations, ambitions, the whole lot.If you start listening to people like Ta Hui and working according to their idea, you will get more and more in a mess. He is saying, actively try to clear out your mind. He is giving you a wrong direction, without any intention to take you on a wrong path. But intentions don’t matter. What matters is whether the indication is in the right direction or not.Nothing can be done directly with the mind.He says, Actively try to clear out your mind, then you won’t go wrong, but the first condition cannot be fulfilled. You will be going wrong all the time. But he is accepting that the first condition can be fulfilled.Not a single enlightened person has ever said that you can do anything directly with the mind, but because he accepts that idea, he goes on and on. …then you won’t go wrong; since you don’t go wrong, correct mindfulness stands out alone. Still, it is mindfulness.Meditation is not mindfulness. Meditation is a state of no-mind.Mindfulness is still intelligence. You can be highly intelligent – that does not mean that you know meditation.A great contemporary British philosopher, C.E.M. Joad, was very much disturbed by the ideas of George Gurdjieff and his disciple, P.D. Ouspensky. He was sick, and he was reading P.D. Ouspensky’s book on the teachings of Gurdjieff. He was one of the great philosophers of the century.Joad told one of his friends, “I hear Ouspensky is in London, but I am not in a good enough condition to go and talk to him. The doctors say I should rest in bed. But I cannot wait, because it may be that I am just counting my last days, any day may be the end. Can you go to Ouspensky and tell him my situation…and if he can come, it will be very kind of him. I want to talk to him, because I don’t understand what this no-mind is. Beyond mind, I cannot understand there is anything.”Joad had worked his whole life with the mind, and he knew what the mind was, but he had never gone beyond the boundary. “In fact,” he said to the friend, “the people who go beyond the mind go into an insane asylum. We say mad people are ‘out of their mind.’ And this strange man Gurdjieff goes on talking about no-mind. You go and persuade Ouspensky! Perhaps, knowing my name, he may come.”Ouspensky came, and Joad said to him, “I cannot understand at all what this no-mind is. I can understand mind, I can even understand mindfulness, but no-mind is simply beyond my conceivability.”Ouspensky said, “It is a very simple matter. I am sitting here. You just close your eyes and remember one thing: whatever is going before your inner eye is the mind, and the presence in front of which the mind is passing is the no-mind.”Joad had never done any such thing. He closed his eyes…a half hour passed, one hour passed, and his face was looking so silent, so serene. Ouspensky had some other appointment, so he had to wake him up. He told him, “I am sorry to disturb you – you were going really deep.”And Joad said, “I am immensely grateful. I cannot express my gratitude…I had never thought about the possibility that I can watch the mind; that certainly means I am not the mind. The watcher is certainly different from the watched. And rather than explaining it to me intellectually, you gave me the experience itself. It was so beautiful and so silent. These last days, staying in bed, I have nothing else to do. I am going to continue watching my mind.”“Perhaps Gurdjieff is right, and perhaps the Eastern mystics are right. And this is the right time for me. If I can get away from the mind into myself, into my witnessing, into my watching – what they call no-mind – perhaps I will go from life not feeling that I lived meaninglessly.”After just ten days he died. But before his death, he dictated to his secretary a small statement to be delivered to George Gurdjieff and to Ouspensky. He said, “I am dying with great gratitude – you showed me the way. Now death does not matter, now nothing matters. I have tasted something of the beyond, of the eternal. Mind was the barrier. I was thinking mind is all that we have, but I never thought that mind is just an instrument, like any other instrument.”You have kidneys, you have hands, you have legs; if your hand is cut off, that does not mean that you are destroyed. You are more than the total sum of your parts – that is the meaning of no-mind. You are not an arithmetical entity, you are a spiritual being.I would like to repeat so that you remember it: You are more than the sum total of your parts, and that which is more than the sum total of your parts is your real being. A machine is not more than the sum total; a machine is exactly equal to the sum total of its parts.It is only life which is more than its sum total.And when life becomes conscious, it is even more.And when consciousness becomes absolute illumination, it is tremendously more. The sum total of your parts remains far behind, a very small, tiny thing. You become as vast as the sky itself.But Ta Hui has no understanding yet. He is still talking like a thinker.When correct mindfulness stands out alone, inner truth adapts to phenomena; when inner truth adapts to events and things, events and things come to fuse in inner truth. When phenomena fuse with their inner truth, you save power…That too has to be understood. Power from the lips of Ta Hui is not the same power about which a Gautam Buddha may talk.Power – according to the mind – is always power over others. Mind is continuously trying to dominate, to enslave, to be powerful over others, because mind has no power of its own. All its power is borrowed. What does the prime minister of any country have as his power? Just the votes that he has begged. He is really the greatest beggar in the country. All his power belongs to the people; he does not have any power of his own.So when the mind talks about power, it talks about politics, it talks about domination, it talks about possessiveness; it talks about increasing your empire of riches, of power, of prestige, in whatever way, so you can become a dominant figure.But the power that the awakened one talks about is not power over others. He talks about it as an intrinsic explosion, just like the atomic explosion. It is not the power that is coming from outside; it is the power that was deep inside the atomic cell. Because the atom has exploded, the power is all over the place.A very strange piece of information has come to me just the other day…a Japanese scientist had been continuously watching, studying the effects of atomic energy and its radiation in and around Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Forty years have passed since the atomic explosion happened there, when the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.This one scientist really risked his life; nobody goes to Hiroshima because everything is full of radiation, but he went and lived there for a few weeks, just to see what effect the radiation would have. And when he came back he brought a great surprise to his fellow scientists. He looked ten years younger, and healthier than he had ever been.They were all surprised, because nobody had thought…it had always been thought that radiation will kill, but he has discovered that radiation will kill only in a certain great quantity. It is a question of degrees. In small quantities it can help to destroy disease, to give man a longer life, to keep him young until his death. Now he has prepared a small ceramic paper, with a very small dose of radiation coming out of it. He thinks that keeping that in your room will be enough for you to remain healthy and younger!I have always been saying that energy is neutral: that which can destroy, can also create; we just have to discover how it destroys and how it creates.This Japanese scientist has done a tremendous service to the coming humanity. It means that if the nations are willing, and if their stupid politicians don’t hinder it, then all the atomic energy and nuclear weapons that they have gathered can be brought to the service of life – to bring more health to the world, to dispel illness, to dispel hunger, to dispel old age, to make man live longer and remain younger.The power of the atomic bomb is not power coming from outside; it is the power of the atom which was dormant, sleeping, and has been awakened. If this is possible through the atom – which is part of electricity, just a small particle – what is possible if we can explode the living being of a man? A small particle of his consciousness, if it explodes, is going to bring so much light and so much power.Perhaps the mystics who have always been talking about power were talking about the power that they were feeling inside themselves. It has nothing to do with dominating anybody. Their power has been used as compassion, their power has been used for showering flowers over others. Their power has not ever been used for any destructive purpose, in the service of death.But the word power itself is dangerous, because ordinarily its association is with politics. When Ta Hui uses the word power he does not understand that the mystics have used it in a different way, totally opposite. He says,When phenomena fuse with their inner truth, you save power; when you feel the saving this is the empowerment of studying the path. In gaining power you save unlimited power; in saving power you gain unlimited power.The way he is saying it is clear: unlimited power – over whom? Why this emphasis on power?The power that comes out of meditation does not come as power. It comes as if flowers are showering on you; it comes as fragrance, it comes as love, it comes as compassion. It brings all the great qualities and all the great values of life suddenly to their blossoming. It is the spring of your consciousness. Everything suddenly becomes green, everything becomes cool; the breeze becomes full of fragrance, because you are bursting forth into flowers which cannot be seen by the eye. But those who have the heart and the courage to open to it will certainly feel it. They will feel its song, they will feel its dance.But the word power is not to be used. It has been associated with wrong people – they have contaminated it.This matter may be taken up by brilliant, quick-witted folks…And he himself is nothing but a brilliant, quick-witted folk.…but if you depend on your brilliance and quick wits, you won’t be able to bear up. It is easy for keen and bright people to enter, but hard for them to preserve it. That’s because generally their entry is not very deep and the power is meager. With the intelligent and quick-witted, as soon as they hear a spiritual friend mention this matter, their eyes stir immediately and they are already trying to gain understanding through their mind’s discriminating intellect.Ta Hui has a misunderstanding. Mind has only one power and that is the discriminating intellect; it has no other power.Because of its discriminating intellect, mind is so useful in science, and it is absolutely a hindrance in spiritual growth. There you don’t need any intellect. All that you need is a deep trust in existence, a deep reverence for life.Intellect is never trust, it is always doubt. Spiritual growth is hindered more by doubt than anything else, but how can you gain trust? Doubt is natural to the mind; trust is not part of the mind. How can you come to trust?That’s why all spiritual teachings emphasize a deep intimate relationship with someone who has gone ahead of you. You need to be related to one who is already awakened. His very awakening will become an evidence, an argument for you to dispel all doubt, and to dispel all mind.You have to come in contact with a man who lives as a no-mind, who lives as silence.His silence is luminous. It is contagious. If you come close to such a man, you are bound to be caught in the net of his radiating love, his radiating awareness. Only that experience will create trust in you, will give you the feeling that if this beautiful flowering can happen to one man…and I am also a man. It will remind you of your own potential: there is no need to doubt; if this man can blossom into such a beautiful flower…I am also a man.The presence of the enlightened person brings a great dignity to you, a great pride, which is not ego…a pride that you are a human being full of the potential of being a buddha.And once trust has arisen in you, you are on the path.Trust is another name of the path.Doubt is the name of going astray.Intellect is nothing but another name of doubt. Doubt is a beautiful instrument as far as science is concerned, but doubt is not of any help to go beyond the mind. To go beyond the mind you need trust, and trust has a beauty of its own. Doubt has no beauty, it is ugly. It does not give you integrity, it always keeps you suspicious.Once trust has arisen in you, you are beyond the dangers of the mind.But Ta Hui has not understood, although he has been from one master to another – to many masters. Perhaps that has created the whole confusion in him. In those many masters, a few may have been just teachers, a few may not have even been teachers, but people who love to advise – whether they know anything or not. They enjoy advising, because in advising they become higher than you; you are ignorant, and they are knowledgeable.I have been part of a psychology department in a university. There were four other psychologists in the department, and they were all practicing psychoanalysis, except me. I never believed in any kind of analysis, any kind of psychology, because I don’t want to do anything with the mind at all. But you will be surprised, they were giving counseling to sick people – mentally sick, psychologically sick. They were analyzing, and they were earning much money, but they were suffering from the same problems.I was the only one available, so they were all asking me, “What to do with this problem that never leaves us?”I said, “You are great psychoanalysts; you counsel people, you help people.”They said, “Don’t make a laughingstock of us! We know the technique, we have learned psychoanalysis, and we advise.”But I said, “If you cannot follow your own advice, what right have you got to give it to somebody else?”I used to tell them an ancient Sufi story. A woman was very much disturbed by her young child – she had only one child, and her husband had died. She was rich, but she had lost all interest in life. She was living simply because of this small child, and certainly in such circumstances, children are spoiled; the child would not eat anything except sweets. The doctors were saying, “This is bad, his whole health will be spoiled.” But the child was not listening.The woman used to go to the Sufi mystic, so one day she thought, “He does not listen to me, but perhaps he may listen to the mystic, because the man is so radiant that anybody who goes close to him feels impressed.”She took the child and she told the mystic, “He does not listen to anybody. Doctors tell him that his health will be spoiled, and I am telling him every day. His whole food consists only of sweets; otherwise he prefers to remain hungry. He is my only child, my husband is dead, and I am only living for him. I cannot see him hungry, so I have to give him sweets, knowing well that I am giving poison to him – white sugar is white poison. So I have brought him. You tell him something! You are a man of God, perhaps your words may have a different impact.”The mystic looked at the child. He said, “My son, I am not in a position to answer you right now because I myself love to eat sweets. You come back after two weeks. For two weeks I will not eat sweets, if I can manage it. Only then can I advise; otherwise, I am not the right person to advise.”The woman could not believe it. This could even be dangerous…but the child was immensely impressed. He touched the feet of the mystic. He said, “I have been taken to many people; my mother goes on taking me to this wise guy, to that wise guy, and they all go on advising immediately. You are the first man who is sincere. I will come after two weeks, and whatever you say, I will do. I can trust you.”A man who confesses before a child… “Right now I am not in the right position even to advise you, because I myself like sweets; so for two weeks I will have to try my advice on myself, and then you come.“If I fail, I will say, ‘I am sorry, I cannot advise you.’ If I succeed, then I will say, ‘Don’t be worried, if I can succeed – an old man – you are so young and so powerful, and so intelligent, you can succeed also. Just give it a try!’”The mother was shocked. If the mystic says after two weeks that he cannot succeed, then the whole thing is finished; then there is nobody else to whom she can take the child.After two weeks, they came back. The mystic said, “My son, it is difficult but not impossible. I managed not to eat sweets for two weeks, and I promise you that my whole life I will not touch sweets again. Do you think I can advise you? If you allow me to advise, only then will I do so.”The child said, “There is no need to say anything. I have received the message. I am grateful to you. A man like you who is ready to drop eating sweets for his whole life just to give me the advice that he himself practices, is worthy of trust. I trust you. I also promise you that I will not eat sweets from this moment onward.”I used to tell these psychologists, “When you advise other people, have you ever thought that the advice is coming from somebody who himself suffers from the same problem?”So this Ta Hui must have gone to learned people, to the knowledgeable, to teachers of all kinds. Once in a while perhaps he may have accidentally met an awakened man, a master, a mystic, and he has collected from all these sources; so once in a while there is a statement that seems to be absolutely right. But mostly he has collected all kinds of pieces from sources which are as ignorant as he is, but they were as willing to advise as he is willing to advise.I would like my people to remember it: never advise unless it is your experience. In the world, advice is the only thing which everybody gives and nobody takes, so why bother? Everybody enjoys giving advice and nobody ever takes it, and the reason is that everybody knows that advice is meant for others – not for yourself.I would like my people to remember: never advise, unless it has been your own authentic experience. Then too you can simply say, “This has been my experience. It is not necessary that it will be right for you – you can experiment. If you feel that it brings more harmony to your life, more joy, you can go ahead. If you feel it is not bringing anything…because individuals are different. What fits me may not fit you, what is medicine to me may be simply poison to you.”An absolutely alert man is always alert about what advice to give and what not to give. Even if he gives advice, it is always conditional – conditional upon experiment. He says it only as a hypothesis: “You try a little bit – perhaps it works. If it works, good. If it does not work, don’t go on doing it. It has helped me, that’s true, but that does not mean that it will help everybody on the earth.”People are different; each individual is unique, and each individual needs a unique way that suits him.People like this are creating their own hindrances, and will never have a moment of awakening. “When devils from outside wreak calamity, it can still be remedied,” but this reliance on intellectual discrimination amounts to “When one’s own family creates disaster, it cannot be averted.”He is giving good advice, but he has no experience. I am so certain that he has no experience because so many sentences, so many sutras, give clear-cut indications of ignorance.This is what Yung Chia meant when he said, “The loss of the wealth of the dharma and the demise of virtue all stem from mind’s discriminating intellect.”What he is saying is right, but he himself is not the right person to say it. All his understanding is based on intellect.The statement of Yung Chia is absolutely right: “The loss of the wealth of the dharma and the demise of virtue all stem from mind’s discriminating intellect.”Yung Chia was an enlightened master. He is saying that because of the mind, the world has become irreligious; because of the mind, all that is great has disappeared. It was perfectly true for Yung Chia to say it; it was his own experience. But Ta Hui is simply repeating it. The words are beautiful, the sentence is beautiful – he is collecting beautiful flowers from everywhere.The obstruction of the path by the mind, and its conceptual discrimination, is worse than poisonous snakes or fierce tigers.One simply cannot believe that a man is saying things which he has not experienced! And he has not gone beyond them.Why? Because poisonous snakes and fierce tigers can still be avoided, whereas intelligent people make the mind’s conceptual discrimination their home, so that there’s never a single instant, whether they’re walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, that they’re not having dealings with it. As time goes on, unknowing and unawares, they become one piece with it – and not because they want to, either, but because since beginningless time they have followed this one little road until it has become set and familiar. Though they may see through it for a moment, and wish to detach from it, they still can’t. Thus it is said that poisonous snakes and fierce tigers can still be avoided, but the mind’s conceptual discrimination truly has no place for you to escape.All that he is saying is right – but he is not. This has to be understood clearly: a wrong man can say right things, although a right man can never say wrong things. For the right man to say wrong things is impossible, but for the wrong man to say right things is very possible because it hides his wrongness. It becomes a cover-up to his ignorance.In the world there are millions of teachers, priests, monks, belonging to different religions and different paths; they are all repeating beautiful words, but because they come from them, they lose all beauty.They are the same words spoken by Zarathustra, by Lao Tzu, by Jesus Christ, by Gautam Buddha; they are the same words, but the man who is speaking is not the same. And those words have significance only if they are supported by an existential individual standing behind them. Those words are living only if they come from a living source. Hence, my insistence is: never bother about dead saints, never bother about holy scriptures.Try to find a living master.The living master contains all the scriptures and all the dead saints. Through the living master, whatever comes to you goes directly into your heart.The living master never misses the target.A beautiful story for the end.There was a carnival going on in the town, and Mulla Nasruddin asked all his disciples to come with him. He would take them to the carnival to teach them a few things; that was his usual method, to take his disciples to actual situations. As they entered, the whole crowd there became interested, because they always knew that wherever Nasruddin is, something interesting is going to happen.He was there with his fifty disciples following him. He went directly into a stall, where people were putting down money; if they could hit the bull’s-eye with the arrow, the stall keeper would give them three times as much money, and if they missed, their money was gone. Many people were trying, but it is not easy unless you are an archer.Mulla Nasruddin went there, put ten rupees on the table, and took the bow and arrow. There was great silence. His fifty disciples were standing behind him, and a great crowd watching and thinking, “We never thought that this Mulla Nasruddin is an archer also. Now let us see what happens!” He took a shot, and the arrow simply went far away beyond the bull’s-eye.Everybody laughed! He said, “Stop!” He turned toward his disciples and said, “Look, this is the arrow of a man who is too ambitious. He always misses the point, he goes far away.” Even the stall keeper became interested….Nasruddin took out another arrow, took a shot, and the arrow fell just in front of him. Again people laughed. He said, “You idiots, stop! I have brought my disciples here to teach them something.” And he turned to the disciples, and said, “Look, this is the arrow of a man who is always hesitant, wishy-washy – to die or not to die? Because of this either/or situation, he always falls short; he never hits the bull’s-eye.” The people became silent – “He is right.”He pulled out the third arrow, and the stall keeper was also silent – “This man has some ideas and he is not wrong.” And Mulla hit the bull’s-eye, took his ten rupee note, and asked for twenty more.The stall keeper said, “What!”Mulla said, “This is Mulla Nasruddin’s arrow; he never misses the target. You just bring twenty rupees!”People laughed, but the stall keeper had to give twenty rupees. The disciples also said, “This is too much! In fact, if he had missed again, he would again have brought some explanation; this is just accidental. But he is a great man, there is no doubt about it.”He was able to bring as many explanations as possible. If you go on shooting, one time it is going to hit; whenever it hits, it is Mulla Nasruddin’s arrow.Mulla Nasruddin walked away with his thirty rupees and his disciples. He said, “Come on, you can enjoy some sweets, some fruits. Take these twenty rupees. Just leave my ten rupees, because only those ten belong to me; the other twenty came only from tricks.”The so-called teachers like Ta Hui go on saying things, and among so many things, once in a while there may be one arrow hitting the target. But my concern is to show you how humanity has been deceived by teachers. Ta Hui was honored by the emperor of China as a great Ch’an master, a great Zen master, and he has been accepted as a great Zen master since then. When the emperor honored him with the title, who is going to dispute it?It is now almost one thousand years ago, and nobody has raised the question that these are not the words of a man who is enlightened. It is basically to teach you a certain awareness and clarity, so that when you hear someone or read someone you can feel whether it is coming from an enlightened source or from a dark source – from someone who knows how to collect beautiful words, someone who is knowledgeable, someone who can deceive even emperors. But emperors are nothing but human beings – just like you!For one thousand years, even Zen people have not taken Ta Hui to task. That is also something to be understood. Every tradition goes on protecting its people; whether they are right or wrong is not the question. The question is that they belong to their tradition; they have to be right.This has messed up the whole atmosphere of the world. It has created such confusion for the whole of humanity. It seems that people are not interested in helping humanity grow into consciousness; they are more interested in their own line, in their own heritage, and in proving that it is right.Naturally nobody else interferes. Perhaps I am the only man who goes on searching. I don’t care whether the person is Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Christian, or a Buddhist, or a Jew, or a Jaina.To me the whole humanity is one.And the whole heritage of the past is mind.I would like to make a clear-cut distinction for the future, so that all those who are not right should be known as not right, and those who are right – to whichever tradition they belong – should be declared right.In fact, in other words: I would like in the world only two traditions – the people who are right and the people who are wrong – to simplify things. Their future generations don’t have to worry; otherwise it is such a confusing mess. You are not supposed to say that anything wrong is wrong, because it belongs to your heritage.It happened that in my village, between my house and a temple, there was a piece of land. For some technical reason, my father was able to win the case if he took it to court – only on technical reasons. The land was not ours, the land belonged to the temple. But the technical reason was this: the map of the temple did not show that the land was in their territory. It was some fault of the municipal committee’s clerical staff; they had put the land onto my father’s property.Naturally in court there was no question; the temple had no right to say that it was their land. Everybody knew it was their land, my father knew it was their land. But the land was precious, it was just on the main street, and every technical and legal support was on my father’s side. He brought the case to the court.I told him, “Listen” – I must have been not more than eleven years old – “I will go to the court to support the temple. I don’t have anything to do with the temple, I have never even gone inside the temple, whatever it is, but you know perfectly well that the land is not yours.”He said, “What kind of son are you? You will witness against your own father?”I said, “It is not a question of father and son; in the court it is a question of what is true. And not only will your son be there; your father I have also convinced.”He said, “What!”I had a very deep friendship with my grandfather, so we had consulted. I had told him, “You have to support me because I am only eleven years old. The court may not accept my witnessing because I am not an adult, so you have to support me. You know perfectly well that the land is not ours.”He said, “I am with you.”So I told my father, “Just listen, from both sides, from your father and from your son…you simply withdraw the case; otherwise you will be in such a trouble, you will lose the case. It is only technically that you are able to claim. But we are not going to support a technical mistake on the part of the municipal clerk.”He said, “You don’t understand a simple thing, that a family means…you have to support your family.”I said, “No, I will support the family only if the family is right. I will support whoever is right.”He talked to my grandfather who said, “I have already promised your son that I will be going with him.”My father said, “That means I will have to withdraw the case and lose that valuable piece of land!”He said, “What can be done about it? Your son is going to create trouble for you, and seeing the situation, that he will not in any way be persuaded, I have agreed with him – just to make his position stronger so that you can withdraw; it is better to withdraw than to get defeated.”My father said, “But this is a strange family! I am working for you all. I am working for you, I am working for my son – I am not working for myself. If we can have a beautiful shop on that land you will have a better, more comfortable old age; he will have a better education in a better university. And you are against me.”My grandfather said, “I am not against anybody, but he has taken my promise, and I cannot go against my word – at least as far as he is concerned – because he is dangerous, he may put me in some trouble. So I cannot deceive him; I will say whatever he is saying. And he is saying the truth – and you know it.”So my father had to withdraw the case – reluctantly…but he had to withdraw the case. I asked my grandfather to bring some sweets so we can distribute them in the neighborhood. My father has come to his senses, it has to be celebrated. He said, “That seems to be the right thing to do.”When my father saw that I was distributing sweets, he asked, “What are you doing? – for what? What has happened?”I said, “You have come back to your senses. Truth is victorious.” And I gave him a sweet also.He laughed. He said, “I can understand your standpoint, and my own father is with you, so I thought it is better that I should also be with you. It is better to withdraw without any problem. But I have learned a lesson.” He said to me, “I cannot depend on my family. If there is any trouble they are not going to support me just because they belong to me as father, as son, as brother. They are going to support whatever is true.”And since that time no other situation ever arose, because he never did anything in which we had to disagree. He remained truthful and sincere.Many times in his life he told me, “It was so good of you; otherwise I was going to take that land, and I would have committed a crime knowingly. You prevented me, and not only from that crime, you prevented me from then onward. Whenever there was a similar situation, I always decided in favor of truth, whatever the loss. But now I can see: truth is the only treasure. You can lose your whole life, but don’t lose your truth.”This is what I want you to learn from Ta Hui’s teachings: to experiment in seeing what is right and why it is right, what is wrong and why it is wrong, and also to know that even right becomes wrong when it comes from a wrong mind, from a wrong person.Truth needs to be born out of an experience of truthfulness. It is a very delicate flower but the most precious treasure in life, because it brings liberation, it brings freedom, it brings to you your own immortality.But never be a borrower, never depend on the other’s knowledge. A small piece of your own experience is far more important than all the Vedas, all the Korans, all the Bibles, all the Talmuds. A little experience of your own inner being is more valuable than all the buddhas of all the ages.Truth has to be your own.Only then is it alive, with a beating heart.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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There Is Nothing to AttainGentlemen of affairs often take the mind, which assumes there is something to attain, to seek the dharma, wherein there is nothing to attain. What do I mean by “the mind, which assumes there is something to attain”? It’s the intellectually clever one, the one that ponders and judges. What do I mean by “the dharma, wherein there is nothing to attain”? It’s the imponderable, the incalculable, where there’s no way to apply intelligence or cleverness.Haven’t you read of old Shakyamuni at the assembly of the lotus of the true dharma? Three times Sariputta earnestly entreated him to preach, but there was simply no way for him to begin. Afterward, using all his power, he managed to say that this dharma is not something that can be understood by thought or discrimination. This was old Shakyamuni taking this matter to its ultimate conclusion, opening the gateway of expedient means as a starting point for the teaching of the true nature of reality.When Hsueh Feng, a truly awakened master, heard of the teaching of Chou, master of the adamantine wisdom scripture, on Te Shan, he went to his abode. One day he asked Te Shan, “In the custom of the school that has come down from high antiquity, what doctrine is used to instruct people?” Te Shan said, “Our school has no verbal expression, nor does it have any doctrine to teach people.” Later Hsueh Feng also asked, “Do I have any share in the business of the vehicle of this ancient school?” Te Shan picked up his staff and immediately hit him saying, “What are you saying?” Under this blow Hsueh Feng finally smashed the lacquer bucket of his ignorance. From this we observe that in this sect intelligence and cleverness, thought and judgment, are of no use at all.An ancient worthy had a saying: “Transcendent wisdom is like a great mass of fire. Approach it and it burns off your face.” If you hesitate in thought and speculation, you immediately fall into conceptual discrimination. Yung Chia said, “Loss of the wealth of the dharma and destruction of virtue all stems from the mind’s conceptual discrimination.”Once you have the intent to investigate this path to the end, you must settle your resolve and vow to the end of your days not to retreat or fall back so long as you have not yet reached the great rest, the great surcease, the great liberation. There’s not much to the buddha dharma, but it’s always been hard to find capable people.One of the greatest contributions of Gautam the Buddha to humanity is that religion is not to attain something. That which you want to attain you already have, so any effort to attain it is simply stupid. You have got your illumination within, you have got your enlightenment ready to explode at any moment, but the problem is you are never here and now. You are wandering and searching all over the world, and this search, this constant urge to achieve, has a certain psychology in it.The mind is empty, and emptiness hurts like a wound. The mind cannot look back, it can only look ahead. To fill its emptiness it goes on achieving money, power, prestige, respectability. But nothing satisfies it because its emptiness is infinite. It may have any amount of money – still more is needed. It may have any amount of power – still more is needed.The constant urge in the mind is for more and more, that’s why it is never at rest. It cannot be at rest; it has to achieve more. No one in the whole history of mankind has ever said that his mind is satisfied; such a statement does not exist in the annals of history.Mind means dissatisfaction, mind means complaints, mind means unfulfilled greed, mind means incomplete desire.Mind is by its very nature a beggar.Diogenes asked Alexander, “Are you satisfied with conquering so many lands?”He said, “No, unless I conquer the whole world I will not be satisfied.”Diogenes said, “Remember my words. Even if you conquer the whole world, the mind will ask for more, and there is no other world to conquer. Remember…you have conquered the world that is, and there is no other world to conquer – and mind is asking for more. You will be in such a frustration that you cannot conceive of it right now.”The day Alexander died, he remembered Diogenes. He had conquered the whole known world, and he was dying in utter frustration because the mind was not content.Mind, by its very nature, cannot be content.In fact, it is the name of your discontent.Before his death, Alexander told his generals and ministers, “When you take my coffin to the grave, let my hands hang out of the coffin.”They said, “What kind of strange idea has come to you? That is not the way – it has never been done! And what is the reason for it?”He said, “I want everybody to know that even Alexander is going with empty hands. A whole life’s effort, not a single moment’s rest, running after more and more, and the ultimate result is just empty hands. Because millions of people will be standing by the side of the road to watch the procession, it will be the right moment to let them see and think. And when they ask, tell them why my hands are hanging out – I am going as unfulfilled as I had come.”Gautam Buddha is very clear about the situation that, if you remain in the mind, you cannot get out of the trap of “more and more.” The only way to get out of the trap of more and more is to get out of the mind.Mind is the greatest disease.Ta Hui is in a strange situation. Sometimes he rises and grasps something of immense importance, but it is still intellectual. His words don’t sound authentic because immediately he says something else that spoils it completely. He certainly has a genius for understanding people, and he has been with many teachers and many masters.In the first place, when somebody is with many teachers and many masters one thing is certain – that he has not yet found the man to be with. Seeing someone, the bells of his heart do not start ringing. He is still searching. This is also because of the mind, which wants more and more. He has understood this teacher, now he wants something more. He goes to another teacher.Ta Hui went on and on searching for teachers his whole life, but this too is in a strange way the same trip – it is not different. Yes, once in a while he had come across a master, but he had not the eyes to recognize him. So he collected his words, but mixed them with the words of those who didn’t know anything. His whole philosophy is a hodgepodge, but we can take out those beautiful diamonds that have fallen into the mud. A diamond is still a diamond although it may be covered with mud.This sutra, There Is Nothing to Attain, he must have heard from someone who really knows. But he has not been able to understand exactly why there is nothing to attain. That is possible to understand only when you are enlightened. That is possible only when you see that all that you had wanted to attain is already given to you; it is intrinsic in your self nature – that’s why there is nothing to attain.He says,Gentlemen of affairs often take the mind, which assumes there is something to attain, to seek the dharma, wherein there is nothing to attain.But he does not give the reason why there is nothing to attain. Truth has to be attained, bliss has to be attained, beauty has to be attained, immortality has to be attained: mind can think only in terms of attainment.I have been talking to thousands of people and so many times people have come to tell me, “You insist on meditation, but you never say what we will attain by it. Even if we meditate, we have to be certain what we are going to attain.”I said, “You don’t understand. Meditation is not for attainment; meditation is just to discover who you are. Whether you discover it or not, you are the same from eternity. It is not an attainment, only a discovery.”Ta Hui, listening to the masters, starts talking against the mind, but in a way which only a man of mind can do. You can see it in his language, his way of stating.What do I mean by “the mind, which assumes there is something to attain”? It is the intellectually clever one, the one that ponders and judges. What do I mean by “the dharma, wherein there is nothing to attain”?But he himself is not aware of why there is nothing to attain – because you already have it!I have said many times that my function is to take away from you all that you don’t have, and to give you all that you already have. Just a thin layer of unconsciousness is covering your treasures. But because the mind becomes worried about its emptiness, its ignorance, naturally it starts seeking and searching somewhere to be somebody. But it can never be somebody. Just behind it, it is already a god, already a buddha, already the awakened one. It is a very strange situation that the emperor is so much surrounded by beggars that slowly, slowly you only know the beggars and you can’t see the emperor behind them.It’s the imponderable, the incalculable, where there’s no way to apply intelligence or cleverness.My difficulty with Ta Hui is that I can see he is simply repeating like a parrot. He himself does not understand what he is saying. He is intelligent enough to grasp the words spoken by the awakened ones, and his memory is good – he can repeat them. But I don’t feel at all that he understands what he is saying.Haven’t you read of old Shakyamuni at the assembly of the lotus of the true dharma? Three times Sariputta earnestly entreated him to preach, but there was simply no way for him to begin. Afterward, using all his power, he managed to say that this dharma is not something that can be understood by thought or discrimination. This was old Shakyamuni taking this matter to its ultimate conclusion, opening the gateway of expedient means as a starting point for the teaching of the true nature of reality.Even when he relates an incident of tremendous importance like this… Every year Gautam Buddha used to have a special assembly called the lotus assembly of the authentic religion. This was a special occasion, when all the wandering monks would gather together, thousands of monks.In one assembly this incident really happened.Sariputta was one of his most intimate disciples, and Sariputta was the head of the lotus assembly. He asked Gautam – entreated him three times – to preach, but Gautam Buddha remained silent. Ta Hui has not understood that silence is his preaching.It was an assembly of people who could understand why he remains silent. Buddha had said all that was needed to be said: Become silent and you will know it. He did not say it, because by saying it, it is defiled, contaminated; he was simply showing it by his own silence. And certainly when Buddha was utterly silent with his eyes closed, the whole assembly became as if there was nobody – a ‘pin drop’ silence.Sariputta asked again and again, and Buddha remained silent. In fact, he had preached, he had given the golden key; he had blessed the whole assembly by his silence.That reminds me of Jesus. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, wanted somehow to release Jesus because he could see he was innocent, he had not done any harm to anybody. He said things which hurt the traditional people – but that was their problem. And they were not able to convince him…that would have been the human way.If you disagree with me, it is perfectly okay. Disagreeing does not mean that you have to crucify me; that is not an argument, and that does not prove you right. In fact, on the contrary, it proves you wrong! Because you could not answer the man, you became angry – so angry, so bloodthirsty, that you killed the man.By crucifying Jesus, his contemporaries sealed his truth, recognized his truth. Crucifixion is a recognition that they accepted their defeat. But before it happened, Pontius Pilate tried to talk to Jesus…and Jesus answered everything. Finally Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?”Jesus looked into his eyes and remained silent. Pontius Pilate asked again, “What is truth?” – exactly three times. And Jesus went on looking into his eyes, but not saying a word. Those who don’t understand may think Jesus does not know the truth; otherwise why is he silent? But the reality is: he is silent because that is the only language in which truth can be expressed.Ta Hui has not got the point. He thinks that, Afterward, using all his power, he managed to say that this dharma is not something that can be understood by thought or discrimination.Buddha never said that; it is not part of authentic history. He remained silent. The assembly was dispersed for that day, and Sariputta declared to the assembly, “I have asked your question – it was not my question. My question he has answered long ago. It was your question, you wanted to know. I asked on your behalf three times, and he has answered three times. I am grateful, and I thank him. The assembly is dispersed for today.”What Ta Hui is saying is really to fill the loophole in his own nonunderstanding with some words. This has never happened: Afterward, using all his power, he managed to say that this dharma is not something that can be understood by thought or discrimination.This is Ta Hui’s own invention, and the reason why he has to invent it is that he himself must be feeling uneasy about the incident with the three silences. He could not understand that Buddha has said it, and now there is nothing else to be said.The assembly was dispersed, and Sariputta knew that this was the answer. There are things which cannot be said, but can be understood. Truth is one of them.This was old Shakyamuni taking this matter to its ultimate conclusion, opening the gateway of expedient means as a starting point for the teaching of the true nature of reality.Again he falls back to the true teaching of the nature of reality. There cannot be any teaching of a true nature: all teaching is philosophizing, all teaching is thinking, all teaching is diametrically opposite to the reality.It is true Buddha went on teaching for forty-two years, but what he is saying is not the truth. Then why he is teaching? He is teaching just to attract people who are entrapped in their intellects. Once they are convinced intellectually, they come closer to him, they become intimate with him. And in that intimacy is the transfer, in that intimacy the silence can be heard. So the forty-two years’ teaching should not be taken at face value…he was doing it only as a device.I am not teaching you anything at all.I am simply preparing you to listen to my silence.Certainly teaching can be used to create silence, just as sound can be used to create silence. But the sound is not the real music…the real music is between the sounds, the gaps, the intervals. Ta Hui has not got the point at all.When Hsueh Feng, a truly awakened master, heard of the teaching of Chou, master of the adamantine wisdom scripture, on Te Shan, he went to his abode. One day he asked Te Shan, “In the custom of the school that has come down from high antiquity, what doctrine is used to instruct people?”Te Shan said, “Our school has no verbal expression, nor does it have any doctrine to teach people.” Later Hsueh Feng also asked, “Do I have any share in the business of the vehicle of this ancient school?”Te Shan picked up his staff and immediately hit him saying, “What are you saying?” Under this blow Hsueh Feng finally smashed the lacquer bucket of his ignorance.But Ta Hui is not able to convey correctly the incident that has happened, to tell what has transpired. Hitting him with the staff, do you think ignorance can be dispelled?Te Shan was one of the most famous masters of China, and Hsueh Feng was also a truly awakened master, so there is no question of his ignorance being dispelled by hitting him with the staff.Hsueh Feng went to Te Shan and asked him, “What doctrine is used to instruct people?”The master said, “Our school has no verbal expression, nor does it have any doctrine to teach people.”Hsueh Feng also asked, “Do I have any share in the business of the vehicle of this ancient school?”At this point, the master took his staff and immediately hit him saying, “What are you saying?”This was just playfulness between two enlightened people; it has nothing to do with destroying his ignorance. Nobody can destroy anybody’s ignorance by hitting him with a staff; otherwise things would be so easy! I can just call each of you and give a good hit, and your ignorance disappears and you become enlightened.No, this was simply a playfulness. The master hit just to show Hsueh Feng, “You cannot deceive me…you are asking in a different way so that I may say something which is not right. I have answered you already: we don’t have any doctrine, and we don’t have any expression in our school. It is an absolutely silent school. We don’t talk, we don’t read scriptures, we don’t worship Buddha – we simply sit silently on this mountain. Slowly, slowly the mind disappears. It has nothing – no work, no possibility of ambition, no question of achieving anything – it disappears.”And because he asked again – Te Shan had answered completely – now to ask him again in a different way, in a tricky way…. It was a tradition in Zen that masters used to go to each other – Zen is a very joyful, playful, nonserious religion – and as Te Shan saw that Hsueh Feng was trying to bring the question again from a different angle, he hit him with his staff and said, “What are you saying? Have you not heard – we don’t have any verbal expression, we don’t have any doctrine, so in what way can you serve? In what way can you be a vehicle for this ancient school? The only way to be part of this school…you cannot be a vehicle, you cannot be a messenger, you cannot be a missionary because we don’t have any message and we don’t have any doctrine. You can participate in the school, you can be part of it, but to be part of it means just to fall into utter silence.”But Ta Hui could not understand what happened, so he says…and this kind of translation in the Western world is creating a very strange impression. People think that perhaps there was a special way of hitting with the staff, because it is absolutely absurd that by hitting with the staff all his ignorance is dispelled.This is not the case. Hsueh Feng is already an awakened master, he is just being playful. But Te Shan has a direct insight…you cannot be playful with him, you cannot catch him in some way so that he goes against what he has said. He has hit Hsueh Feng with the staff just to tell him, “It is enough! I have said everything, now the only way I can put your questions to silence is by hitting on your head. We don’t need your head, we don’t need your mind.” By hitting his head Te Shan is saying, “Your mind should not be here at all. These people are living in a state of no-mind, and that is our school.”From this we observe…you can see the words that Ta Hui is using are the words of a schoolteacher. From this we observe that in this sect intelligence and cleverness, thought and judgment, are of no use at all. Observe? He is still behaving like a student who is studying, observing – what is the doctrine of this school, what is the philosophy of that school? He himself is not a participant.An ancient worthy had a saying: “Transcendent wisdom is like a great mass of fire. Approach it and it burns off your face.” If you hesitate in thought and speculation, you immediately fall into conceptual discrimination. Yung Chia said, “Loss of the wealth of the dharma and destruction of virtue all stems from the mind’s conceptual discrimination.”Once you have the intent to investigate…Just look at his words. They are words of a man who writes a thesis; they are not the words of a master who knows his own illumined nature.Once you have the intent to investigate this path to the end, you must settle your resolve and vow to the end of your days not to retreat or fall back so long as you have not yet reached the great rest…The enlightened masters have never used such phrases, such paragraphs, such long complicated sentences. This is the intellectual approach.One Zen master was sitting on the seashore, and a man came and said to him, “I have been looking for you, but life has so many responsibilities that I could never come to you. It was just by coincidence I was passing and I saw you. I thought, ‘This is an opportunity I should not lose.’ I want to ask – just explain to me in a very simple way the master key of your religion.”The master remained sitting just like a marble statue, not saying anything, not even blinking his eyes. The man was a little bit afraid. He asked loudly, “Have you heard me or not?”The master laughed and said, “This is the question I should have asked you. Have you heard me or not?”The man said, “But you have not said anything.”The master said, “That’s what my teaching is: there is nothing to say, but only to experience.”The man said, “That does not help me. Just give me a little more; I may not be able to come to you again.”So the master wrote in the sand with his finger: “dhyana…meditation.” The man said, “That’s perfectly right, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. Can’t you explain it a little bit more?” So the master wrote dhyana, in bigger letters. The man said, “Smaller letters or bigger letters, it is not going to help me.”The master said, “I cannot lie just to help you. I have gone as far as truth will allow. Beyond that, you please forgive me. I have told you everything that my religion consists of: silence is its flowering, and meditation is its root. Now get lost!”Zen masters, or any enlightened masters, don’t speak like intellectuals, like the intelligensia. They have their own way…a very special way. Only those who are ready to open their hearts to them can be filled with their energy, can allow a few rays of light to enter into their being, may have some flowers showered on them – because it is not in the words that the transmission happens. It is possible only when both persons, the master and the questioner, are moving on the same wavelength, in the same state of silence.Ta Hui says, …the great liberation, the great rest, the great surcease…And still he goes on:“There is not much to the buddha dharma, but it’s always…hard to find capable people.”He is expressing his own understanding. All that is possible in Gautam Buddha’s approach to reality; in fact, it is the richest religion in the whole world. No religion has come to such heights, such peaks, and no religion has been able to produce so many enlightened beings in the world. Most of the religions have remained very mundane, very worldly.Buddha stands out completely alone as far as the growth of human consciousness is concerned; he is the greatest contributor. Most of the enlightened people have come out of his insight, so it is stupid to say, “There’s not much to the buddha dharma.” And why is he saying this? Because buddha dharma, the religion of Gautam Buddha, does not have great philosophical treatises, but simple things: silence, no-mind, meditation, living totally, witnessing. Just on two hands…ten fingers may be enough to count the whole buddha dharma.Naturally, to an intellectual this does not seem to be much. But the intellectual does not understand that you can have a huge mountain made only of rocks; it will be great as far as weight is concerned, but just one Kohinoor is enough…it is far more valuable than your whole mountain. Other religions have great doctrines….Buddha has said again and again, “I am just a finger pointing to the moon, and my insistence is: ‘Don’t look at my finger but look at the moon.’ My finger does not mean anything; the reality is there in the moon. Forget my finger, and look at the moon.” So even whatsoever little he has said, he has insisted that it is only an arrow showing you the path and the direction. Naturally, for an intellectual, a philosopher, this is not much.Ta Hui’s whole approach is such that it is mixed. To sort out what he has got from enlightened people, what he has got from learned people, and what he has made up himself is not difficult for me, but it will be difficult for you. And that’s the reason I have chosen the book. This will give you the idea that whenever you are reading someone or listening to someone you must be very alert. Has the man the presence, the depth, the silence, the authority that comes out of one’s own experience? Or is he just a knowledgeable person? And ask people, “Do you know it yourself?” and you will immediately find…if they hesitate even for a single moment or are taken aback, they were not expecting that you will ask this.From my very childhood that has been the most interesting game that I have been engaged in. I have never played with the boys of my age. My whole time was involved in a different kind of game. One swami, Swarupananda, used to come to the town often, and he used to stay with one of my father’s friends. The friend was very rich and was well known as a wise man; all the saints used to stay in his guest house. But he was very angry with me, because whenever he arranged a meeting for his saints, I was always in the front row.I always used to take my grandfather with me, and my grandfather was really, even in his old age, a very juicy man. He would go on hitting me, saying “Start! Do something.”And I would suggest, “But let him speak, let him say something that I can find fault with.” And in the middle I would stand up and ask just a single question, “Is this your own feeling, your own experience? And remember, you are in the temple of God” – these meetings used to happen in the most beautiful temple in the city – “so you cannot lie!” And the man would hesitate, and I would say, “Your hesitation is saying everything! Either you know, or you don’t know. Where is the space for hesitation?”Intellectuals can talk about all kinds of things. Catch hold of their necks and ask them, “Is it your own experience?” – and just look in their eyes. You will be surprised that out of a hundred perhaps you may find one man who is speaking out of some experience; otherwise, all is borrowed. And all that is borrowed is simply crap. These people have harmed humanity more than anybody else because they speak beautiful words, but those beautiful words are dead. And because of these people it has become difficult to find a real master, because there are so many fake teachers all over the world.This is the greatest dishonesty that man can do to humanity. You can cheat people out of money, there is nothing much in it; you can be a con-man and do all kinds of deceiving…it is all okay with me because it does not matter whether the money is in one’s pocket or in somebody else’s pocket; the money is in the pocket – that’s all. It is not a great loss in any way.But the people without experience who are pretending to be masters are really harming you spiritually. They are giving you words which are dead – they mean nothing – and they are preventing you from finding the right man. When there are so many fake people, the greater is the possibility that you will get caught by some fake person. And the fake person is always nicer, more persuasive; he talks in a way that supports your prejudices.The master does not care about your prejudices…he is out to destroy them. He cannot be nice like the fake people, he has to be hard. Only those who have a real longing – like a thirst – to become enlightened, to reach to the source of their life, can tolerate the hardness, the strange behavior of the master. He is not going to be according to you. You have to be according to him. The fake master is always ready to be according to you – that fulfills your ego.But the real master cannot be according to you. He is bent upon destroying your ego completely, he is bent upon taking away your mind completely. He leaves you only a clean space. In that silent, clean space is your realization. It is not an achievement, it is only a discovery.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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There Is Nothing to AttainOnly if the person truly possesses the faculty of wisdom and will power will he consent to step back and reflect.Yung Chia also said, “The real nature of ignorance is identical to the nature of enlightenment. Original inherent nature is the naturally real enlightened one.” If you think like this, suddenly, in the place where thought cannot reach, you will see the body of reality in which there is not a single thing – this is the place for you to get out of birth and death. What I said before, that one cannot seek the dharma, which has nothing to attain, with the attitude that there is something to attain, is just this principle.Gentlemen of affairs make their living within the confines of thought and judgment their whole lives: as soon as they hear a man of knowledge speak of the dharma in which there is nothing to attain, in their hearts there is doubt and confusion, and they fear falling into emptiness.As soon as you hear it said that you shouldn’t think, immediately you are at a loss and can’t find your grip. You’re far from realizing that this very lack of anywhere to get a grip is the time for you to let go of your body and your life.If correct mindfulness is present at all times, and the attitude of fear for birth and death doesn’t waver, then, over long days and months, what was unfamiliar will naturally become familiar, and what was stale will naturally become fresh. But what is the stale? It’s the brilliance and cleverness, that which thinks and judges. What is the unfamiliar? It’s enlightenment, nirvana, true thusness, the buddha-nature – where there’s no thought or discrimination, where figuring and calculating cannot reach, where there’s no way for you to use your mental arrangements.This is a special evening, because one of us has left for the other shore. Anand Maitreya was certainly a man of tremendous courage. He met me sometime near 1960. He had already been a member of parliament for twelve years and he was very close to the first prime minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. But the moment he heard me he simply dropped his whole political career.Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru tried to persuade him, saying, “There is every chance for you to become the chief minister of your state.” – he was from Bihar, the land of Buddha.But Maitreya said, “I want one thing understood clearly: ambition is hell and I am not going to look back; politics is finished for me. All ambitions are finished for me.” And since then he has been with me.He has never asked a single question. He has never doubted, his trust was absolute. In these years, thousands of people have come to me; many have been lost, but he remained unwavering. He could not conceive how people can find contradictions in my statements.Sometime in 1984 Maitreya became enlightened, but he had chosen to remain silent, so he remained silent. He did not even tell me what had happened to him. But the day it happened I called a small meeting of a few sannyasins in Rancho Rajneesh in America. I declared that there were going to be three special committees: one of mahasattvas, the great beings who are destined to become enlightened in this very life; the second of sambuddhas, who have already become enlightened; and the third of bodhisattvas, who will also become enlightened…but perhaps they will take a little longer than the other two categories, but certainly before their death.Because I had included Maitreya’s name, he was shocked. He wanted to keep it completely to himself, not to say anything about enlightenment to anybody. As he left the meeting, he told a few people outside, “It is very strange, I have not said – I have been trying to hide it – but somehow he has seen it. And not only has he seen it, he has declared me enlightened.”And his response was truly a response of great love. He said, “Osho is really a rascal.”All these years before his enlightenment and after his enlightenment, he just remained absolutely ordinary, with no ego, with no desire, with no greed.Just before I came back to Pune, Maitreya told me in Bombay, “I have got ten thousand rupees in a post office deposit in Patna, Bihar; that’s all I have, but now I will not need it.” Certainly he was becoming aware that his time of departure was coming closer. And he transferred the money to Neelam for the ashram. He died without anything, any possessions. And he slipped very slowly, very silently, from sleep into eternal sleep.I am saying this evening is special, because one of us has moved from the world of mortals to the world of immortals. He will not be born again. He has attained to the freedom and the liberation we have been talking about.This is a moment of great celebration and rejoicing. It happens very rarely. In millions of people perhaps one comes to this silent explosion of light and disappears into the ocean of consciousness that surrounds existence.I would like these talks to be dedicated to Swami Anand Maitreya, who slipped from sleep into eternal sleep. But he was not asleep! He has gone in full awakening. He has gone with full awareness. You will keep him in your memories because he has shown the path to you, too. He lived joyously, although he had nothing, and he died peacefully, blissfully.That’s what attaining to one’s destiny means. Those who live in misery and die in misery go on missing their destiny. They are failures, and because they have failed so many times, they become accustomed to failing again and again. But even if one person among you succeeds, it is your success, too. He has proved that what we have been talking about is not mere philosophy – it is an authentic path to self-realization.Maitreya will be missed. Just the other night, when I last saw him, I had a certain strange feeling…as if he is going to depart very soon. And this feeling happened to many other people too; it was as if he was gathering himself and preparing for the eternal pilgrimage. He has gone the way a man should go – joyously, ecstatically.You have to remember that his whole experience was based on two things: one, that he has fallen in trust with me… It is a strange language that I am using. You may not have ever heard the phrase ‘falling in trust’. Falling in love happens every day. Falling in trust happens only once in a while.And secondly, not for a single moment since he has met me has he missed entering into meditation as much as possible. His death was not an end to life, but the ultimate culmination of a tremendous trust and meditativeness. Where trust and meditation meet, one attains to one’s potential in its whole glory and splendor.Now the sutras:Only if the person truly possesses the faculty of wisdom and will power will he consent to step back and reflect.Ta Hui is a strange mixture. Perhaps he is not even aware that the words he is using are not the right words. For example, wisdom is not a faculty; intelligence is a faculty.Wisdom is your whole being. Wisdom is you. It is not a faculty, it is your wholeness that becomes luminous.But Ta Hui is an intellectual and is trying his best to teach people something which even those who have attained find it difficult to teach. And he is meddling in people’s minds: faculty of wisdom – and then the second word he uses, will power.Will power is nothing but another name of ego power. A man of wisdom has no will, just as he has no mind – because to will means to keep yourself separate from existence. It is a little subtle, but try to feel it. The moment you will it means you are always willing against things as they are. You want them to be some other way.A man of enlightenment has no will. The universal will is enough, there is no need of having an individual will. He has surrendered his individual will to the universe, now wherever the river takes him, he goes. He is not even swimming, he is simply floating.Will is struggle, fight.Will To Power is the name of the book by Friedrich Nietzsche. It was published after his death because even Nietzsche himself could not imagine how he would face the world when the book was published. It will be criticized, because will to power means a continuous struggle, violence – for money, for power, for position. Life becomes a war field, no more a rejoicing. It is simply competition – and a very terrific competition because everybody is trying to reach to the same place.Ta Hui uses the word without understanding the nature of meditation: there is no will power, there is no faculty of wisdom. And he goes on to say,Only if the person truly possesses the faculty of wisdom and will power will he consent to step back and reflect.The man of wisdom does not reflect. Reflection is another name for thinking, a superior kind of contemplation. But howsoever superior it may be, it is a form of thinking. The man who has eyes knows that light is; he never thinks about whether light is or is not. And if a man reflects about whether the light is or is not, one thing is certain: he has no eyes. Eyes don’t have to think. Eyes simply know, spontaneously know that light is.The same is true when you have gone beyond the mind. There is no question of any reflection; you simply see whatsoever is the case. And because it is the nature of things, it cannot be otherwise; hence there arises a tremendous acceptance, called by Buddha tathata – ‘suchness’ or ‘thusness’. You cannot do anything. It is simply the nature of things.All that is needed is for you to relax, be at rest, and accept the reality as it is – a total “yes,” holding nothing back. Naturally in this state of thusness there cannot be any misery and there cannot be any suffering. There is only immense silence and tremendous joy. Your whole being is continuously surrounded by music; you are still, and yet in a dance – a dance without movements and a song without words.But Ta Hui is not yet aware of it. He goes on quoting masters whom he has been meeting.Yung Chia also said, “The real nature of ignorance is identical to the nature of enlightenment. Original inherent nature is the naturally real enlightened one.”He is quoting Yung Chia, but I don’t see that he understands what he is saying, or what he is quoting, because the following sentences show his ignorance. He has not understood Yung Chia.He says,If you think like this, suddenly, in the place where thought cannot reach, you will see the body of reality in which there is not a single thing – this is the place for you to get out of birth and death.Can you see the contradiction?First, Yung Chia’s statement is of great importance. He is saying “The real nature of ignorance…” What is the real nature of ignorance? Perhaps you have never thought about it.What is the real nature of ignorance? The real nature of ignorance is innocence. It knows nothing; hence it is clean, pure, unpolluted.Yung Chia is saying, “The real nature of ignorance is identical to the nature of enlightenment” – because the enlightened man also knows nothing. He is also innocent, just like a small child. A very strange statement…it can disturb many who think only intellectually. The question is bound to arise in their minds: if the real nature of enlightenment is the same as the real nature of ignorance, then why bother? You are already ignorant. Now meditating and contemplating and concentrating, and standing on your head, and doing yoga postures, and fasting, and going to the caves and to the Himalayas, renouncing the world… Why do this whole circus if the nature of enlightenment is just the same as the nature of ignorance? In a way it is the same; in a way it is not.As far as innocence is concerned, it is the same. But the child’s innocence is corruptible, and the enlightened man’s innocence is incorruptible – there is the difference. The child will become knowledgeable; he cannot resist. There is no way to keep the child continuously ignorant. The child’s innocence will soon be lost. In fact every effort is being made so that he will soon become knowledgeable and adult, mature.But the sage has passed through all those stages of knowledge, maturity; he has come round the whole circle. He is incorruptible. Now nobody can tell him, “You should try to know something.” He has known everything and dropped it. He has not only dropped knowledge, he has dropped the very faculty of knowing: the mind. He has seen that the whole game is simply futile; his innocence is now incorruptible. So there is a similarity – and there is a great unbridgeable difference.Ta Hui is quoting this great statement, but I don’t have the feeling, looking at the following statements, that he has understood it. If you think like this he says… It is not a thinking. You cannot think like this. Thinking always leads to knowledge, never to innocence. So the moment he says, If you think like this, he misses the whole point. And you can see how very intellectual people can behave in a very stupid way.Listen to the whole sentence: If you think like this, suddenly, in the place where thought cannot reach…and he is asking you to think, and to think about a place where thought cannot reach. …you will see the body of reality in which there is not a single thing – this is the place for you to get out of birth and death. One does not get out of birth and death; one simply becomes awakened, and one is out of death, out of birth.It is not a question of first becoming aware…and then you have to do something to get out of the circle of birth and death. No, the moment you are aware, you are out of it. They are simultaneous.Just as in the morning when you get up – have you to do something to get out of your dreams? The moment you get up, you are out of your dreams already; otherwise it would have been very difficult to know whether you are dreaming or whether you are awake. If there were some effort needed to get out of your dreams, who will make the effort? You are fast asleep, you are dreaming – who will get out of the dreams?You must have had dreams, once in a while, when you dream that you are awake. And only when you really become awake you find, “My God, that was only a dream, and I was thinking that I am awake.” Awakening and getting out of the dreams have to be simultaneous.This life, this birth, this death, this whole circle of events – in which we go on and on moving from one life into another – is only because we are spiritually asleep.Meditation wakes you up.It is simply a method of awakening, and the moment you are awake, you are out of the whole circle of birth and death.But Ta Hui is still talking about having “to get out of birth and death.” You don’t have to get out. Even if you want to get in, you cannot get in either.I have heard…one night Mulla Nasruddin saw an angel who said, “You have been so virtuous, Mulla, I am going to give you a gift.” And he gave him one rupee note.Mulla said, “Are you joking? For my virtues, just one rupee reward! I cannot accept it, it is humiliating.”Haggling, the angel said, “Okay, two, three, four” …finally they came to ninety-nine rupees.Mulla said, “Listen, just for one rupee, don’t destroy the whole thing. Make it just a one hundred rupee note. That seems to be correct, complete. Ninety-nine looks so incomplete.” But he said it so loudly – “Make it one hundred!” – that his wife woke up. She thought, “What is he saying and to whom is he talking?” So she shook him and he woke up.Mulla said, “You idiot! You don’t understand that I was getting one hundred rupees from an angel. My whole night I have been haggling and haggling, and that was such a miserly angel. I have never seen such a miserly person. He was stuck at ninety-nine, and now you have awakened me. Just bring my glasses. I will go to sleep again, but I need glasses because I suspect that that angel is so miserly, the hundred rupee note may be false. Be quick!”The poor woman thought, “This is absolutely stupid; in sleep you don’t need glasses.” But not wanting to quarrel in the middle of the night and disturb the neighbors, she brought the glasses and Mulla put them on. And then he started, “Come on! Where have you gone? Okay, ninety-nine. I will settle even for ninety-eight.” And in this way he went down again, but the angel was nowhere to be seen. When a dream is broken, you cannot reconnect it. Finally he said, “Okay, one rupee. Now don’t hide.”His wife was listening to the whole thing. She said, “Don’t waste your night. You can take one rupee from me, and just go to sleep. You will not get that dream sequence again, and for God’s sake, take those glasses off; otherwise you will break them in your sleep. And sleeping by your side, knowing that you have your glasses on, I cannot sleep. I feel uneasy…what kind of thing is happening?”So Mulla said, “Okay, you give me one rupee. In fact, you disturbed the whole thing. I was going to manage that fellow for one hundred rupees. If I and pull him from one rupee to ninety-nine, and then it was only a question of one rupee more…I was going to convince him! You woke me up and disturbed the whole thing, and meanwhile that miserly fellow has escaped. Now when I close my eyes, he is not there – nowhere to be seen.”You cannot continue the same dream again. Once you are awake, to enter into the same dream is impossible – and this is about ordinary awakening. When you are truly awakened, your whole being conscious, there is no question of getting out of birth and death. You are out of it. Now even if you want to get into it, it is not possible.A young boy, not more than seven years old, was arguing with his father: “You said yesterday, ‘Always remember, nothing is impossible.’ And you said this statement is from Napoleon Bonaparte. And I say to you that I have found one thing which is impossible.”The father asked, “You have found something which is impossible? What is it?”The boy said, “It is just in our bathroom.”The father said, “Just show me.”The boy brought the tube of toothpaste and he said, “This is impossible – even if Napoleon Bonaparte wants to do it, he cannot do it – once you take it out, to put it back in. I have tried my best, it does not go back. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, no Napoleon Bonaparte can put it back in. You try! You are a great fan of Napoleon Bonaparte. Do this small thing. Just the other day you were bragging that nothing is impossible in the world, and in your bathroom, the impossible thing is there.”The most impossible thing in the world is: once you are awake, you cannot go back to your unconsciousness. There is just no way. Even if you want, even if you try, nothing is going to succeed. Just as you cannot go back in time, you cannot go back to yesterday, to the day before yesterday. You cannot go back into a state of unconsciousness.All your problems of life and death are of unconsciousness.So although these are very small mistakes, they show a great misunderstanding on the part of Ta Hui. He has listened to masters, but he is only an intellectual. He has not experienced… So it is very easy to detect where the loopholes are.What I said before, that one cannot seek the dharma, which has nothing to attain, with the attitude that there is something to attain, is just this principle.Gentlemen of affairs make their living within the confines of thought and judgment their whole lives: as soon as they hear a man of knowledge speak of the dharma, in which there is nothing to attain, in their hearts there is doubt and confusion and they fear falling into emptiness.In the first place, he uses the phrase, “a man of knowledge,” which is never used for anyone who is enlightened. He can be called a man of wisdom, he can be called a man of knowing, he can be called a man of innocence, but he cannot be called a man of knowledge. Knowledge always belongs to the mind.What is the difference between knowing and knowledge? Knowing is actual experience in the moment. Knowledge is when knowing goes dead, when knowing becomes past. Knowledge is stale, knowing is fresh.Knowing is the rose dancing in the sun, yet connected with the roots deep in the earth, alive. Knowledge is a roseflower you have put in your holy scripture. It still has the shape of the flower but the color has faded, the fragrance is no longer there, and there is no way to make it dance in the sun, in the wind, in the rain. It is dead, it is a corpse.Knowing is living experience.Knowledge is a corpse.A man of enlightenment can be called a man of knowing, of experiencing, but not a man of experience, not a man of knowledge. These are subtle differences, but they make one thing clear: Ta Hui does not have any experience of the things he is talking about. And to talk about things when you don’t have the experience is one of the greatest crimes – because you will stuff people’s minds with all your nonsense.As soon as you hear it said that you shouldn’t think, immediately you are at a loss and can’t find your grip.Perhaps he is saying it about himself. Tell any thinker, “You should not think; only then can you enter into the temple of meditation,” and he cannot conceive the idea – without thinking? He immediately imagines that without thinking he will fall into a darkness, into emptiness, into ignorance, into stupidity – without thinking, he will be lost. Thinking is the only light that he has.He is saying it about others, but my feeling is that it is his own experience.As soon as you hear it said that you shouldn’t think, immediately you are at a loss and can’t find your grip. You’re far from realizing that this very lack of anywhere to get a grip is the time for you to let go of your body and your life.If correct mindfulness is present at all times…Now he sometimes talks so stupidly that it is amazing that he has been thought to be a great master. He is saying: If correct mindfulness…which means there is a possibility of incorrect mindfulness. There is no possibility of incorrect mindfulness. Mindfulness is simply awareness. It is the wrong word for awareness, but it actually means awareness.Buddha has used a word which has been translated in all these languages: Chinese, and Japanese, and Korean. That word is sammasati. Samma means right, and sati means remembering. Sammasati has been translated as correct mindfulness. But in the case of sammasati, it can be said that this is not a contradiction.Sammasati is Pali for the Sanskrit words, samyak smriti. From language to language, small nuances go on changing. Samyak smriti is the root word. And samyak smriti means balanced remembrance. In Pali, it becomes sammasati. There it also means right remembrance. Remembrance can be wrong. There are two kinds of remembrance, right and wrong.Right remembrance is concerned with your own being, when you remember yourself. When you are aware of yourself that is sammasati. When you remember other things that is not right remembrance. You may remember a thousand and one things, but if you don’t remember yourself, your remembrance is wrong.But when it is translated as mindfulness, then the whole word has taken on a new meaning. There cannot be any wrong mindfulness. All mindfulness is right. And mindfulness doesn’t mean anything to do with the mind; it simply means you are conscious, alert, aware. If you are walking mindfully, it means you are walking with consciousness. If I am moving my hand mindfully, it means I am moving it knowingly, not just like a robot.If correct mindfulness is present at all times, and the attitude of fear for birth and death doesn’t waver, then, over long days and months, what was unfamiliar will naturally become familiar, and what was stale will naturally become fresh.What he is saying is so stupid that even to call it stupid does not seem right; he needs something more powerful. He is saying something which can be perfectly right for an intellectual, but it is not right as an experience. And you can see it if you are just a little bit aware.First, whenever one becomes aware, one becomes aware for twenty-four hours. It is not a question of becoming aware and then losing it, and then becoming aware again – it is not like that.Awareness is just like your heartbeat.When you are asleep, the heart is beating, when you are working, the heart is beating, when you are talking, the heart is beating. Whatever you are doing or not doing, the heart is continuously functioning. When your awareness becomes just like a continuous undercurrent, only then is it worthy of being called awareness. So to say, If correct mindfulness is present at all times – it is present at all times – …and the attitude of fear for birth and death does not waver…is nonsense.A man of awareness has no problem of fear as far as birth and death are concerned. Once awareness has arisen, you are free from the fear of birth and death; there is no question of wavering. Wavering can arise only if it is just an intellectual conviction, not an actual experience. Then doubts can always arise; in fact they will arise.And then Ta Hui goes on and on making wrong statements: …then, over long days and months, what was unfamiliar will naturally become familiar…He is thinking of awareness as if it were a habit which you have to practice continuously, so after months and days, slowly, slowly it will become familiar.Awareness is not a gradual phenomenon. It does not come slowly, slowly, in installments. It is an explosion, it is always sudden; it comes to you in its totality. It is not that slowly, slowly it comes and you become familiar with it.And because he is making a wrong statement, he goes on round and round making more wrong statements: …and what was stale will naturally become fresh.Now that which was stale, after days and months will become fresh. Can you see the contradiction? What is fresh may become stale after months. He is saying what was stale in the beginning, after days and months becomes fresh. He is not aware that even a small child who has nothing to do with enlightenment can say that this is stupid. As time passes, fresh things become stale, not vice versa.The same is true about awareness. It goes on and on being fresh because it never becomes old. For consciousness there is no time – neither days, nor months, nor years, nor lives.Awareness is beyond time and beyond mind.It never becomes stale, and it has never been stale. First you were unaware of it; now you are aware of it.It’s the brilliance and cleverness, that which thinks and judges. What is the unfamiliar? It’s enlightenment, nirvana, true thusness, the buddha-nature – where there is no thought or discrimination, where figuring and calculating cannot reach, where there’s no way for you to use your mental arrangements.Ta Hui is important for you to understand, because he is a representative of thousands of intellectuals in the world who go on deceiving themselves because they can consistently, logically, think about experiences that have not happened to them. Perhaps they are influenced by people who have actually experienced, and that impact is so great that they start believing that certainly such things happen. Then they are capable of intellectual systematizing – and they can go on systematizing – but underneath they don’t know a thing.These people are the theologians, these people are religious heads, these people are philosophers, these people are great professors. These people dominate humanity, and they are the wrong people – wrong because they are dishonest, wrong because they don’t accept that it is not their experience. They simply go on fabricating beautiful words and theories and creating an illusion in the minds of people that perhaps they are authentic seers, enlightened people.I will tell you an actual incident that happened, just at the beginning of this century. One young man, Ramateertha, was a professor of mathematics in Lahore University, and he was certainly a genius. He is well known for this incident – perhaps nobody else has done it this way… In examinations, the question paper comes with a note, “Answer any five out of the seven questions.” When he was a student this was his consistent practice: he would answer all seven questions with a note, “Examine any five questions.” He always answered all seven questions exactly right, so there was no problem for him – you could choose any five yourself, whichever ones you wanted to examine. When he passed his post-graduation – he topped the university in mathematics, he was a gold medalist – he was immediately appointed as a professor. He had the caliber of a great intellectual. And just then Vivekananda returned from America.Vivekananda was a monk and a disciple of Ramakrishna, who was an enlightened man but uneducated. Ramakrishna was not articulate enough to manage to say something about his experience, so he had chosen Vivekananda, who was a very intelligent person, from the cream of Bengal’s intelligentsia. Vivekananda impressed people all over the world, wherever he went; now he had come back from America and was going around India. He came to Lahore, to the university where Ramateertha was a professor, and Ramateertha was so much impressed by Vivekananda that he wanted to be initiated by him immediately.Vivekananda himself was just an intellectual, but a very forceful personality, a very imposing personality. He appealed to Ramateertha immediately because they were both intellectuals, so there was immediately a harmony, a synchronicity between their minds. Vivekananda initiated him into sannyas, and Ramateertha left for a world tour himself.Ramateertha was far more articulate than Vivekananda himself, far more poetic, far more impressive…not as a personality, because Vivekananda looked like a giant – he had a huge body – but Ramateertha seems to have been far superior, intellectually. In particular, he was so much drowned in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu poetry, which are all unique as far as their mysticism is concerned – they all belong to the Sufi tradition of mystics.So Ramateertha had some new area about which Vivekananda had no knowledge. He also impressed people very much wherever he went. And the problem with the mind is that if people are impressed by you, slowly, slowly, it has a feedback effect. Because they get impressed by you, you become impressed by yourself: “I must be carrying some great message; otherwise why are so many people mad about me?” He became convinced that he was enlightened. The crowd that was following him everywhere convinced him that he was enlightened.When he came back to India, he was imagining a great reception… Naturally, an enlightened person coming back home, after impressing the whole world… He went directly to Varanasi, which has been the Hindu citadel for centuries, and where the Hindu learned people have their council which decides who is enlightened and who is not. None of these learned people is enlightened, but they are immensely learned as far as scriptures are concerned. So Ramateertha first approached the council of the learned to get recognition.Now to me, even the idea of getting recognition from someone means you are not certain about your own attainment – you are asking recognition from those who are not enlightened! On what grounds do they have the authority to recognize you?In the first place, your asking makes it certain that you are not enlightened. Secondly, you are asking people who are not enlightened themselves – that reinforces that you don’t understand what enlightenment is. It never needs anybody’s recognition; it is a self-evident phenomenon. Even if the whole world says you are not enlightened, it does not matter. And even if the whole world says you are enlightened and you are not, then too, you will not become enlightened.Something very strange happened there: one scholar of the council asked Ramateertha – It was sheer stupidity for Ramateertha to go to the council – one scholar asked, “Do you know Sanskrit?” And Ramateertha had no knowledge of Sanskrit, because he came from the part that is now in Pakistan. It was a Mohammedan area; there the language of the learned people was Arabic, Persian, Urdu. It was not the part where Sanskrit had any influence. So he was very deeply rooted in Persian and Arabic literature, and certainly Sufi literature has a beauty which Sanskrit literature does not have.Sanskrit literature is very dry, like mathematics. Sufi literature is pure poetry. It has a certain juiciness about it, because the whole of Sufism is based on a foundation of love. Sufis are the only people in the world who think of God as the beloved, like a girlfriend. Naturally they have written beautiful poetry for the beloved. God is not a man, but a beautiful woman! No poetry can reach to the heights of Sufi poetry.Ramateertha was at a loss. He said, “No, I don’t know anything about Sanskrit. I come from the part of the country where Sanskrit is far away; even Hindi is not spoken.All those scholars laughed, and they said, “Without knowing Sanskrit, do you think one can become enlightened? First learn Sanskrit.”I can forgive all those idiots, but I cannot forgive Ramateertha, because he started learning Sanskrit! – just to get the recognition from unenlightened people that he is enlightened.I have always liked his discourses, but I have always found places in them which show decisively that the man is only an intellectual. He has no experience of his own. He knows beautiful poetry, he can talk in a very poetic way; he knows beautiful Sufi stories, he can explain those stories very impressively. But he himself is a beggar – his bowl is empty.Such is the situation of Ta Hui. Understanding Ta Hui will help you to understand many others who are in the same boat.Ramateertha went to the Himalayas, to a small state called Tihri Garhwal. The king of that state was very much impressed by Ramateertha, so he made him a special bungalow in the mountains, where he was learning Sanskrit in order to be recognized.One day it happened…Ramateertha had a secretary, a certain Sardar Pooran Singh who was a great writer in Punjabi, certainly a very refined writer – his prose is almost like poetry. He was so impressed by Ramateertha that he dropped his job, became Ramateertha’s secretary and was taking care of his body, his letters and the correspondence from all over the world…One day, looking out of the window, Ramateertha saw his wife coming. He had been married, but he had renounced his poor wife and become a sannyasin. The wife was so poor that she was doing all kinds of jobs in the village, grinding people’s wheat or washing people’s clothes. She did not even have the tickets for traveling…When she heard that Ramateertha was in Tihri Garhwal, she had sold a few ornaments that had been given to her at the time of their marriage. She just wanted to touch the feet of Ramateertha. She had not come to complain – she was really glad. In the East that has been the tradition: if the husband becomes a world-renowned sannyasin…even though the wife was living in rotten circumstances, still she was very happy that she had a husband whose name would go down in the corridors of history.When Ramateertha saw his wife coming, he told Sardar Pooran Singh, “Close the window and close the door, and go out on the verandah. My wife is coming. Tell her that I am not here, that I have gone into seclusion in the forest, and nobody knows when I am supposed to return. Just somehow get rid of her.”Sardar Pooran Singh was a very sincere man. He said, “This is strange, because I have seen you allowing people, both men and women, to see you. Why are you preventing your own wife, whom you have renounced? Now she is no longer any relation to you. Your preventing her means that deep down your mind still believes that she is your wife. Why are you discriminating between other women and her? And why are you so afraid?“Certainly that poor woman cannot do anything to you. It must be something inside you of which you are afraid. I am not going to close the window or the door. And I cannot lie to the woman. You have to decide one thing: either you have to see her or I am no longer your secretary, no longer your disciple. I am going.”Ramateertha could not afford for Pooran Singh to go. He was dependent on him for everything. So he said, “Okay, if you insist, I will see her.” And his wife came with tears of joy and just touched the earth, not even his feet. And Pooran Singh wrote in his diary, “Even my tears started flowing. The woman is so respectful, she does not consider him her husband anymore. He has become so divine to her that even to touch his feet will be defiling him.”Pooran Singh touched the feet of Ramateertha’s wife. He said, “To me you are more religious and more understanding than Ramateertha.” And Ramateertha felt so ashamed…you will not believe what he did: he immediately changed his clothes. He was wearing the orange robe of a Hindu sannyasin. He dropped that and took clothes from Sardar Pooran Singh – ordinary clothes, not those of a sannyasin. Sardar Pooran Singh asked, “What are you doing?”Ramateertha said, “I am so ashamed. I am not enlightened; I am not even worthy to be called a sannyasin. The recognition has come to me, although late, but still it is good that it has come to me. I have been believing that I am enlightened, that I have renounced the world. No, seeing my wife I could see all my lust, all my repressed sexuality. I am not worthy of these orange clothes.” And then he went out of the bungalow, and jumped from the mountains into the Ganges – the Ganges flows just nearby, coming down from the mountains. He committed suicide.But such is the hypocrisy of the society that the same learned people who refused to accept him as enlightened started saying that he had “renounced his body” – not that he committed suicide, not that he had committed a crime. Their actual word is jal samadhi: “He has dropped into the water and become one with existence.”And still there exists a Ramateertha League, and there are followers…and his books are published, and people are reading those books in order to become enlightened.Intellect can deceive you, can deceive others.Beware of the intellect.Beware of the mind.Be very careful; don’t be impressed easily. Certainly don’t be impressed through intellect. If suddenly a connection happens from being to being, that’s another matter.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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See the Moon, Forget the Pointing FingerYou must see the moon and forget the fingers. Don’t develop an understanding based on the words.An ancient worthy said, “The buddhas expounded all teachings to save all minds; I have no mind at all, so what’s the use of all the teachings?” If they can be like this when reading the scriptures, only then will people of resolve have some comprehension of the intent of the sages.Stories and SayingsThese days, in the Ch’an communities, they use the extraordinary words and marvelous sayings of the ancients to question and answer – considering them situations for discrimination, and beguiling students. They are far from getting to the root of their reality.When people engaged in meditation read the scriptural teachings, and the stories of the circumstances in which the ancient worthies entered the path, they should just empty their minds. Don’t look for the original marvel, or seek enlightenment in sounds, names, and verbal meanings. If you take this attitude, you’re obstructing your own correct knowledge and perception, and you’ll never have an entry.P’an Shan said, “It’s like hurling a sword at the sky: no talk of whether it reaches or not!” Don’t be careless! Vimalkirti said that the truth goes beyond eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and intellect.Te Shan would see a monk enter the door and immediately strike him with his staff; Lin Chi would see a monk enter the door and immediately shout! Venerable adepts everywhere call this “bringing it up face to face,” “imparting it directly,” but I call it first class trailing mud and dripping water. Even if you can take it up with your whole being at a single blow or shout, already you are not a man of power – in fact you have been doused over the head by someone else with a ladleful of foul water. How much more so, if at a shout or blow you are looking for marvels or seeking subtle understanding – this is the stupidest of the stupid.Ta Hui is a strange fellow, but he represents all those people who try to find their self-nature by intellectual effort. The problem with these people is that they have a good intellect. They can grasp words from masters, they can repeat them; they can deceive people and they can be deceived themselves.Now this is one of the most stupid sutras among all his teachings, and I will show you why I am saying that. As I go more and more into Ta Hui, I am wondering whether to call him a great teacher or just a pseudo teacher. A master certainly he is not; a teacher he may have been, but there are things which are even below the status of a teacher. He seems to be a pseudo teacher. He has not fulfilled even the qualifications for being an authentic teacher, just transmitting knowledge from the masters to the masses.He cannot even understand what has been happening in the school of Zen. It is so special that a very rare insight is needed to comprehend it, and unless you have your own experience there will always remain something of a doubt in you.For example, Zen is the only school in the world where the masters have slapped the disciples, hit them with their staffs, or even physically thrown students out of the window. Not only that, one master jumped on top of a disciple; sitting on his chest he asked, “Got it?”The Zen master is mysterious in his working. People who simply read the anecdotes cannot make any sense out of them because they don’t know the inner story which cannot be compiled in the anecdotes. It is a happening between the master and the disciple: it is the invisible transfer of energy.Just to give you an insight so that you can see the stupidity of Ta Hui… An understanding of this man who has been thrown out of the window by Lin Chi, who then jumped on him and asked, “Got it?”, needs the total background to the story and the intrinsic undercurrent running through it.The disciple had been working for almost a year on a koan which is the most famous koan in Zen – ‘the sound of one hand clapping.’ Now, there cannot be any sound of one hand clapping. You can go on clapping one hand, but sound is not possible. Sound is only produced when two things clash; if there is only one thing, sound is not possible.So the first thing to understand is that a Zen koan is not an ordinary puzzle which can be solved. It needs a different approach – not that of solution, but that of dissolution.The poor student went, sat under a tree, thought about it, meditated – what can be the sound of one hand clapping? Do you hear the cuckoo…? He heard a cuckoo from a faraway bamboo grove. He said, “This is it!” – so beautiful, so peaceful, bringing such joy. He rushed back and told the master, “I have heard it. It is the song of a cuckoo.”The master slapped him and said, “You idiot! I have told you to find out the sound of one hand clapping! What does a poor cuckoo have to do with it? Just go back and meditate.”He was very much puzzled, because his mind was searching for sounds – which sound is it? One day he heard a breeze passing through the pine trees and he said, “This must be it!” And he rushed back….This went on for one year. He would find some sound, the sound of running water, and he would go back. A point came when the master had no need to hear his answer. The moment he saw him, he slapped him, and he would say, “Go back.”He replied, “But I have not even said anything….”The master said, “As long as you go on finding, you will not have found it. Just go back. I know you have brought some stupid sound again!”This was the student…. After one year, when he came in, the master saw that slapping was not going to do it – he had been slapping him for one year continually! He just took hold of him and threw him out of the window. It was a two-story building….It was such a shock to the student. He was expecting a slap, but he was not expecting to be thrown from the window into a ditch. And besides that, the master jumped on top of him, so the few bones which had been left unbroken were now broken. He had multiple fractures! And on top of all that, the master was asking, “Got it?” The shock was such that his mind stopped – it was so unexpected.Mind stops only when there is something unexpected – so unexpected that the mind cannot figure it out…it stops.Absolute silence…and tears of joy in the eyes of the disciple. He touched the feet of the master and said, “Why have you waited for one year? You could have done it on the very first day.”The master said, “It would not have worked. I had to wait for the right moment, when you were ripe. You had worked hard with your mind. Your mind was tired, utterly tired; it had lost all hope that there is any possibility to find the answer. This was the moment when, if something unexpected happens to you, the mind may stop – just for a single moment. And that’s enough to hear the sound of one hand clapping.”The words are deceiving. It is not the sound of one hand clapping; it is the silence when the mind stops. Now anybody looking at the anecdote and not knowing the whole inner process – just an outsider – is bound to think this is simply stupid. But the disciple became enlightened, and it is always the end which decides whether the means were right or wrong.Ta Hui is just an intellectual, so sometimes he repeats beautiful words. But here he has shown his reality, because he could not conceive any meaning in the stories and the anecdotes. I will go into them.You must see the moon and forget the fingers.This is so easy to repeat, because for the thousands of years since Gautam Buddha this has been one of the most important statements: the buddha only points the finger toward the moon.His ‘finger’ means all that he says, all that he does, and it is only an indication – a hint. You should not get too much attached to the finger, because the finger is not the point. What he is saying, what he is preaching, is not the point; it is only an indication. You should not get attached to the philosophy, you should not become a Buddhist. You should look at the moon.And if you want to look at the moon, the most fundamental thing is to forget all about the finger. If your eyes are focused on the finger, how are you going to see the moon? Unless you move your eyes from the finger toward the faraway moon in the sky, it is not possible.Buddha was saying, “Don’t get attached to what I say, don’t get attached to any doctrine, to what I preach; don’t get attached to my personality. These are all just fingers pointing to the moon. Forget me, don’t start worshipping me; just look at the moon. And once you have looked at the moon, I don’t matter at all.”It is a very pregnant statement, and a very courageous one, to make to one’s own disciples: “Don’t bother about what I say. I am not preaching any doctrine and I am not delivering to you a system of beliefs or a philosophy. These are all devices to indicate the truth. It is beyond all words, but words can be used as a finger pointing to it. They cannot express it, but they can indicate it.”It is very easy to repeat it, but I don’t think Ta Hui understands.You must see the moon and forget the fingers. Don’t develop an understanding based on the words.But that’s actually what he has done. All his understanding is based on words.An ancient worthy said, “The buddhas expounded all teachings to save all minds; I have no mind at all, so what is the use of all the teachings?”The quotation is perfectly right, but this is what Buddha means by saving: The understanding arising in you that you don’t have any mind, that you are a no-mind. And then there is no question of saving. While you are attached to the mind you are in a bondage, and you need to be brought out of the bondage.So the ancient worthy is right when he says, “The buddhas expounded all teachings to save all minds. I have no mind at all” – he is a saved man – “so, what’s the use of all the teachings?”Certainly when you are saved there is no use. When you have seen the moon, what is the use of the fingers? When your disease is cured, what is the use of the medicine? Are you going to worship the bottle of medicine? Are you going to carry it wherever you go because it has saved you from a disease? The moment you are cured, you throw the medicine bottle; it is finished, its work is done.It is almost as if you have a thorn in your foot: you take another thorn to take the first thorn out. The other thorn is as much a thorn as the first one, but you can manage to take out the first thorn with the other one. Now what are you going to do with the other thorn? Are you going to put it in the wound that has been created by the first thorn because it has saved you from that thorn? That would be utter stupidity – then you still have what was wrong in the first place. No, once the first thorn is taken out, you throw away both the thorns together.All teachings are just like that. The ancient worthy is saying it right, but Ta Hui does not understand what he is saying. He says,If they can be like this when reading the scriptures, only then will people of resolve have some comprehension of the intent of the sages.Ta Hui is saying that you can understand what the sage has said only if you are reading the scriptures; only if you are a man of resolve and determination, a man of comprehension, will you be able to understand the intent of the sages.All the words that he is using are not needed to understand the sages. What is needed is an experience. Not your comprehension, because all comprehension is intellectual; nor your resolve, because all resolve is of the mind; nor your reading of the scriptures, because that is all your intellectuality – these things are not going to help you understand such a profound statement as, “The moment you have seen the moon, forget all about the fingers.”This kind of statement can be experienced only through experience. Ta Hui has no experience at all, and that becomes very clear when he comes to the stories and sayings. Any intellectual, even today, will condemn Zen stories or simply laugh, thinking that perhaps they are just jokes, because they don’t make any sense to the mind.These days in the Ch’an communities, they use the extraordinary words and marvelous sayings of the ancients to question and answer – considering them situations for discrimination, and beguiling students. They are far from getting to the root of their reality.When people engaged in meditation read the scriptural teachings, and the stories of the circumstances in which the ancient worthies entered the path, they should just empty their minds.He is not even aware that he goes on saying things in which he contradicts himself. Just look: When people engaged in meditation read the scriptures… A man who is engaged in meditation does not need to read the scriptures, because whatever the scriptures contain is a faraway echo of somebody’s meditation. And if you are yourself meditating, you are at the very source. Why should you bother about faraway echoes, corrupted, distorted by the interpretations of intellectuals, teachers, pedagogues, commentators?When you are at the very source yourself, you are at the very root from where all scriptures have arisen. A man of meditation has no necessity to read the scriptures and the teachings in the scriptures, but that is what Ta Hui is saying. Then immediately he says: …and the stories of the circumstances in which the ancient worthies entered the path, they should just empty their minds.How can you empty your mind when you are reading scriptures, teachings, and stories of how the ancient sages entered the path? you are filling the mind, not emptying the mind.Meditation empties the mind; studying anything only fills it. They are diametrically opposite to each other. But Ta Hui, in a single sentence, is bringing the whole opposition together, without ever being aware that what he is doing will be thought utterly idiotic by anyone who knows what meditation is.Don’t look for the original marvel, or seek enlightenment in sounds, names, and verbal meanings.How are you going to read the scriptures if you don’t look for the verbal meanings? What other kind of meanings are there? In a scripture there are only words and nothing else; you can read the scripture only as verbal meanings.If you take this attitude, you’re obstructing your own correct knowledge and perception and you will never have an entry.He has no idea that knowledge is the problem. One has to get free of it. It is not knowledge that gives you perception; it is knowledge that hinders your perception. It is removing the knowledge that clears the sky, just as when the clouds have moved there is absolute clear perception.But this is bound to happen to a man who has been gathering things from here and there and who has not gone into meditation himself. Not a single thing shows that he has had any taste of meditation.P’an Shan said…He quotes people because he has been going to teachers, masters; he must have been taking notes of what they were saying. He quotes many people.P’an Shan said, “It’s like hurling a sword at the sky: no talk of whether it reaches or not!” Don’t be careless! Vimalkirti said that the truth goes beyond eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and intellect.I am simply amazed! This man quotes Vimalkirti, and Vimalkirti is saying, “Unless you go beyond intellect and all your senses, you will not have the perception of reality, you will not know your self nature.” But it does not strike him that he is simply working through the intellect.Te Shan would see a monk enter the door and immediately strike him with his staff; Lin Chi would see a monk enter the door and immediately shout! Venerable adepts everywhere call this “bringing it up face to face,” “imparting it directly,” but I call it first class trailing mud and dripping water. Even if you can take it up with your whole being at a single blow or shout, already you are not a man of power – in fact you have been doused over the head by someone else with a ladleful of foul water. How much more so, if at a shout or blow you are looking for marvels or seeking subtle understanding – this is the stupidest of the stupid.Because he cannot understand, because he has no experience of his own, he calls it stupidest of the stupid. I will try to explain to you exactly what these people were doing. They were immensely successful, and they are not stupid. Ta Hui is the stupidest of the stupid.Te Shan is famous and a great master. A monk would enter the door and immediately he would strike him with his staff. You have to understand the situation. The master sees the disciple; he gives him a certain koan, an unsolvable puzzle. Then whenever he finds the right answer to it, he has to come and report to the master. Now there is really no answer for it – so whenever a disciple enters to give him an answer, why waste time? He would simply hit him hard. He is making it as clear as possible that all answers are wrong, so there is no need to listen to your answer. Although it looks very strange that you have not given the answer and he is hitting you – if you were wrong, he could have hit you…but you may have been right. But that is the problem: no answer is going to be right, only silence.So it happened many times that the student will get hit – many, many times. Then for a few days he will not appear, and Te Shan will inquire, “Where is he?” He will go to the place – it was a big monastery, a beautiful Zen garden – and he will find the disciple sitting under a tree, in utter silence. His face showed that the mind is no longer functioning, that there is no wavering inside, that everything is quiet and calm.And the same Te Shan who has been hitting this disciple will touch his feet. As he will touch his feet, the disciple will open his eyes and he will say, “Master, what are you doing?”Te Shan will say, “I am touching your feet because you have found the answer. I suspected that something else had happened, because for many days you did not come. It happens that students only stop coming when they have found, because what to say? – there is no answer. And they are enjoying their silence so tremendously…they have forgotten the koan, they have forgotten the master, they have forgotten everything. They are living in such an ecstasy that everything is left far away.”Te Shan used to find the disciples, and it always proved right – his hitting had helped. His hitting finally made them aware that he is so compassionate and so loving, he will not hit unnecessarily. His hitting again and again shows only one thing: that whatever answer you have found is wrong. There is no need to hear it because there is no possibility of a right answer. By hitting he is making it clear that there is no possibility of a right answer; mind is absolutely impotent to give you the answer.Slowly, slowly, the disciple forgets about the koan, forgets about the sound, because it brings nothing but a hit from the staff of the master. But the moment he forgets the mind, and the koan, and the master, and the search for any answer, he falls into a deep, abysmal silence. That silence is the answer, but you cannot say anything about it. And it is so wonderful, mysterious…you are so contented with it that there is no need for recognition from the master that you have found the answer. All these things have become trivia.But Ta Hui does not understand it at all, and perhaps nobody – not even the greatest philosopher in the world – will be able to understand what kind of things these are. It looks simply absurd: first you give him a koan, and then you don’t even listen to his answer. But it is a strategy, a strategy of great love and great compassion.The master touches the feet and asks to be forgiven for all the hits that he has given…he had to do it: “There was no other way to destroy your stubborn mind, to destroy your clinging with the mind, to destroy the idea that you can find an answer through the mind. It was not only you that was hurt by my staff, I was hurt more. For all that I touch your feet, and I ask for your forgiveness.”Te Shan was loved by his disciples even though he hit them with his staff; Ta Hui has no understanding at all.Lin chi would see a monk enter the door and immediately shout! Any intellectual will make a laughingstock of the whole thing. What is the point? – you give the appointment to the student, to the disciple, to come to your room, and then you suddenly shout for no reason at all.In my childhood I came across a man. His name was Sardar Chanchal Singh. He had been with Subhash Chandra Bose, a great Indian revolutionary, who had escaped from the jails of the British government. He had gone first in disguise to Germany to see Adolf Hitler, because he wanted to suggest, “You are fighting with the British. We are also fighting them, and we need your help. If you can give us help, the British Empire can be attacked from two sides. We can attack from inside and you can go on attacking it from the outside.”The policy was absolutely clear…and you will be surprised, Adolf Hitler never introduced any man to his armies the way he introduced Subhash Chandra Bose. He said to the armies, “Respect this man more than you respect me, because I am a fuhrer of only a small nation; this man is a revolutionary and the leader of a vast continent.” And he gave him – although he was not in any political position – a guard of honor.It was Adolf Hitler and Subhash Chandra’s plan…they worked out that it would be better that Subhash Chandra went to Japan. In Japan there were thousands of Indian soldiers who were fighting for the British government against Japan.It was a very clever policy: Subhash Chandra would go to Japan and Hitler would inform Japan – because Japan was an ally with Germany against the British, against the Americans…. He would inform them, “Allow Subhash to talk to all the Indian soldiers who are prisoners in Japanese jails. I have every certainty that this man is capable.” – and he was a man of immense charisma – “and that he will convince those soldiers, ‘You are fighting for the British empire, which keeps your slavery intact. Instead, come with me, and we will make an army and fight against the British Empire.’”It was so logical and simple that the prisoners were ready. First…if they are ready, they will not be prisoners anymore; they will be guests of Japan. Secondly, they may have been fighting for the British, but deep down they were against the empire; just for their bread and butter, they had sold their souls.Once Subhash told them, “You have sold your souls…” then all the camps of prisoners were opened. A new army – the Indian National Army – was created by Subhash Chandra Bose. Sardar Chanchal Singh was one of the close colleagues of Subhash. He was also a prisoner. He had had a high post in the Indian army, and he also had a very high post in the Indian National Army that was going to attack from Japan.They succeeded as far as Rangoon; they defeated the British armies. Even Calcutta started feeling the fear that after Rangoon the next attack would be on Calcutta. All British were removed from Calcutta, and people who had enough money all moved from there. Calcutta was a danger point.At that very moment Germany was defeated. Atom bombs were thrown on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so Japan surrendered.Subhash was in a strange position. Now, both friends who were supporting him were defeated. He had a small army – but although he was winning, how long could he go on? He could not even reach Calcutta, which was his home town. So he escaped from Rangoon….It is still a mystery what happened to him. There are stories that he has been seen in the Soviet Union; there are stories that he lives in Tibet; there are stories which seem to have been created by himself…. The plane he had taken from Rangoon fell in Taipei and burned. The pilot and somebody else – nobody knows who the other man was – were immediately burned, without any press conference or without any medical examination. They were already burned in the crash, and because they were both Hindus, they were put on a funeral pyre.Most probably, Subhash had been dropped somewhere else, and this plane was purposely burned to create the impression to the British Empire that Subhash was dead; otherwise he was enemy number one, to be caught dead or alive. So, this was a good fiction: he is dead, now there is no point…and he has even been burned.Taipei gave out the report that he had been put on the funeral pyre – but there was no point, the bodies were already burned, they were unrecognizable. They had not even photographed those bodies – which is absolutely necessary for a man with the status of Subhash, for whom the British Empire was bloodthirsty. They should have taken photographs, they should have called medical people to examine the bodies. They should, in fact, have delivered the body to the British Empire. But my feeling is that it was not the body of Subhash; it was just a created facade. And that was the feeling of Sardar Chanchal Singh also.He, by chance, met me in a restaurant in Jabalpur. He had been released from the Indian jail…. After Subhash left, all the Indian National Army people were again in jail – but now they were in the jails of the British. But a case was fought for them, and Chanchal Singh was released. He was searching for employment, so I told him, “If you have learned any martial arts in Japan, I can arrange a group of college and university students. You can teach them martial arts, and they will pay you enough so that you can survive until you can get other employment.”I have told you about Chanchal Singh because he had learned from someone to shout exactly the way Lin Chi must have been shouting – and I have heard him shout! I don’t know Lin Chi – he must have been more articulate in his shouting…but even if this man Chanchal Singh shouted at you, your mind would stop immediately. If you were going to strike him with a sword, and he shouted, your hand would stop.His shout was so deep, so much penetrating in you, that whatever you were doing you would simply stop. We had tried bringing wrestlers to hit him, to punch his nose. They were expert boxers, but the moment he would shout, their hands would just stop, close to his nose…. Something strange in his sound.Just jokingly we used to use him. somebody was urinating and we would say, “Chanchal Singh, give a good shout.” He would give a good shout and the urination would stop! The man would look all around – what happened?I know perfectly well that there are many stories about Lin Chi, whose shout has awakened people, but it was not an ordinary shout. It was a certain training that enters into the deepest core of your being. The whole problem is that man is asleep. A good shout can wake him up.Even today, in the school of Lin Chi, the shout is being used. But it is not being used on every disciple – only when a disciple has worked hard with his mind and his mind is tired. Those koans are so tiring because you know that they are absurd. But if the master says, “Find the answer,” and you have come to the master to become awakened, then you have to follow whatever discipline he gives you.Those shouts are given only when the mind is almost on the brink of failure, and it is the understanding of the master that now is the time. Then a disciple enters in Lin Chi’s room, without expecting that he will shout like a lion’s roar for no reason at all…jump and shout as if he is going to kill the disciple. The disciple will remain just…the whole mind stops. And just for a moment he can see his self-nature.The question is not of time. If you know your self-nature, even for a moment, things become easy. Now you know the way. Now you know yourself, you can reach to it again and again. Now a shout is not needed every time; it was only an arbitrary device.But Ta Hui condemns it because he does not understand the deep compassion, the psychology, the articulateness behind it. He proves himself to be an ordinary intellectual. Only in one thing is he right, when he uses the words stupidest of the stupid. But those words belong to him, not to Lin Chi, not to the master Te Shan.These people were using absolutely new methods to awaken people. Their contribution is great. Zen has made more people enlightened than any other school of any other religion. Even in one monastery you can find many enlightened people. And this has been the only living current which has not stopped somewhere in the past; it is still alive. There are still people like Te Shan and Lin Chi, but they have fallen into obscurity.America has corrupted the Japanese atmosphere completely; otherwise, Japan would be a totally different world. Its whole genius was concentrated on how to become enlightened. Now, under the American rule, their whole energy has been diverted toward money. And, they are people of great integrity, so great that now their money has the greatest value. Even the dollar, the American dollar, is left far behind. They are one of the richest nations in the world, and their money is more trustworthy than any other nation’s currency. But this is not a success; it is a tremendous failure.America has corrupted Japan’s universities. What is being taught now in their universities is borrowed from America; they are completely imitating America, competing with America. Certainly they have made America afraid: although their products are very highly taxed when they enter America, still they are able to compete in the American market with American products, which are not taxed at all. The taxation has been going higher and higher to prevent the American market from being completely taken over by Japan.But even though the Americans are raising the taxation on any import, Japan is still competing very well on every front in the American market. And America is absolutely impotent to compete in the Japanese market.The Japanese work hard, work totally, work intensely. Their only problem is that they don’t have much land to create more factories. So just a few days ago they have succeeded in floating an artificial island. On this artificial island they will be making factories. Once they succeed on one island, they will float many other islands. They are creating land for the first time.Ta Hui does not understand. And this is the sign of a stupid person – that without understanding anything, he criticizes it. Intellectuals are very willing to criticize anything that does not come within their comprehension.But there are methods which work whether you can comprehend them or not. You should look at the ultimate result. Although the Japanese monasteries have fallen into darkness, still there are people who are working with devices which can create awakening.Ta Hui is absolutely wrong. I was thinking to call his teachings, “Teachings of a Great Teacher.” But as I am going into his sutras, I will have to change the title of the book. It will be “Zen Teachings of a Pseudo Teacher – Ta Hui.”

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Enlightenment and Delusion“Buddha” is the medicine for sentient beings; once the disease of sentient beings is removed, the medicine has no further use.If you want to attain oneness, just give up both buddhas and sentient beings at once!An ancient worthy said, “Just perceive nothingness in the midst of things.”“I formed the repository of thusness with subtle illumination that is neither destroyed nor born; and the repository of thusness is only the illumination of sublime enlightenment shining throughout the whole cosmos.”Nevertheless, both are ultimately empty falsehoods. If one abandons the power of actions to grasp the power of the path, then I would say that this person does not understand the skill in means of all the buddhas in expounding the truth as is appropriate to the occasion. Why? Have you not read how old Shakyamuni said, “If you cling to the truth aspect, you are attached to self, personality, living beings, and life; if you cling to the non-truth aspect, you are attached to self, personality, living beings, and life.” Thus it is said, “The Buddha only uses provisional terms in guiding sentient beings.”As soon as the source of the sickness was pointed out to him by an old adept, Chang Ch’o, the famous scholar in the old days understood enough to say:Trying to eliminate passion aggravates the disease; rushing toward true suchness is also wrong. There is no obstruction in worldly circumstances according to one’s lot: “nirvana” and “birth and death” are equally illusions.Be like the stillness of water, like the clarity of a mirror, so that whether good or bad, beautiful or ugly approach, you don’t make the slightest move to avoid them. Then you will truly know that the mindless world of spontaneity is inconceivable.Ta Hui in these sutras comes very close to truth. But even to be close to truth is not to attain it. Even the closeness is a distance.Whatever he is saying could have been said by an enlightened being, and then its meaning would be totally different. He is repeating very cleverly the statements of ancient enlightened people, but they sound phony, they don’t sound alive. It seems something is dead inside them. He does not show that what he is saying is his own experience; there is no authority in it.But we will try to understand, because the statements that he is quoting from others are significant in themselves. Alas that he himself has not experienced them! And experience makes such a great difference. A blind man can describe all the qualities of light; he can describe all the beauties of a rainbow, but in his description something essential will be missing. And anybody who knows light and knows the colors of the rainbow will immediately feel that the man is blind. Perhaps he has heard about light, but he has not seen it. And I will tell you how different would be the same statement from a man of enlightenment.The first sutra:“Buddha” is the medicine for sentient beings; once the disease of sentient beings is removed, the medicine has no further use.It is perfectly true as far as medicine is concerned, but buddha is not the medicine. Buddha is the state when you are cured and no medicine is needed. Buddha is your innermost nature.A man who knows through experience would have said, “Meditation is the medicine for sentient beings. Once the disease of sentient beings is removed, the medicine has no further use. Meditation is no longer needed for one who is enlightened.”But to use the word buddha instead of meditation shows tremendous confusion in the mind of the person. He may have heard someone talking about how once the disease is gone the medicine has no use. That’s true, but is buddha the medicine? Buddha is your absolute help. He is your intrinsic eternal nature – you cannot discard it. It is you, in your very innermost authentic being.Meditation is a method, and the method is for a particular purpose. When the purpose is fulfilled, the method is not of any use. Do you think I meditate? The disease is gone and at the same moment, simultaneously, meditation has also disappeared.I have told you before that the words meditation and medicine come from the same root. Medicine is to cure the body, and meditation is to cure the consciousness, but their function is to cure. Once the cure has happened they become of no use, but to use the word buddha is absolutely absurd. That’s how a man who tries intellectually to understand is bound to commit small mistakes, and he will not be able to figure out where he is committing the mistake. He is very careful, but carefulness alone is not going to help. Consciousness is needed.If you want to attain oneness, just give up both buddhas and sentient beings at once.The same mistake continues. It is true: if you want to attain oneness you have to drop all kinds of duality. The duality between the ignorant and knowledgeable, the duality between birth and death, all kinds of dualities have to be dropped.But buddhahood is another name of oneness. There is nothing opposite to buddha. It is not part of the world of dualities, it is the very transcendence beyond the dualities. Every duality will disappear…then you will know oneness, then you will know your enlightenment, then you will be a buddha.Buddha has not to be dropped the way other dualities have to be dropped, because it is not part of any duality. Have you ever met anybody who is a non-buddha? Everybody is a buddha; a few are asleep, a few are awake, but there is not a single sentient being who can be called a non-buddha. This word buddha has no opposite to it, hence it is exactly of the same meaning as oneness.“I formed the repository of thusness with subtle illumination that is neither destroyed nor born; and the repository of thusness is only the illumination of sublime enlightenment shining throughout the whole cosmos.”He is again quoting someone: this statement is within quotes. But this is the problem with all the intellectuals in the world: they can quote perfectly, but the whole quotation goes against the previous sutras. As it is, if they are right then this quotation cannot be right. This quotation can be right only with my changes: instead of “buddha”, “meditation”, and instead of “dropping buddhas and sentient beings to attain oneness”, “dropping all dualities to attain buddhahood” – because buddhahood is another name of oneness. If these corrections are made then this quotation is right.I will read it again so you can understand why I am saying that it can be right only with corrections in the previous sutras. “I formed the repository of thusness with subtle illumination that is neither destroyed nor born; and the repository of thusness is only the illumination of sublime enlightenment shining throughout the whole cosmos.”Now, what is this illumination of sublime enlightenment, except buddhahood? – just a different name. And if even this has to be dropped, then what remains?Dualities have to be dropped, not oneness. Birth and death have to be dropped, not life. Life is eternal, it is beyond birth and beyond death. Now he is accepting that the subtle illumination…and what is illumination other than the state of buddhahood? These are different names only – illumination, enlightenment, awareness, buddhahood – but he does not seem to understand that they are names of the same experience.This subtle illumination…is neither destroyed nor born…There is only one thing that is neither destroyed nor born, and it is the very principle of life. Birth happens in it, death happens in it – thousands of times – but life continues. Birth and death are small incidents in the eternal flow of life-energies. Birth is not the beginning and death is not the end…just small incidents in the eternity of life and existence.Nevertheless both are ultimately empty falsehoods.Now this is his own statement, without quotation-marks, and immediately he falls into his intellectual state…Nevertheless both are ultimately empty falsehoods. If one abandons the power of actions to grasp the power of the path, then I would say that this person does not understand the skill in means of all the buddhas in expounding the truth as it is…To say that both are ultimately empty falsehoods means the ignorant people are false, and the awakened people are also false; ignorance is false and illumination is also false – then what remains that you can call true? And if there is nothing true, there is no criterion to call anything false. False is possible only if there is something which is not false; unless the not-false is there, the false cannot exist.Ta Hui is saying both are false: the not-false and the false, the true and the untrue – both are false. And he thinks that he is making a great statement. He is simply showing his utter ignorance! All intellectuals are ignorant people with great borrowed knowledge, with beautiful words, with great philosophical jargon – but no understanding or experience of truth.Have you not read how old Shakyamuni said, “If you cling to the truth aspect, you are attached to self, personality, living beings, and life; if you cling to the non-truth aspect, you are attached to self, personality, living beings, and life.” Thus it is said, “The Buddha only uses provisional terms in guiding sentient beings.”It is a little subtle but not impossible to understand. He is quoting Gautam Buddha, but in the quotation there is something missing. If you cling to the truth aspect… If you cling to any aspect, true or false, you cling to the part – and the part is never the whole. The part becomes the barrier to attaining the whole. So Buddha is right when he says, “Don’t cling to the truth aspect and don’t get attached to it.” He also says, “Don’t cling to the non-truth aspect.”But remember the word aspect which Ta Hui has forgotten. He is not saying that both truth and untruth have to be dropped. If truth and untruth both have to be dropped, then what remains? What are you going to call it?Buddha is saying a totally different thing, and Ta Hui misunderstands – naturally, because an intellectual cannot do more than that. Buddha is saying, “Don’t cling to any aspect, whether it is the aspect of truth or the aspect of non-truth. Just don’t cling.”His insistence is for not clinging, for nonattachment – because every attachment, every clinging will keep you in a bondage, will keep you in ignorance. Even if you feel, “This is true,” don’t cling. The question is not of truth or untruth, the question is of clinging. His emphasis is on nonclinging…don’t cling even to the truth!That does not mean that truth has to be abandoned. It simply means clinging has to be abandoned. Clinging makes everything a bondage, an imprisonment. Nonclinging brings freedom to you, and truth can be alive only in absolute freedom.You cannot keep truth in bondage, in any kind of imprisonment. You cannot grasp truth, because truth is almost like the open sky. You can have it in your open hand – the whole sky is yours, all the stars are yours – but don’t try to make a fist. The moment you make a fist, the whole sky has slipped out of your hand.His insistence: is not to be attached. Certainly, not to be attached to untruth is simple to understand; that’s why he is making it clear…even if you are attached to truth, the very attachment is a poison which will kill even the truth itself.So remain aloof, unattached, just a witness.Then the whole truth is available to you, and the whole untruth simply disappears. It has never been there. It was your own projection – you had created it.But Ta Hui thinks that Buddha is saying: “Truth and non-truth both have to be dropped.” That certainly Buddha has never said, and he is not saying it even in this statement.To support his idea Ta Hui again says, Thus it is said, “The Buddha only uses provisional terms in guiding sentient beings.”It is true that Buddha uses provisional terms, arbitrary terms – but not for any special reason. There is no possibility to bring the truth into knowledge, into words, into language – so he uses only provisional terms, approximate, as close as possible to the truth. But it is provisional.Once you have reached the realm of truth, you will have to abandon all those terms and words and theories and doctrines and scriptures. They have helped you. When the finger points to the moon, certainly the finger is helping, but the finger is not the moon. And when you have seen the moon, the finger is of no use. There is no need to cling to the finger; there is no need to worship the finger because it has shown you the moon. That will be simply foolishness.The finger pointing to the moon is just like the arrows on the mile-stones which show you how far you are from the place you are going to, and how far you have come from the place you have left. But you never worship those arrows; you never even say to them, “Thank you, sir.”They are provisional means, and they are of great utility. All the words used by enlightened people are of great utility – but they don’t have the essential truth in them. They are only arrows pointing toward it. But without them perhaps you may never look at the moon.If the buddhas were not insistent, continuously emphasizing, “You are asleep, wake up!” – if they were not making all kinds of devices to wake you up, perhaps you might never wake up. But once you are awake, you don’t worship the alarm clock. The alarm clock has been of great utility, it has awakened you, but a thing of utility is not a thing to which you have to be grateful.As soon as the source of the sickness was pointed out to him by an old adept, Chang Ch’o, the famous scholar in the old days understood enough to say:Now to use for Chang Ch’o the word scholar is not right, he is not a scholar – Ta Hui is a scholar. Chang Ch’o is a buddha, he has come to know the reality. And we can see in his statement the fire, the illumination, the celebration – and a subtle presence of truth. Even though you may not have experienced it, if you can just for a moment, be silent and listen to what Chang Ch’o says, you can see the difference between the words of a scholar and the words of a man of enlightenment.These are the words of Chang Ch’o:“Trying to eliminate passion aggravates the disease…”I have been condemned for years because I have been saying, “Don’t repress anything that is natural to you.” That has become a world-wide antagonism against me in the minds of the priests of all the religions, without exception. They think that I am supporting people’s biological instincts. What I am doing is simply what Chang Ch’o is saying… “Trying to eliminate passion aggravates the disease…”All the people who have been teaching celibacy, anti-life attitudes, controlling your sex, controlling your hunger, controlling everything that nature requires you to fulfill – it has not helped anybody. It has only created perverted people, sick people – psychologically, spiritually, physically, all kinds of perversions have been created.This man Chang Ch’o must have been a man of absolute enlightenment, because thousands of years ago he was saying exactly what the world even today is not willing to understand.Trying to eliminate passion aggravates the disease; rushing toward true suchness is also wrong……because you cannot desire suchness. Rushing is a desire – you want to reach quickly to the state of suchness where you can relax, rest, and accept whatsoever life brings to you.It is not a question of rushing toward some place: it is simply a question of relaxing right now. It is not a desire and it is not a goal; it is not a destination that you have to reach. It is a simple understanding…and you are already – wherever you are – able to live the beautiful experience of suchness.Chang Ch’o is right when he says; …rushing toward true suchness is also wrong…because you cannot make a goal of it, you cannot make a destination of it. It cannot be an object of your desire and your will. It is simply a pure understanding, a silent understanding that whatsoever life brings to you – rejoice in it. No complaint, no grudge, no asking for more…just in a silent moment relish the feeling.Then this very moment, suchness is yours.There is nowhere else to go.Suchness is your nature.There is no obstruction in worldly circumstances according to one’s lot…I started telling the monks – Hindu monks, Jaina monks, Christian monks – that renouncing the world is simply cowardliness. It does not show your understanding, it simply shows your fear. It is escapist. There is no obstruction in worldly circumstances…If you are living in suchness and let-go there is nothing in the world which can disturb you. There is no obstruction, because you are able to accept everything – even the obstruction. You will absorb it without any complaint. You will simply say, “Such is my lot, such is my destiny.” You will not ask that it should have been otherwise. So why escape from the world? Escaping means that you wanted a different kind of place, where you can be at ease. But you can never be at ease anywhere.I have heard about a man who had a very angry nature, and was very quick in reacting. He would not think for a single moment what he was doing, and he would repent it for his whole life. He became a nuisance in the whole town; he asked a monk who was visiting the town, “What should I do? Everybody seems to be boycotting me. I understand that I am temperamental, and I get angry very quickly. It comes with such force that I don’t have any time to think about it, and I act according to my anger. Then I repent – I should not have said that, I should not have done that. But now I have made the whole town my enemy.”The monk said, “It is not your fault. This world never allows anybody to live peacefully, silently, prayerfully. One has to renounce it; it is a world full of sins and full of sinners. What do you think…all the great religions’ founders have renounced the world – were they fools? Renounce this world! Come along with me!”The logic was clear. It is very easy to throw the responsibility on other people’s shoulders: the world is wrong, you are perfectly right, but what can you do if the whole world is wrong and it drives you into wrong paths? And from everywhere the incentive is to do wrong.The monk convinced him, “Just come with me. I am going to the Himalayas. Live silently in a cave – nobody will provoke you and the anger will disappear. How can you be angry when there is nobody else except you?” It was so convincing and so ego-fulfilling to think, “I was not wrong, the whole world is wrong.” That’s why all great religious teachers renounced it, went into seclusion, into isolation. If they could not cope with this world… “I am a small man, how can I cope with it?”So he renounced the world and went into the forest. Sitting under a tree he was feeling very good, thinking that this is true: “Those who have renounced the world have known eternal peace.” And just at that moment a crow pissed over him. You can renounce the world, but there are monk crows who have also renounced the world and they live in the mountains…Immediately he jumped up! He became very angry, forgot all about renunciation, and started throwing rocks at the crow. The master who had brought him came out of his cave, asking “What is the matter?”And he became angry at the master: “Yes, you are the matter! You have told me to renounce the world and there will be no anger. And I am sitting here silently, doing nothing, no provocation from my side – and a crow comes and pisses over me!”The master who had brought him began to think that he had brought a very dangerous fellow. He may get angry with him at any moment, for any reason. He said, “It is better…forgive me for suggesting to you the idea of renouncing. You go back to the world.”The man said, “I cannot go back to the world. I have suffered there enough, and I have suffered here. I am going to commit suicide!”The master said, “It is up to you, but I am not suggesting it because I don’t want to take the responsibility.” And the man left. Just nearby there was a village and he collected wood for his funeral pyre on the bank of the river.The village people gathered out of curiosity: “What is going on, what are you doing?”He said, “I am going to commit suicide. I am going to burn these logs of wood and jump into the fire, alive. Enough is enough – I have seen the world, I have seen renunciation. Now the only thing left is to see whether in death people can get peace or not!”The villagers said, “Your idea perhaps is right, but do one thing: don’t make your funeral pyre here, because when you are burning… We poor people live here. It will stink and the smoke will come to our huts. Can’t you go somewhere else?”Now he was really angry. He said, “This is a strange world. They don’t let you live, they don’t let you die! I cannot even choose the place for my death!”If you start thinking in such terms – that others are responsible, that the world is the problem, other people are the problem – then you are looking from a very wrong perspective. Chang Ch’o’s perspective is absolutely right when he says,There is no obstruction in worldly circumstances according to one’s lot: “nirvana” and “birth and death” are all equally illusions.What he is saying is that people think that if they can achieve nirvana then there will be no birth, no death, no misery, no problem. Nirvana, according to their mind, is just a golden paradise. But the nirvana conceived by the ignorant people cannot be the true nirvana; hence Chang Ch’o has put ‘nirvana’ into inverted commas.He does not mean the real state of nirvana; he means the conception of nirvana according to ignorant people. Because of their ignorance they will think about nirvana also, but it cannot be the true nirvana. Their nirvana, their birth and death, are all equally illusions. When they have gone beyond all illusions they will find the space which Buddha calls nirvana. That will not be the same as they were thinking it would be.It used to happen almost every day in Gautam Buddha’s life, because he was the first man to use a negative term for the ultimate state…. In India, Jainas use for the ultimate state the word kaivalya. It means to be absolutely alone in your pure consciousness; it is a concept of freedom. The Hindus have the word moksha, which actually means absolute freedom. These are positive terms.Buddha perhaps is the only man in the whole of history who uses for the ultimate state a word which is negative. Nirvana means nothingness, emptiness. As a word it literally means blowing out the candle.When you blow out the candle, what remains? Just darkness…. Darkness – people want to attain to eternal light, not to eternal darkness. People want to be part of a paradise with all the comforts and luxuries that they are missing here; they don’t want to enter into a state of emptiness. People want to become gods; they don’t want to become just pure nothingness.So every day people were telling Gautam Buddha, “If you go on using this word nirvana, nobody is going to follow you – because who wants emptiness, who wants nothingness, who wants eternal darkness?” Buddha said, “What you want is out of your ignorance. It is out of your unawareness that the desire is coming. So your paradise, your heaven, your moksha are nothing but projections of your ignorance. What I am saying is simply to negate your projections.“By emptiness, I am saying all that you can conceive will not be there – and what will be there you cannot conceive, neither can I speak about it. I am saying whatever you think are comforts, luxuries, joys, happiness will not be there, and what will be there you don’t have any way even to dream about. Hence I am using the word nothingness. It is just to negate you!“I am not talking about a negative state. I am talking about a very positive state, but that positive state is beyond expression, beyond words. So the only way is to negate you. If you can understand that your mind, your self, your personality will all be gone…if you can accept this tremendous idea of entering into an absolutely unknowable world, only then can you taste something of meditation. And finally, you can taste what I call nirvana, enlightenment, illumination.”He was immensely courageous to use the word nirvana. People want their desires to be fulfilled – they want consolations, they want opium, they want beautiful opportunities – then they are ready to do fasting, they are ready to do austerities, they are ready to do any kind of stupid thing you ask in the hope that it is only a question of a few days, and after that…eternal carnival, circus, movies, love-affairs. Deep down in their unconscious, these are the projections.Buddha is cutting their projections in the single blow of a sword. He says, “Nothing of all this nonsense! You will be attaining to eternal peace and silence and serenity – which can be very closely expressed as emptiness, as nothingness, as blowing out the candle, as nirvana.” And I can understand that he was right.People should not be supported in their illusions. They have lived millions of lives in their illusions, and religions go on supporting and nourishing their illusions: “You will be getting this, you will be getting that. Just the same desires that you are not able to fulfill here, you will be able to fulfill there in the ultimate state.” This is a very dangerous game that priests are playing with the whole of humanity. The greatest deception, the greatest cheating, the ugliest profession, is that of the priests. Buddha is very much against the priests. He is very much against all those people who are trying to persuade you.I am reminded…One day I was going to the university and a beautiful woman waved to stop my car, so I stopped the car. She came close to me and she gave me a beautiful leaflet. On the front of the leaflet there was a picture of a very beautiful house by the side of a beach and the ocean, and on the other side a thick pine-forest. And the caption on this picture said, “Do you want to have such a house?”I said, “Strange, is there such a house available in this city?” So I looked inside; I thought perhaps it is just for sale or something, and I wanted to look. I would have loved to have that house – the house was really great, and the situation was fabulous.I looked at the back and it said, “If you follow Jesus Christ then in paradise this house will be allotted to you.” This in short is the whole history of religions. They are telling you that you will get this, you will get that.Buddha is the only man who says, “You won’t get a thing. All that you have will be taken away.” He does not even allow you, as a self. You will be just a consciousness without any idea of “I.”In Pali, the language he used to speak, atta means the self. Just as in Sanskrit atman means the self, the supreme self, atta is the supreme self. Buddha used the word anatta – no-self. He has used all the negatives – and yet the man must have been of tremendous charisma, because he persuaded people to lose everything, to drop everything and enter into eternal nothingness.His persuasion is in his silence, in his blissfulness, in his grace. People have felt, “If this man has entered into nothingness, and out of nothingness has come so much flowering and so much fragrance, then there is no need to be worried…this nothingness seems to be better than all our conceptions and dreams.” Your nirvana is not the nirvana of Gautam Buddha.Chang Ch’o is certainly a man of enlightenment. His statement is so clear. Three things he is saying: One, don’t try to eliminate passion, because that will aggravate the disease – and this is two thousand years before Sigmund Freud. …rushing toward true suchness is also wrong.This is against all religions, who want you to be greedy for a life after death, for a heaven where you will be rewarded, where your virtues will be rewarded – and there seems to be no criterion as to how the virtues will be rewarded.I have heard Hindu saints saying that if you donate one rupee to a saint here…of course, to a saint – and there is no saint other than himself in the vicinity – you will get one crore rupees in heaven as a reward. It seems to be a kind of lottery, just for one rupee. And it is worth risking just one rupee! It is better to have a ready-made account there; when you reach there will be millions of rupees in your account. Then enjoy all the luxuries that you could not manage on the earth!But it is written in Hindu scriptures that one million times more…whatever virtue you gain, it becomes one million times more in heaven. This is simply exploiting people’s desires, people’s minds. Gautam Buddha perhaps is the only great teacher who has not exploited anybody.Ta Hui goes on quoting from great enlightened people, but he does not seem to understand that scholarship and enlightenment are not one. There are so many scholars – you can get them for one rupee a dozen. They are all around, all the universities are full, all the churches are full, all the synagogues are full – great rabbis, great pundits, great bishops and cardinals, but they are all scholars. They have studied much, they have gained much knowledge – but they have not gained much being.Wisdom belongs to those whose being expands to its ultimate limits.But it is good to see how an intellectual person, a genius, can go on committing mistakes – what to say about ordinary people? If they commit mistakes they have to be forgiven; even geniuses go on committing mistakes!Perhaps the basic problem with intellectuals is that they cannot conceive of anything greater and better than intelligence. Meditation is certainly that which goes far above anything that intelligence can even conceive.In the whole world there are so many learned people, but these learned people are not interested in meditation. They think learning is enough: “Learn more! There is so much to learn.” – and every year knowledge goes on growing so fast that to keep pace with it has become almost impossible. Who has time for meditation?I have been with so many learned people in this country and I have asked them, “After all your learning, hasn’t the idea of meditation ever occurred to you?”They said, “Why should it happen to us? There is nothing better than intelligence…” It hurts them, their ego is wounded, to hear that there is something greater than intelligence – meditation.An incident happened…I was a student, but I used to go to conferences and other places to speak on different subjects. There was a meeting on the birthday of Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. The president of the meeting was the chief justice of Madhya Pradesh high court, and I was the speaker. I was just a student but this man, whose name was Ganesh Bhatt, was a rare man. I have never come across another man of his quality.He was the chief justice and I was only a postgraduate student. After I spoke he simply declared to the assembly of almost ten thousand sikhs, “Now there is nothing more to be said. At least I cannot say anything better than has been said by this young man, so I will not deliver the presidential address, because that may spoil what he has said to you. I would rather that you go home silently pondering over what he has said, and meditating upon it.”The Sikhs were surprised, everybody was surprised, and as I was stepping down from the podium the chief justice, Ganesh Bhatt, touched my feet. I said, “What are you doing? You are of the age of my father. You are a learned man, you are a brahmin.”He said, “Nothing matters – neither my being a brahmin, nor my age, nor my prestige, nor my being the chief justice. What matters is that whatever you have said has come from the deepest being. It was unexpected…I have presided over many meetings and I have listened to many learned people, but all that they say is within quotation marks. For the first time I have heard a man who speaks directly, without any quotation marks – who speaks on his own authority. So don’t prevent me. I am showing my gratitude by touching your feet.”The judges had come because the chief justice was presiding over the meeting, and the advocates of the high court had come because the chief justice was there – they were all shocked! But Ganesh Bhatt became a regular visitor to my house. It became almost a regular routine that his car would be standing in front of my house.People whose cases were being heard in the high court started coming to me. I said, “I cannot help you.”They said, “Just a word from you, and he will not do anything against it.”I said, “I cannot do any such thing. He comes here with such respect toward me that I cannot bring up such trivia.”It became a problem. I had to keep a servant in front of my house to send these people away, otherwise everybody was coming to the house saying, “I am in much trouble, and just a little support from you will get me out of it.”After he retired from the chief justice-ship he became the vice-chancellor of Sagar University. By that time I had become a professor in Jabalpur University, and I had gone to Sagar to speak in a public conference of all religions. He heard that I had come, so he invited me to the university where he was now the vice-chancellor.Once I had been a student in that university, and because the vice-chancellor had called the meeting, all the professors and all the students, everybody was present. I was worried about only one thing – that he may do the same act again. The professors who had taught me were there, and thousands of students were there who had also been students, junior to me – and he did his act.As I went on the podium he stood, touched my feet, and said to the audience, “To be learned is one thing, and to know on your own experience – face to face – is a totally different thing. In my long life I have been in high positions, and I have come across so many learned people, and I can say with absolute confidence that learning brings no transformation to their being. The transformation of one’s being comes through some other door, not through the doors of mind.”It was a great shock! Many of them were my teachers, many of them were students who knew me when I was a student in that university, and their vice-chancellor touching my feet…. My old professors gathered when I came down after speaking, saying, “This is a strange phenomenon. We had never expected…”I said, “I was studying under you, but you never looked deeply into me, you never looked into my eyes. You never thought about the questions I was asking. You simply thought of one thing – that I was just creating trouble for you because you had no answer, and you were not courageous enough to say, ‘I don’t know.’”Intellectuals are very weak about one point. They cannot say, “I don’t know.”Only an enlightened being can say, “I don’t know.” His innocence and his enlightenment are synonymous.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Great AffairThis affair is like the bright sun in the blue sky, shining clearly, changeless and motionless, without diminishing or increasing. It shines everywhere in the daily activities of everyone, appearing in everything. Though you try to grasp it, you cannot get it; though you try to abandon it, it always remains. It is vast and unobstructed, utterly empty. Like a gourd floating on water, it cannot be reined in or held down. Since ancient times, when good people of the path have attained this, they’ve appeared and disappeared in the sea of birth and death, able to use it fully. There is no deficit or surplus: like cutting up sandalwood, each piece is it.Since there is no place to locate it, buddha is illusion and dharma is illusion: the three worlds, twenty-five states of being, the sense organs, sense objects, and consciousness are utterly empty. When you get to this realm, there’s no place to put even the word ‘buddha’; if even the word ‘buddha’ has no applicability, where is there true thusness, buddha-nature, enlightenment or nirvana? Thus the great being Fu said, “Fearing that people will give rise to a view of annihilation, we provisionally establish empty names.”In all the sutras up to now, Ta Hui has not been able to establish himself as an enlightened being. He is trying hard, he is using the most logical and intellectual methods, but they are empty; they don’t carry any weight. For example, when he says, “All the senses, self-nature, dharma, all are illusory,” one has to ask him, “To whom are you talking?” And, “Who is talking?” He has used the word illusory without understanding its implications.Anybody who is not aware of both the intellectual potentialities and the nature of ‘no-mind’ will not be able to figure out whether this man is authentic or pseudo.Before I go into his sutras, I am reminded of a beautiful incident about the Adi Shankaracharya, the first Shankaracharya, who established four temples – the four seats of shankaracharyas for all the four directions. Perhaps in the whole world, he is the most famous of those philosophers who are trying to establish that everything is illusory. Without doubt he was a great logician, because he went on conquering other philosophers; he moved all over the country and defeated all other schools of philosophy. He established his philosophy as the only right vision, the only right perspective: that all is maya, illusion.Shankaracharya was in Varanasi. One day, early in the morning – it was still dark because traditionally the Hindu monks take a bath before sunrise – he took a bath. And as he was coming up the steps, a man touched him on purpose, not accidentally, and told him, “Please forgive me. I am a sudra, I am untouchable. I am sorry, but you will have to take another bath to clean yourself.”Shankaracharya was very angry. He said, “It was not accidental, the way you did that; you did it on purpose. You should be punished in hell.”The man said, “When all is illusory, it seems only hell remains real.” That took Shankaracharya aback.The man said, “Before you go for your bath, you have to answer my few questions. If you don’t answer me, each time you come up after your bath, I will touch you.”It was lonely and nobody else was there, so Shankaracharya said, “You seem to be a very strange person. What are your questions?”He said, “My first question is: Is my body illusory? Is your body illusory? And if two illusions touch each other, what is the problem? Why are you going to take another bath? You are not practicing what you are preaching. How, in an illusory world, can there be a distinction between the untouchable and the brahmin? – the pure and the impure? – when both are illusory, when both are made of the same stuff as dreams are made of? What is the fuss?”Shankaracharya, who had been conquering great philosophers, could not answer this simple man because any answer was going to be against his philosophy. If he says they are illusory, then there is no point in being angry about it. If he says they are real, then at least he accepts the reality of bodies…but then there is a problem. If human bodies are real, then animal bodies, the bodies of the trees, the bodies of the planets, the stars…then everything is real.And the man said, “I know you cannot answer this – it will finish your whole philosophy. I’ll ask you another question: I am a sudra, untouchable, impure, but where is my impurity – in my body or in my soul? I have heard you declaring that the soul is absolutely and forever pure, and there is no way to make it impure; so how can there be a distinction between souls? Both are pure, absolutely pure, and there are no degrees of impurity – that somebody is more pure and somebody is less pure. So perhaps it is my soul that has made you impure and you have to take another bath?”That was even more difficult. But he had never been in such trouble – actual, practical, in a way scientific. Rather than arguing about words, the sudra had created a situation in which the great Adi Shankaracharya accepted his defeat. And the sudra said, “Then don’t go take another bath. Anyway there is no river, no me, no you; all is a dream. Just go in the temple – that too is a dream – and pray to God. He too is a dream, because he is a projection of a mind which is illusory, and an illusory mind cannot project anything real.What Ta Hui is saying here is something similar. He does not understand the implications. Let us look into each sutra.This affair…– this affair of enlightenment –…is like the bright sun in the blue sky, shining clearly, changeless and motionless, without diminishing or increasing. It shines everywhere in the daily activities of everyone, appearing in everything. Though you try to grasp it, you cannot get it; though you try to abandon it, it always remains. It is vast and unobstructed, utterly empty.These words he must have borrowed, because these are the words of a man who knows. Each single sentence is impeccably true. This affair – the affair of enlightenment or liberation or self-realization – is like the bright sun. It has been the experience of thousands of mystics that when they reach the highest peak of their consciousness there is an explosion of light, something like an atomic explosion.One of the great mystics, Kabir, says, “It is shining so much that it seems one thousand suns have risen suddenly around me. Wherever I look, the sun that I used to see seems completely paled…the brightness of these one thousand suns is so much. It has purified every fiber and cell of my being, as if I have passed through fire the way gold does. All that is not gold is destroyed by the fire and only the pure gold comes out.“Passing through this experience of one thousand suns, for the first time I know what purity means – its fragrance, its freshness, its absolute newness. It is never stale, it is never past, it is never present, it is never future. You cannot divide it into time segments. It always is; it is the very nature of existence itself.”So Ta Hui is quoting these words without quotation marks, which is one of the cunning strategies of all the intellectuals of the world. They go on stealing from every source, and pretending that it is their own experience. But they cannot manage it – sooner or later something immediately shows their stupidity.This affair is like the bright sun in the blue sky, shining clearly, changeless and motionless, without diminishing or increasing. It shines everywhere in the daily activities of everyone, appearing in everything. Though you try to grasp it, you cannot get it; though you try to abandon it, it always remains. It is vast and unobstructed, utterly empty.These sentences are certainly stolen from someone who knows. And the reason I am saying they are stolen is because just as we enter into further sutras it becomes clear that he is not aware that they are showing his ignorance.Like a gourd floating on water, it cannot be reined in or held down. Since ancient times, when good people of the path have attained this, they’ve appeared and disappeared in the sea of birth and death, able to use it fully. There is no deficit or surplus: like cutting up sandalwood, each piece is it.The first thing that he has wrong is that enlightened people are not, and cannot be called, good people. One can become a good person without being enlightened; in fact one can become a good person even without believing that there is consciousness, soul, or God. Do you think the atheists have not produced good people? Epicurus in Greece was a great atheist but you cannot find a better man; you cannot find anything to blame in his life.In India there has been a big school of atheists called Charvakas. They did not believe in any other world, in God, in reincarnation, in the existence of the soul. They were purely materialists, but they produced such good people that even the theist Hindu scriptures mention their originator with great respect as Acharya Brihaspati, the great master Brihaspati. They don’t agree with his ideas, but they cannot disagree with his character, with his goodness.The enlightened person is beyond good and evil. You cannot confine him to the word good. He is neither good nor evil, he is simply aware. Good passes in front of him and evil passes in front of him, and he remains unaffected. Whatever he does, he does not follow any ethical code or any morality; he simply follows his own awareness. So the good is not a goal for him, it is simply a by-product of his awareness. He is not doing virtuous things and he is not waiting for any reward. He is simply conscious; he has eyes.Do you think that because you have eyes and you can see the trees and the sun, you need some reward for it? Or because you can see the door and can go out or come in, do you think you need some reward for it?The man of awareness simply has eyes.The moralist has no eyes of his own. He is practicing what has been said traditionally to be good. He does not know exactly whether it is good or not; people just say it is good. He is born among people who believe it is good, and because by doing it he is honored, respected – his ego is fulfilled – he goes on doing it. It is a beautiful arrangement; here it is ego-fulfilling and there in the other world, after death, he will be showered with great rewards. He is really doing a good business.The enlightened man has no reward. He has the greatest thing in the world: a total awareness. Now nothing can be added to his richness. He is neither good nor bad; this is where Ta Hui shows his ignorance about the enlightened people.Secondly he says, …they’ve appeared and disappeared in the sea of birth and death.That is absolutely wrong. Once a man is enlightened, he never comes back into a womb; he goes beyond birth and death. Good men are bound to be born, are bound to die, but not the enlightened one. The very foundation of enlightenment is to get free from the wheel of birth and death, and to enter into universal life – formless, without a body. A body is a confinement, it is an imprisonment. Consciousness need not have a body; it can be just pure, formless space.Once a man is enlightened, he never comes back into another body. And because Ta Hui is saying that “he appears and disappears in the sea of birth and death,” he is showing his ignorance about the whole affair of enlightenment.The last sentence is certainly beautiful and significant, but it is again stolen; it is stolen from Gautam Buddha himself. Buddha was always asked, “Does the experience of awakening, in different people, have the same taste, the same flower, or is it different?” And he has used two statements. One is: “The sea is vast, but you can taste it from anywhere and it is always salty; it has the same taste.” And second: “Like cutting up sandalwood, each piece is it.” You can cut the sandalwood into many pieces, but each piece will have the same fragrance; it will not be different in different pieces.This is a famous statement of Gautam Buddha. Ta Hui has simply used it.There is no deficit or surplus: like cutting up sandalwood, each piece is it.Since there is no place to locate it, buddha is illusion and dharma is illusion…The reason that he is giving for why buddha is illusion and why dharma, the nature of enlightenment, is illusion is that you cannot find a place to locate them. Can you find a place to locate space? Can you find a place to locate time? Is time illusory? Is space illusory?Just because you cannot locate them…they are formless, hence location is not possible. If you make it a criterion that anything that cannot be located and pointed at is not real, then only things which have boundaries will be real and things that don’t have any boundaries will not be real. Then your body will be real, because it can be located, and your consciousness will be unreal, because it cannot be located.Ta Hui does not understand the implication of what he is saying. Just in the beginning he was talking about the affair of enlightenment, and there he did not mention at all that he was talking about an illusory affair. It was…bright sun in the blue sky, shining clearly, changeless and motionless, without diminishing or increasing. It shines everywhere…A thing that shines everywhere, of course, cannot be located. You can locate a thing which exists somewhere, but a thing that exists everywhere cannot be located.…appearing in everything. If it were appearing in some things, to locate it would be possible, but if it is appearing in everything…. If rocks are also buddhas, fast asleep, and they don’t have any qualitative difference from enlightened beings…. They are aware and the rocks are fast asleep, but being asleep or awake doesn’t make any difference to their basic reality.In all those statements…he is saying, Though you try to grasp it, you cannot get it – you cannot grasp it because it is so vast, and so formless…though you try to abandon it, it always remains.You cannot abandon it because it is everywhere; wherever you go you will find it. It is within you, it is without you. Those statements were absolutely right, but they are not his experiences.The later sutras show that he cannot befool, he cannot deceive: Since there is no place to locate it, buddha is illusory.Suddenly, that which was shining in the blue sky like the bright sun has become illusory. And even the nature of awareness, which is dharma, has become illusory.…the three worlds – hell, earth and heaven – twenty-five states of being, the sense organs, sense objects, and consciousness are utterly empty He is not leaving anything which is real. Then to whom is he talking? Their ears are illusory, their eyes are illusory, and so it is the case with Ta Hui himself. All the senses are illusory. The sense of seeing the people to whom he is talking, the very fact of talking…if everything is illusory, then he is simply mad. What is the point of writing these sutras? For whom is he writing these sutras? And if everything is illusory, do you think that the paper on which these sutras are written…only the ink and the paper are real? – although the man who was writing was illusory.When you get to this realm, there is no place to put even the word ‘buddha’;But that does not make buddha illusory, it simply makes the word inapplicable. In that experience no word is applicable. All words are just tentatively used. When one has become awakened he cannot say anything about his experience of awakening. It is true: there is not even space to place the word buddha.…if even the word ‘buddha’ has no applicability, where is there true thusness, buddha-nature, enlightenment, or nirvana?And he was talking about this affair in the beginning of the sutras, where it extended throughout space. You could not grasp it because it was too vast, and you could not abandon it because where will you abandon it? Wherever you go, you will find it. You are in it, you are it.Those statements were perfectly true. But now he is saying, …if even the word ‘buddha’ has no applicability, where is there true thusness?Now where is the great idea of true thusness, or buddha-nature, or enlightenment, or nirvana? Now everything is denied.In these small sutras he has done a great job! What he says in the beginning, and says very clearly, he denies in the end. It is just intellectual gymnastics. It is true, the word buddha is arbitrary – not because the existence of that for which we are using the word buddha is illusory, but because the experience is so vast that even the word buddha cannot contain it.It is not that the experience of thusness is illusory; in fact it is one of the greatest disciplines of awareness that has arisen in thousands of years.If one can say and feel and experience the nature of thusness, tathata, he will not be disturbed by pain, he will not be disturbed by pleasure, he will not be disturbed by failure, he will not be disturbed by success. He will simply say, “Thus is the case. Such is the way things happen in nature. I am just a witness. Right now success is passing in front of me like a cloud. Soon failure will follow, just as day is followed by night. This moment it is pleasure, soon it will bring pain, but I am absolutely aloof – they don’t even touch me. I am beyond their grasp.”This is one of the greatest approaches to reality that has come to man’s understanding: the idea of ‘thusness’ or ‘suchness.’ And Ta Hui is saying it is illusory! and then that even enlightenment is illusory, buddha-nature is illusory, nirvana is illusory. One has to ask Ta Hui how you can call something illusory unless there is something real in existence; otherwise, how will you compare?You can call something illusory only because something else is real. But if there is nothing real, then there is nothing illusory either. They have to exist together. He does not talk about what is real; in fact, all that is great and real, he is calling illusory. Now what is real? And if he says there is nothing which is real, then he has no right to call anything illusory.Thus the great being Fu said, “Fearing that people will give rise to a view of annihilation, we provisionally establish empty names.”He goes on quoting enlightened people out of context. What the great Master Fu said does not mean what Ta Hui wants it to mean. He has put it in a context: he is calling enlightenment, buddhahood, thusness, nirvana, all illusory, and then he quotes Master Fu, “Fearing that people will give rise to a view of annihilation” if they are told that everything is illusory….That’s why buddhas have not said that. They have talked about enlightenment and thusness and buddha-nature and nirvana, just so that people don’t get the view of a total negativity, of an utter emptiness, annihilation.…we provisionally establish empty names. All these names are empty, but Fu’s meaning is totally different. What Ta Hui wants him to mean is not his meaning. He is saying: “We are giving provisional, empty names – but the empty names are given to realities, not to illusions. They are provisional and empty because they cannot contain the vast reality of nirvana, enlightenment, thusness, buddha-nature. So just to give a small indication we have used provisional, empty names.” But once a person comes to experience himself, he will be able to see that all names were only provisional.To tell them in the beginning that everything is illusory…. They are already in misery, they are in deep anguish, and he tells them that there is no possibility of getting beyond it because everything that can take one beyond is illusory! But very strange is the fact that he does not call people’s misery illusory: their sadness is illusory, their egos are illusory, their intellects are illusory, their minds are illusory – he does not mention these things.And if everything is truly illusory, then what is the fear? If illusory people feel afraid, what is wrong in it? The people don’t exist, so let them fear! Non-existential people are fearing annihilation; they are already no more – so what more annihilation can happen to them?No, the people are real, although their conception about themselves is not real. They have to find their authentic reality, and that authentic reality is so vast that we have to give it provisional names – provisional, because once you have reached it you will see that those names were just utilitarian. They don’t define and they don’t confine the experience. That’s what master Fu meant when he said, …we provisionally establish empty names.But if there is nobody, if master Fu is illusory and the people he is concerned about – the ones that may become afraid of annihilation – don’t exist, then what is the problem? Everything is solved: there is no need of any preaching, there is no need of any scriptures, there is no need of any meditation, there is no need to go beyond your anguish, anxiety, misery. You yourself don’t exist; how can you be miserable? Have you ever heard of somebody who does not exist feeling very much worried, someone who has never existed going through a migraine? The very idea is so stupid.Ta Hui’s whole approach is to pick up all the great statements from different masters, to compile them and give a fallacious impression to people that he himself is enlightened. But enlightenment is far away. He is living in a very deceptive state. He is deceiving others, but that is not so important; he is deceiving himself. And this is the case not only with Ta Hui; this is the case with ninety-nine percent of so-called religious scriptures.I am talking about all this nonsense to make you aware that whenever you come across the same kind of nonsense again somewhere else – beware! Don’t get caught in it. Enlightened people have been respected so greatly that intellectuals have had a great jealousy, and they have tried in every way to imitate the enlightened people’s statements. There are thousands of treatises which have been produced by intellectual people – and they are clever enough. They have the acumen, the logic, the reason…they can deceive millions of people without any difficulty.Ta Hui even deceived the emperor of China, who honored him by offering the title: The Great Zen Master. In fact, the word Ta Hui itself means The Great Zen Master. The word Ta Hui is not his real name; it has been conferred on him by the emperor of China. If he can deceive the emperor, what to say about ordinary people?I am talking about Ta Hui just to make you aware. Don’t get caught. Be very watchful. When you are reading something or listening to something, be alert and see whether those words are coming from a space of realization…or are they just mind games? And whenever you find any kind of mind game, throw it.Just the other day I was looking at a picture of a Zen master who is very famous in Japan for his actions. In the picture he is tearing up scriptures and throwing them away; scriptures are flying all around in the air while he is tearing them up. And he became famous for this act!Looking into the picture, I was trying to find out whether Ta Hui’s sutras are in them or not…

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Lecture at the Request of Wei Ch’iangHaven’t you seen the saying of the man of old: “Even if there were something surpassing nirvana, I would say that it too is like a dream, an illusion.” If in the midst of dreamlike illusion, you are able to witness it as it really is, to understand it as it really is, to work on it as it really is, and to act on it as it really is, then you can use the method of ‘according with reality’ to subdue yourself, and, arousing an attitude of great compassion, create all kinds of skillful expedients whereby you can also subdue all sentient beings.Dealing with SituationsOld Yellow Face (Buddha) has said, “When the mind does not vainly grasp past things, does not long for things in the future, and does not dwell on anything in the present, then you realize fully that the three times are all empty and still.” You shouldn’t think about past events – whether good or bad; if you think, that obstructs the path. You shouldn’t consider future events; to consider them is crazy confusion. Present events are right in front of you: whether they’re pleasant or unpleasant, don’t fix your mind on them. If you do fix your mind on them, it will disturb your heart. Just take everything in its time, responding according to circumstances, and you will naturally accord with this principle.Unpleasant situations are easy to handle; pleasant situations are hard to handle. For that which goes against one’s will, it boils down to one word: patience. Settle down and reflect a moment and in a little while it’s gone. It’s pleasant situations that truly give you no way to escape: like pairing magnet and iron, unconsciously this and that come together in one place.Ta Hui is facing something very fundamental as far as the intellect and intelligence of man is concerned. This is of great importance: to have a clear conception that intellect is not intelligence.Intellect is of the mind: it depends on memory, it functions through borrowed knowledge. All our educational systems in the world are rooted in intellectual development; hence they all depend on memory. The examinations in our schools, colleges, universities, are not of intelligence – they are only testing how good a memory you have. But memory is not an indication of intelligence. Memory is mechanical. A computer can have a better memory than a man of genius, but the computer has no intelligence.The mind of man is nothing but a bio-computer, evolved over a long, long time. And intelligence is when the memory is silent and the intellect is not functioning, when the whole mind is at rest.Intelligence is something beyond mind.In English there is a problem because the same word is used for both – and they are totally different. In Sanskrit, and in all Eastern languages, we have different names for each: intellect is called bodhi, the faculty of knowledge; and intelligence is called pragya, the faculty of knowing, not knowledge.Knowledge is always dead; it is information. And all our educational systems are doing with students exactly what we are doing with computers – feeding them with more and more information. But no computer can answer a question for which it has not been already prepared. Intellect can only answer that which it already knows; it is stale, it is of yesterday.Intelligence is a response to a new situation, not out of your past memories but from your present awareness, this very moment. You don’t function as a computer, you don’t search for the answer in your memory storage; rather you simply open your consciousness to the situation and allow the spontaneous response.In other words, intelligence is spontaneous responsibility.The word responsibility has also been misunderstood. It has to be broken in two; otherwise, by and by, it loses its original meaning. It has become almost equivalent to duty. The reality is different. Break the word responsibility in two, then it becomes ability to respond or response-ability. Intelligence is response ability – and that is bound to be spontaneous. The response is going to surprise even you, because it is so new – you are not repeating anything from the past.There has been a perennial conflict between intelligence and intellect. The man of intellect thinks that he is intelligent because he knows so much. He has accumulated a great heritage of knowledge, he is burdened with all kinds of information. The man of intelligence is innocent; he functions moment to moment, his functioning has a freshness and a beauty. But to find intelligence one has to go beyond the mind. Meditation is the way.The problem with Ta Hui is the problem with all intellectuals of the world. They cannot think – they would not like to think – that there is something higher and superior to intellect.It is not a coincidence that he calls Gautam Buddha ‘Old Yellow Face’; it is an unconscious, sarcastic remark. And it is not only in this passage; in another place he says something even worse than ‘Old Yellow Face’. He may not be aware…this is utterly disrespectful, but the intellectual is always disrespectful toward the man of intelligence. He feels deep down a certain inferiority complex and he takes revenge in many ways.The intellectual tries to imitate the man of intelligence, the man of wisdom, the man of enlightenment – and he is capable, he is articulate. He has more capacity as far as language and words are concerned. He may be a better speaker, a better writer, a better orator. He can manage to deceive the world very easily just by repeating whatever the enlightened people have said.Sometimes it has happened that the imitator can defeat the original. It happened once that a few friends arranged a birthday celebration for an English actor. They made it a nationwide competition: who can imitate the actor the best? In every big city people would be chosen, and then the final test would be in London. The winner was going to have a great prize.Many actors participated. The actor himself thought that it would be a good joke to enter the competition from a small town. Of course he was certain that he was going to come in first – he is the original, everybody else is imitating him. But to everybody’s surprise – and more to his – he came in second. When it became known that he was the real man, nobody could believe that it had happened – how had all the examiners got misled by an imitator?But I see deeper into the psychology of it: the imitator prepares, rehearses, does much homework. The original simply stands there in his spontaneity and reality – he has not prepared, he has not rehearsed, he is just as he is. But somebody who is trying to come in first in the great competition may have worked for months. Naturally, he deceived the examiners. And this has happened a thousand and one times – that someone like Ta Hui, who is just an intellectual, has been accepted for one thousand years as a great master of Zen teaching, and he is simply repeating.I would like you to see that everything can be imitated, except enlightenment. You may say the same words, but they will not have the same fire. Your gestures may be the same, but they will not have the same grace. You may act as if you are enlightened, but that ‘as if’ is a big gap, almost unbridgeable. This becomes so clear in Ta Hui’s case.He says,Haven’t you seen the saying of the man of old: “Even if there were something surpassing nirvana, I would say that it too is like a dream, an illusion.”It is true that the people who have achieved the ultimate realization – you can call it nirvana, liberation, self-realization – those who have achieved it are fully able to say that that too is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. It is the most beautiful dream, the most perfect dream – but nothing more than that.The reason for the enlightened man to call his enlightenment only a dream is a very fundamental one. He is trying to say: “This too is an experience, and I am separate from my every experience – whether the experience is of misery, of suffering, of anguish, or of blissfulness or enlightenment, it makes no difference. They belong to the same category of experiences.“I am not the experience, I am the experiencer. I am always transcendental to any experience that happens to me. I am only a witness, a sakshin. Just as I have seen black clouds, I am seeing white clouds. Just as I have seen clouds, I am seeing a cloudless sky – but I am separate.“My consciousness is not an experience. All experiences pass in front of my consciousness, but I am always a witness. So whether the experience is of misery, agony, or of ecstasy, it makes no difference.”But this can be said only by a man who has attained to that beatitude, that benediction – that this too is a dream, a beautiful dream, the most beautiful dream, but one has not to get identified with it. Hence the saying that when one becomes the buddha he forgets all about buddhahood; he becomes again an ordinary human being. Then the circle is complete. He had started from being an ordinary human being, but that was a state of unconsciousness, like a sleepwalker, a somnambulist. Now he has come back to the same state, with only one difference: now he is no longer asleep, he is awake.A buddha is fully awake but, compared to anyone else, he is not special. He is not holier than you and he is not higher than you. You are asleep and he is awake – this makes no qualitative difference. In fact, the person who is asleep is showing that he has the capacity to be awake. If you were not capable of being asleep, you would not be capable of being awake either; both capacities belong to the same realm. And unless an enlightened man again becomes an ordinary man, he has been fulfilling only his ego. Then his enlightenment is not authentic; his enlightenment is only an intellectual understanding, not an experience.Ta Hui is quoting some ancient seer:“Even if there were something surpassing nirvana” – something surpassing enlightenment – “I would say that it too is like a dream, an illusion.”A tremendously pregnant statement…If in the midst of dreamlike illusion, you are able to witness it as it really is, to understand it as it really is, to work on it as it really is, and to act on it as it really is, then you can use the method of ‘according with reality’ to subdue yourself.Now here he goes wrong. As long as he was quoting the ancient seer he was perfectly right, because those were not his words, he was only repeating. They were the words of someone who has known the experience. Now he starts his own understanding, his own intellectual grasp – and everything goes wrong.He says, “If you can be a witness of this dreamlike illusion, then you can use the method of ‘according with reality’ to subdue yourself.” A man who has come to the point of knowing that even enlightenment is an illusion cannot have the idea of self anymore – he cannot have the idea that “I am.”The witness has no idea of any ego.The witness is but there is no idea of “I am.”The witness is simply like a mirror; it reflects. Whatever comes in front of it, it reflects – without any reaction, without any attachment, without any identity. A beautiful face or an ugly one, all are just reflections, without any difference. When the beautiful face goes away, the mirror does not try to prevent it, to cling to it. And when an ugly face comes before it, it does not want to get rid of it, it does not close its eyes. It has no evaluation, no judgment; it remains simply a witness of whatsoever is the case.A man of enlightenment has no problem as far as the self is concerned – the self was lost long before. You cannot attain to enlightenment before you have lost your self. That is a necessary step to attain to enlightenment.Let me say it this way:You cannot be enlightened.When you are not, enlightenment is.You have to give way for enlightenment to descend, for that great awakening to fill your whole sky, to fill your whole consciousness.If you are there, then whatsoever happens is only mental gymnastics. You can manage to create an illusion of everything except enlightenment. You can see Jesus Christ, you can create the illusion; your mind has every capacity. You may just have to make the right arrangement – a three week fast and isolation, and the continuous repetition of the name of Jesus Christ – and you will start seeing Jesus Christ with you in the cave. You will start talking with Jesus Christ – and not only will you be talking, he will be answering you too! And nobody is there except you.All the religions of the world have insisted on fasting. The reason is that when you are fasting your capacity to judge between the real and the unreal is lost after three weeks. Your mind needs the continuous nourishment of certain proteins; just a three week fast, and those proteins are finished. The mind keeps a certain emergency reserve and that emergency reserve is finished in three weeks – and that is if you are a non-vegetarian. If you are a vegetarian, then within a week all your proteins are gone, because vegetarian food is not sufficient food as far as the mind is concerned.It is no coincidence that not a single vegetarian has received the Nobel Prize! It is strange; it should be otherwise. Vegetarians think that since they are eating the purest food, they must have the purest minds, but even the three persons from India who have received the Nobel Prize – all were non-vegetarians.Being a vegetarian and fasting and isolation are all strategies to bring your mind to a position where you cannot distinguish whether what you are seeing is real or unreal. It happens to small children. At an early age, when they wake up they start crying for something they had in their dream. They ask, “Where has it gone? It was just now here with me.” It takes a little time for children to grow to understand that what they see in sleep is a dream and what they see when they are awake is not a dream.The distinction between dream and reality needs a certain development of the mind. And what happens in this development? Those proteins which make your intellect…All religions are agreed on the principle that fasting is something spiritual, but the reason is psychological, not spiritual: fasting is a beautiful way to create illusions. Have you ever thought about it…that a Christian never comes to see Krishna? When he is meditating in isolation, fasting in his monastery, Krishna never comes to him, Buddha never comes to him. And to a Buddhist, Jesus never comes. It seems these people also discriminate between Christians, Buddhists, Hindus…First they inquire whether this man is a Buddhist – should I go or not?It is your conditioning. Nobody comes, there is nobody to come! These people have disappeared into the universal consciousness. They don’t have any body, any vehicle anymore – even if they want to come, they cannot come. But you can create the illusion, and these are the devices: fasting, isolation…When you are with people, it is one thing; when you are alone it is another thing. Have you watched the difference? – when you are in your bathroom you are a different person than when you are in a marketplace. In the bathroom, even though you may be seventy years old, you can start making faces before the mirror. And if you become aware that just a small child is looking through the keyhole, you will change immediately into a serious, mature, experienced, seventy-year-old person! Just the eyes of that five-year-old boy in the keyhole can make such a great change.Albert Einstein’s life was full of surprises. His greatest surprise was when he became aware that if you are observing the behavior of electrons, they behave differently from when nobody is observing them. Strange! We used to think that electrons were like dead people – just matter – but they seem to be very much alive, and very sensitive.They don’t belong to our society, they don’t belong to our culture, they don’t need to be worried about what we think about them, but something happens…when they are alone they behave in one way and when they feel that somebody is watching, then they immediately become gentlemen! Albert Einstein was so shocked, because it meant that electrons have awareness of some kind. They are not just electric particles; they have their own consciousness.Perhaps you are not aware that when you pass by the side of a tree it changes its behavior. It stands more erect, more beautiful, it releases more fragrance from the flowers. Somebody is coming by; it has to show itself as beautiful as possible.I was teaching in a university, and by the side of my department there was a long row of a certain beautiful flower – gulmohar. That flower is not found in cold countries; it is a flower of very hot countries. And when it comes to blossom, then all the leaves disappear and only red flowers…it seems as if the whole tree has become aflame, afire. It is a very beautiful thing to see. The whole department was surrounded by gulmohar trees.I used to park my car under one gulmohar tree, and it had become known to almost everybody that that gulmohar tree had to be left for my car, because I had been parking my car there for years. Even when I didn’t go to the university, I used to send my car! The car was parked – everybody was satisfied that I was in the university. I had told my driver, “Just enjoy the garden” – the university has a beautiful garden – “and after two, three hours, you take the car back, but first let the vice-chancellor see it.” The vice-chancellor’s office was just beside the tree and he could see from his window that my car was standing there.It was he who brought to my notice…I had not been looking closely at the other trees, and one day just as I was parking my car he came out of his office, and stopped me saying, “It is a miracle! All the other gulmohar trees” – and there were nearly fifty trees – “have died for no reason at all; perhaps some kind of epidemic has attacked those trees. Only your tree is still alive, is still green, still blossoms. It must have something to do with you!”I said, “It is strange…I had never thought about it.”Seeing that other trees had died, I had inquired of the gardener, “What is the matter? Why have all the trees died?”He told me, “I cannot figure it out. Every care has been taken, but they simply go on dying.”The trees were just standing naked, without leaves, without flowers. The vice-chancellor jokingly said to me, “You must be doing something; only your tree is alive.”Two years after I left the university I went there again, and the first thing I did was to look at my tree – but it was gone! I was going to speak, so the vice-chancellor had come to receive me. He said, “Look! I told you that you were doing something to that tree. It remained alive for seven years when all the other trees were dying, but the day you left the university your tree started dying. Within two months it was gone. We tried everything, but we could not save it. And I used to love that tree,” he said, “because it was just in front of my window.”It is possible that the tree had become in some way intimate to me and just for friendship’s sake it remained alive for all those seven years.Now, scientists are finding out that trees are very sensitive. When a woodcutter comes to cut the tree it trembles, and its trembling can be read on a graph, just like a cardiogram. A little instrument has to be attached to the tree, and it goes on showing how the tree is feeling – whether it is feeling happy, wholesome… The moment the tree sees the woodcutter coming…the woodcutter has not started cutting the tree but if he has in his mind the idea to cut the tree, the graph goes suddenly crazy, it loses all harmony. Just a moment before, everything was harmonious on the graph, and now the graph is going up and down. The tree must be trembling; its heart must be worried.Strange – it was sensitive to the thought of the man. He has not done anything as far as cutting is concerned, only the idea was there. Perhaps the tree is more sensitive than we are. And if the woodcutter passes by without the idea, the graph remains the same.Not only does the tree that he is going to cut become worried, concerned, other trees surrounding it also start feeling worried and concerned – because one of them is going to be harmed. It seems subtle vibrations from the mind of the man who is going to cut or not cut are being caught by the trees.This whole existence is immensely sensitive.Everything is made of consciousness.Once you experience this universal consciousness, you are not there – you are left far behind. Hence the question of ‘subduing yourself’ and ‘arousing an attitude of great compassion’…. These statements by Ta Hui are absolute nonsense.He is saying,…and, arousing an attitude of great compassion.The man of enlightenment does not have to arouse the attitude of compassion; he finds that it is already there. It comes with enlightenment as a by-product.We have to practice it. If you want to be compassionate you have to discipline yourself, you have to practice…you have to practice against yourself, because you are basically violent and cruel. Deep down you are carrying all the animals that you have passed in the evolution.But a man of enlightenment does not practice compassion. He has not even to think about compassion, he simply finds it. As his ego disappears and as he realizes the ultimate universal life force as his own – it is not that he is only a part of it… That is something very difficult to understand.P.D. Ouspensky, in his great work about George Gurdjieff’s teachings, In Search Of The Miraculous, has a statement. There is a mathematics that we know – and Ouspensky was a mathematician by profession – where the part is never equal to the whole. That is simple mathematics. How can the part be equal to the whole? The part is always less than the whole.But living with Gurdjieff, meditating with him, he states that there comes a moment when a higher mathematics becomes real, where the part can be equal to the whole and sometimes the part can be bigger than the whole. Looked at logically it is absurd, but looked at from a different perspective than logic, from the perspective of no-mind, I support it absolutely. There is a higher mathematics, which belongs to no-mind, where the part is the whole.So when one disappears in the whole, it is not that he is only a part; he is one with the whole. He is the whole cosmos. The question of being compassionate to anybody does not arise – because there is nobody else left outside him! The trees are within him, the animals are within him, the oceans are within him, the stars are within him; everything that is is within him. To whom is he going to be compassionate? But he feels a tremendous compassion.It is as if you are sitting in your room and nobody is there. If you are a man of love, although there is nobody in the room you will still be radiating love, you will still be radiating compassion; although there is nobody in the room, if you are a man of truth you will still be radiating truth.So two things are to be remembered: the man of enlightenment finds that with enlightenment many things have come as by-products – and compassion is one of the most important. But there is nobody left toward whom he can be compassionate.It is a strange, mysterious existence. When there are millions of people to be compassionate toward, it is so difficult for you; you have to practice it, you have to go through austerities, you have to discipline yourself, you have to torture yourself. And when the compassion comes to you on its own accord, there is nobody left to whom you can be compassionate!These small things show whether the man is enlightened himself or is simply repeating words from other enlightened people. Ta Hui is saying, “subdue yourself” after enlightenment. It as if somebody comes and says to you when you have brought the light in, “Now throw out the darkness.” It is exactly that kind of statement. If the light is there… The darkness was only an absence of light; you cannot find it.When God created the world, one day Darkness appeared before God, very grumpy and angry, and said to God, “You have to do something! Your Sun, from the morning till the evening, harasses me unnecessarily. Wherever I go, sooner or later he reaches and I have to run away. I cannot find rest, I cannot relax, I have to be continuously on guard. The Sun may come any moment.“I have not done any harm to the Sun; in fact we have not even been introduced to one another. There is no question of enmity, we are not even friends! You just tell your Sun that this misbehavior – and that, too, with a lady – is very ungentlemanly! This primitive behavior has to be stopped.”God was absolutely convinced that this should not be so. He said, “You should have informed me before,” and he immediately sent messengers to bring the sun into his court. The Sun was simply amazed to hear that some lady called Darkness has complained against him: “I don’t know any such lady – I have never come across her, I have never seen her! What harm can I do without seeing her?”God was very angry, but the Sun said, “Before you become so angry and start shouting at me, please give me a chance to say something also. I don’t know any lady who is being harassed by me. The best course will be for you to bring that lady in front of me. At least I can see who the person is who is complaining against me.” And since then God has been trying… But he can get only one, either the Sun or the lady, but never both together in the court. So the case remains in the file.You should not condemn the bureaucracies that exist in this world, where files move with such slow speed. Albert Einstein used to say that light has the greatest speed, and I say to you that files have the slowest speed. I don’t think that God will ever be able to produce both parties together in the court. The case cannot be solved.It is exactly the same thing: when enlightenment comes, the ego has already gone out. When enlightenment comes, just as a shadow to it compassion comes in, truth comes in, beauty comes in, grace comes in, blissfulness comes in. All that you have been searching for and were never able to manage is just showered on you.One of the disciples of Gautam Buddha – the first of his disciples to become enlightened – was Manjushree. The story is beautiful…one day he had been meditating in the early morning, and as the sun was rising in the cool breeze of the morning, he became enlightened. And the story says that the whole existence started showering flowers on him. What flowers? They cannot be just the flowers that we know; they are the flowers of compassion, of love, of beauty, of grace, of truth, of authenticity.These flowers shower on you on their own accord. It is the whole existence rejoicing in your enlightenment, because your enlightenment is not only yours; it raises the consciousness of the whole existence higher. With each person becoming enlightened, the whole existence becomes more enlightened. The whole existence rejoices and celebrates.Ta Hui has no idea of enlightenment and what happens as a by-product.…subdue yourself, create the attitude of…compassion, create…skillful expedients whereby you can also subdue all sentient beings…This too is very significant to understand.Gautam Buddha has related many stories of his past lives, and they have such beauty and significance. In one of his past lives he heard about a man who had become enlightened; his name was Deepankar Buddha. The word deepankar means one who can light the candle of your being; the word lamplighter is the exact meaning of deepankar. Deep means lamp, and deepankar means lamplighter. Gautam Buddha was not enlightened in that life. Thousands of people were going to see Deepankar Buddha, and just out of curiosity he also went.When he saw Deepankar Buddha – he had no intention… He had come there only out of curiosity, but the moment he saw the man and the beauty of the man – those deep eyes reminding him of the depth of oceans – and the field of a certain energy vibrating around the man…not knowing what he was doing, with tears rolling down from his eyes, he touched the feet of Deepankar Buddha.He himself could not believe what he was doing, and why…? He had not come to touch his feet, and why were these tears coming and why was he feeling so immensely happy? Nothing visible had happened, but something invisible had touched his heart, the bells in his heart had started ringing. A subtle music had touched him.And at that very moment, as he stood in front of Deepankar Buddha, Deepankar Buddha bowed down and touched the feet of Gautam Buddha – who was not enlightened in that life. He could not believe what was happening. He asked, “What are you doing? If I touch your feet it is perfectly right, I am ignorant. But you have attained to the ultimate consciousness – you are not supposed to touch my feet.”And Deepankar Buddha said something that Gautam Buddha remembered when he became a buddha. The first thing that he remembered then was the statement of Deepankar Buddha of many lives before: “Don’t be worried. Yesterday I was also ignorant, today I am enlightened; today you are ignorant, tomorrow you will be enlightened. There is not much difference – it is only a question of time. When you become enlightened, remember.”The moment somebody becomes enlightened, to him the whole existence becomes enlightened – at least potentially. He can’t see himself in a special position. And that’s what Ta Hui is trying to say – that you should create devices and methods whereby all other sentient beings can also become enlightened.The really awakened man does nothing to enlighten anybody. His very presence certainly does miracles, his very being is magical, but as far as he is concerned, he himself is no more. Who is there to do anything?On the last day of his life, Gautam Buddha said – when his disciples were paying tributes to him because then he was leaving his body – “Don’t feel grateful to me, because I have not done anything. In fact, since the day enlightenment happened I have not been in existence. Things have been happening around me – that’s another thing. But I am not the doer; the doer is dead, the doer has gone long before enlightenment entered.”Things certainly happened, hundreds of people became enlightened around Gautam Buddha, but he was not doing anything to make them enlightened. He was just available, like a well. If you are thirsty you carry the water from the well and drink, but the well is not doing anything.Ta Hui’s statements show very clearly that he has not tasted the experience itself – he has only heard about it. And then he says,Old Yellow Face (Buddha) has said, “When the mind does not vainly grasp past things, does not long for things in the future, and does not dwell on anything in the present, then you realize fully that the three times are all empty and still.”The statement of Buddha is right, but this sarcastic reference to Buddha as ‘Old Yellow Face’ is so ugly that it shows the mind of Ta Hui. Although Ta Hui is quoting Gautam Buddha, there seems to be no reverence. Intellectuals are very clever in criticizing, but are absolutely impotent as far as showing reverence is concerned. Criticism is very easy because it is very ego-fulfilling. Reverence is very difficult because it means you have to put your ego aside.Ta Hui wants to pretend that he himself is an enlightened man, but still he cannot show reverence to Gautam Buddha. To call Gautam Buddha ‘Old Yellow Face’ is just unimaginable. But his ego is feeling hurt somewhere. In a very subtle way, from the back door, it is taking revenge.The quotation of Gautam Buddha is beautiful:“When the mind does not vainly grasp past things, does not long for things in the future, and does not dwell on anything in the present, then you realize fully that the three times are all empty and still.”It is a very significant statement, particularly to us, because for the first time, on a scientific basis, time is no longer the same as it used to be. Since Albert Einstein, time has become the fourth dimension of space.Time is still, just as space is still. It neither goes anywhere nor comes from anywhere. It is just our language that goes on saying that time is passing. In fact, we are passing, time stands still.Time has no movement. There are not only scientific but logical difficulties. If time moves, for example just like a river…if time moves, then there must be something on both sides of the river, unmoving. The river moves only in contrast to two unmoving banks. If there are not two banks which are still, how can the river move?Once in a while you may have been sitting in a train, with another train standing on the next track, and suddenly you feel that your train has started moving. Then you look at the platform, and you realize that your train is not moving because the platform is still there. The other train is moving. But if the platform was not there… Just think, if there was nothing on the other side – only empty space – how would you manage to know whether your train is moving or the other train is moving?The example can be taken even further. If two trains in space, or two planes in space, are moving parallel in one direction, nobody will feel that there is any movement – because to feel the movement you need something static in contrast. If you say time is moving, you have to show against what.Time is still; only the mind is moving.These tenses – past, present and future – are not the tenses of time; they are tenses of the mind. That which is no longer before the mind becomes the past. That which is before the mind is the present. And that which is going to be before the mind is the future.Past is that which is no longer before you.Future is that which is not yet before you.And present is that which is before you and is slipping out of your sight. Soon it will be past.Buddha is saying: If you don’t cling to the past…because clinging to the past is absolute stupidity. It is no longer there, so you are crying for spilled milk. What is gone is gone! And don’t cling to the present because that is also going and soon it will be past. Don’t cling to the future – hopes, imaginations, plans for tomorrow – because tomorrow will become today, will become yesterday. Everything is going to become yesterday.Everything is going to go out of your hands.Clinging will simply create misery.You will have to let go.You cannot manage to prevent the process of things moving out of your sight, so it is better just to watch, just to witness, and let things be wherever they want – in the past, in the present, in the future. Don’t you be disturbed, because everything is going to fall into the past.Only one thing is going to remain with you: that is your witnessing, that is your watchfulness. This watchfulness is meditation.Mind is a clinger – it clings, it hoards, it possesses. In the name of memory it collects all the past. In the name of planning for the future it clings to hopes, desires, ambitions – and it suffers. Mind is continuously in tension, is continuously in anguish – always in a turmoil.Buddha is saying: If you can just remain silent and a witness, every misery, every worry, every tension will disappear. And there will be a silence and a clarity that you had never even thought about. This clarity will bring you the awakening; it is witnessing that, as it matures, finally becomes the awakening.Witnessing can be called the seed and enlightenment can be called the flowers. But begin from witnessing, and then it starts growing. Go on nourishing it, go on caring for it, go on watering it, strengthen it in every possible way – and one day it is going to blossom. That day will be the greatest day of your life.You should not think about past events – whether good or bad.This is commentary by Ta Hui on Buddha’s statement – and you can see the difference. You should not think about past events… Buddha is not saying anything about thinking; he is simply saying, don’t cling!…whether good or bad – Buddha is not saying anything about good or bad.If you think, that obstructs the path.Buddha is not talking about any obstruction to the path. His statement is very simple. He is saying if you don’t cling to past, present and future, then all is empty and still. There is nothing else to say. To add anything else would be superfluous.You should not consider future events.Now does Ta Hui think he is enriching Buddha’s statementTo consider them is crazy confusion.He himself is in crazy confusion; Buddha’s statement was complete – impeccably complete. There is nothing to be added to it.Present events are right in front of you: whether they are pleasant or unpleasant…He is simply bringing in his own mind about good and bad, about pleasant and unpleasant.…don’t fix your mind on them. If you do fix your mind on them, it will disturb your heart.Now he is really in crazy confusion!The witness is neither the mind nor the heart.Mind is a division which thinks, and heart is another division of the same mind which feels. Feeling and thinking, thoughts and emotions…but witnessing is separate from both. Whether you are thinking, the watcher watches…a thought is passing by, or you are feeling angry – the witness still watches. An emotion is passing by, just like clouds pass and you see them.You are neither the good nor the bad.You are neither the pleasant nor the unpleasant.You are neither the thought nor the emotions.You are neither the mind nor the heart.But Ta Hui says,If you do fix your mind on them, it will disturb your heart. Just take everything in its time, responding according to circumstances, and you will naturally accord with this principle.What principle? What principle is he talking about? Buddha has not given any principle. He has simply explained a simple thing: if you cling, you suffer; if you don’t cling, you attain to peace and silence.Buddha is not a moralist or a puritan. He is not interested in what is good and what is bad. His whole interest is very simple, and that is: you should not be asleep. Spiritually, you should be awake and then everything else will be settled. You don’t have to do anything else.Unpleasant situations are easy to handle…Now this crazy fellow goes on….Unpleasant situations are easy to handle; pleasant situations are hard to handle. For that which goes against one’s will, it boils down to one word: patience. Settle down and reflect a moment and in a little while it is gone. It is pleasant situations that truly give you no way to escape: like pairing magnet and iron, unconsciously this and that come together in one place.It is good to reflect on the statements of those who have arrived home, but your reflections should make them in some way more rich. If you drag what they have said into a lower state, you are being very unjust. It is better not to say anything if you don’t know. But this is the problem with intellectuals: they have to say something. Whatever Ta Hui is saying is so ordinary, so meaningless, that it does not help you in any way to enter into the space of enlightenment. On the contrary, he starts bringing in things which will certainly confuse you.It has to be very clearly understood that morality is not religion, although religion is morality. A moral person need not be religious, but the religious person is of necessity moral; he cannot be otherwise. A moral person need not even be concerned with religion: he may be an atheist, he may be an agnostic – still he can be moral. But the religious person has no possibility of being immoral. His very consciousness is enough to give him the right direction. He has not to depend on the precepts given by great religious founders or by religious scriptures; he has his guide in his own awareness.And because he lives according to his own light, there is a joy in his living. His morality is not a burden. His morality is not something imposed on him. His morality is something like overflowing joy, overabundant rejoicing. He loves because he has so much love. He cannot hate because hate has disappeared from his being.I am reminded of one very great woman – Rabiya al-Adabiya, a Sufi woman. A great Sufi mystic, Hassan, was staying with Rabiya. In the morning he wanted the holy Koran. He had not brought his own copy, thinking that Rabiya must have a holy Koran and that will do.Rabiya gave him her copy. He opened it and he was shocked, because Rabiya had made many corrections in the holy Koran! To any fanatic religious person, to any fundamentalist, nothing can be more sacrilegious. A Mohammedan cannot think that you can correct God’s only messenger, and the last messenger. Now God is not going to send another improved edition of his holy scripture. The last one he sent was the holy Koran. Mohammedans say there is only one God; one prophet, Mohammed, and one holy scripture, the Koran. And this old woman, Rabiya, is making corrections – she has cut out a few lines completely!Hassan said, “Rabiya, it seems somebody has spoiled your book.”Rabiya said, “Nobody has spoiled my book. I have simply corrected it.”Hassan said, “I cannot understand. I always thought that you were a great religious woman. I cannot conceive that you would do such a thing.”She said, “I had to do it. Just look at what I have crossed out!” The sentence in the Koran was: “When you see the devil, hate him.” And she has crossed it out.Rabiya said, “Since I have experienced my innermost being, I don’t have any hate left. Even if the devil stands before me, I have nothing to offer but love. I have to correct the Koran. It is my book; it has to be according to my experience! Mohammed has no monopoly. I will not tolerate anything in my book which is against my experience.”A man of enlightenment is so full of love, so full of joy, that he shares it. Sharing comes to him without any effort – it is not an effort, it is not an action. That’s why people like Lao Tzu say “actionless action,” and “effortless effort.”But people like Ta Hui cannot understand that. To them, “effortless effort” and “actionless action” will look like illogical, absurd statements. How can there be an actionless action? How can there be effort without any effort? But I know that once you are awakened, you don’t do anything – everything starts happening. It is just a spontaneous outpouring, just as roses come on rosebushes, without any effort.Love and compassion, good and beauty, grace and blessings, simply go on and on coming out of the overfullness. Just as a raincloud showers without any effort, an awakened man showers also without any effort. And the beauty of no-effort – and yet tremendous happenings – is so majestic. It is the ultimate splendor in existence.Gautam Buddha has said… For forty-two years continuously he was speaking, and at the end he says, “I have not spoken a single word.” And he is right, because he has not made any effort to speak. It was just a raincloud showering, it was a rosebush bringing roses with no effort, with no action. Buddha had to speak because he was so overfull. All that poetry, all that music, all that came out of him was simply spontaneous.A moralist makes efforts; he tries to do good, he avoids doing bad. His whole life is continuously “Do this,” or “Don’t do that.” He is always split, and he is always worried about whether what he is doing is right…is it really right? Or, who knows? – it may not be right. The moralist acts out of confusion. He depends on others who themselves may have been confused.The last words of Gautam Buddha on the earth were, “Be a light unto yourself. Don’t be bothered about what others say, don’t be bothered about traditions, orthodoxies, religions, moralities. Just be a light unto yourself.”Just a small light is enough, and you can go on with that small light for ten thousand miles without any difficulty. Your light may be falling only four feet ahead of you – just go on moving. As you move, the light will be moving ahead, and if you can see four feet ahead, that’s enough. You can go as far as you want. You can go on an eternal pilgrimage with just a small light of your own.Don’t live on borrowed light.Don’t live on borrowed eyes.Don’t live on borrowed concepts.Live according to your own light, and your life will be, each and every moment, a greater joy, a greater blissfulness, a greater ecstasy.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Stillness and CommotionWorldly passions are like a blazing fire: when will they ever end?Right in the midst of the hubbub, you mustn’t forget the business of the bamboo chair and reed cushion (meditation). Usually (to meditate) you set your mind on a still concentration point – but you must be able to use it right in the midst of the hubbub…Vimalkirti said, “It’s like this: the high plateau does not produce lotus flowers; it’s the mire of the low swamplands that produces these flowers.” The old barbarian (Buddha) said, “True thusness does not keep to its own nature, but according to circumstances brings about all phenomenal things….”Don’t Cling to Stillness (to K’ung Hui)Once you have achieved peaceful stillness of body and mind, you must make earnest effort. Do not immediately settle down in peaceful stillness. In the teachings this is called “the deep pit of liberation,” much to be feared. You must make yourself turn freely like a gourd floating on the water, independent and free, not subject to restraints, entering purity and impurity without being obstructed or sinking down. Only then do you have a little familiarity with the school of the patchrobed monks. If you just manage to cradle the uncrying child in your arms, what’s the use?Don’t Pray for ReliefLin Chi said, “If you can put to rest the mind that frantically seeks from moment to moment, you will be no different from old Shakyamuni Buddha.”He wasn’t fooling people. Even Bodhisattvas of the seventh stage seek buddha-knowledge without their minds being satisfied: therefore it is called “affliction.” really there’s no way to manage: it’s impossible to apply the slightest external measure.Several years ago there was a certain layman, Hsu, who was able to find an opening; he sent me a letter, expressing his understanding, that said, “Empty and open in my daily activities, there’s not a single thing opposing me; finally I realize that all things in the three worlds are fundamentally nonexistent. Truly this is peace and happiness, joyful liveliness, having cast it all away.” Accordingly I instructed him with a verse:Don’t be fond of purity: purity makes people weary. Don’t be fond of joyful liveliness: joyful liveliness makes people crazy. As water conforms to the vessel, it accordingly becomes square or round, short or long. As for casting away or not casting away, please think it over more carefully. The three worlds and myriad things are no refuge – where is there any home?If you are just thus, this is a great contradiction. This is to inform layman Hsu that his own kin are creating disaster. Open wide the eye of the thousand sages, and do not keep praying for relief.Emptying Mind and ObjectsIn the daily activities of a student of the path, to empty objects is easy but to empty mind is hard. If objects are empty but mind is not empty, mind will be overcome by objects.Just empty the mind, and objects will be empty of themselves. If the mind is already emptied, but then you arouse a second thought wishing to empty its objects, this means that this mind is not yet empty and is again carried away by objects. If this sickness is not done away with, there is no way to get out of birth and death.Haven’t you seen the verse which layman P’ang presented to Ma Tsu?In the ten directions, the same congregation: each and every one studies non-doing. This is the place where buddhas are chosen: minds empty, they return successful.Ta Hui is constantly in a dilemma. His dilemma is: he wants to be recognized as an enlightened man, but this is only his ambition, his greed; it is not his experience.Whenever he quotes some enlightened person, the quotation has great significance. But when he himself comments on the quotation, those commentaries are just crap. He uses all great words, but the words coming from an intellectual don’t carry the meaning – the same meaning – as they carry when coming out of an enlightened being. And you will see his unconscious continually making sarcastic remarks, sometimes so ugly and condemnable that one cannot think that this man has even begun to grasp the meaning of enlightenment.I will show you how fast asleep the man is – he is talking in his sleep. He is clever and cunning. He can manage to befool people who are not enlightened because they don’t have anything to compare his statements with. They don’t have any of their own experience as a criterion to decide whether what he is saying is worth saying, or if he is just making much fuss about nothing.The first sutra:Worldly passions are like a blazing fire; when will they ever end?Now this is from a man who, in his previous sutras, has said that everything is illusory – the world is illusory, the senses are illusory, the mind is illusory, even the Buddha is illusory!If everything is illusory, then from where come these worldly passions which are like a blazing fire? They are not illusory. He has forgotten, because it was not his own understanding. He simply quoted. But the reality is, he knows his passions are like a blazing fire; he has not gone beyond passions.Talking about even Buddha as an illusion is not only stupid, it is immensely harmful. People who will read it, if they see that even Buddha is illusory, enlightenment is illusory, will wonder then what is the point of unnecessarily running from one illusion to another illusion?One illusion cannot be better than another illusion. Illusions are simply illusions; there is no qualitative difference.Right in the midst of the hubbub, you must not forget the business of the bamboo chair and reed cushion.He cannot say directly, “Don’t forget meditation.” The word meditation somehow hurts all intellectuals, because it is something beyond the grasp of the intellect. They want to be on the top, and suddenly they feel that there is something more beyond their grasp. So rather than simply using the word meditation, he says, “Don’t forget the business of the bamboo chair and reed cushion.”He may think he is being very clever, but it is just his unconscious showing itself – its antagonism for meditation. He is not a man of meditation at all.Usually (to meditate) you set your mind on a still concentration point…That is absolutely wrong! That’s why I say the man is not a man of meditation. Concentration is not meditation; concentration is a faculty of the mind. Mind concentrates; meditation is the absence of mind. Mind cannot do anything about meditation. It simply does not know meditation, and there is no intrinsic possibility for the mind ever to come in contact with meditation. Just as I said before, darkness cannot come in contact with light because darkness is only an absence – so is the mind.Mind is the absence of meditation.The moment meditation arises in you, mind is found nowhere.A Sufi mystic, Junnaid, who himself finally became a great master, was with his old master. One day, early in the morning, the master said, “Just look outside to see if it is still dark.”So Junnaid said, “Okay,” and he took the lamp.He was going out when the master said, “Wait! If you take the lamp with you, how are you going to find out whether it is dark or not? Leave the lamp here.”Junnaid was only in his disciplehood. He said, “If you say so I will leave it, but without a lamp how can I see whether it is dark or not? A little light is needed to see anything.”That is true about everything else, but not about darkness. If you go with a lamp into the house searching for darkness, you will not find it. The same is true about mind and meditation.Ta Hui thinks meditation is to set your mind on a still concentration point. A concentration point is within the capacity of mind; it has its utility. The whole of scientific work comes out of concentration of the mind, focusing the mind, not allowing it to move anywhere, staying only on a single point.In the ancient story of Mahabharata – the great Indian war that happened five thousand years ago – there was a famous archer, Dronacharya. All the princes used to come to learn archery from him. His most intimate disciple was Arjuna, whose concentration was the reason for this intimacy, because archery depends on concentration.One day Dronacharya was examining his disciples. He asked one disciple, Yudhishthira, Arjuna’s eldest brother…Dronacharya had hung a dead bird on a tree, and the dead bird’s right eye was the target. He told Yudhishthira – he was the first, being the eldest – “Take the bow and the arrow, but before you shoot, I have to ask you something.”He became ready with his bow and arrow, and Dronacharya asked him, “What are you seeing?”He said, “I see everything – all the trees, all the birds.”The second man was called in and asked, “What are you seeing?”He said, “I can see only the bird.”The third man was Arjuna. Dronacharya asked him, “What are you seeing?”Arjuna said, “Only the right eye of the bird.”Then Dronacharya told all three to shoot their arrows. Yudhishthira’s arrow went so far off…you cannot even say it missed – the distance between his arrow and the bird was so big. The second man’s was a little closer, but still did not reach the right eye – it hit the bird. But Arjuna’s arrow hit exactly the right eye of the bird. And the right eye of the bird on a faraway tree is such a small spot…But Dronacharya said, “Just your answers had given me a sense of who was going to hit the target. If you see so many trees, you are not focused. If you see only the bird you are more focused, but still you are not focused on the right eye. The whole bird is a big thing in comparison to the right eye. But when Arjuna said, ‘I can’t see anything else except the right eye,’ then it was certain that his arrow was going to reach the target.”In science, in archery, in other arts, concentration may be of great use – but it is not meditation. And this is the point that justifies my continuous insistence that Ta Hui is an intellectual: he has no idea even what meditation is.Meditation is going beyond the mind. It has nothing to do with the mind – except going beyond it. It is not a faculty of the mind, it is transcendental to mind. When you can see without the mind in between you and existence, you are in meditation. It is not concentration. It is utterly silent. It is not focusing…it is absolutely unfocused awareness.…but you must be able to use it right in the midst of the hubbub.This is the problem with the man – he has collected from every source, without knowing whether those statements connect with each other or not.Concentration cannot be practiced in the midst of the hubbub; concentration needs a space where you are not disturbed by anything. That’s why the people who believe in concentration have left the world and gone to the mountains, to the caves, to the desert, where there is nothing to distract them. They can just put their minds on Jesus Christ or Gautam Buddha or Krishna…and there is nothing else.The desert has been one of the most practical places for concentration; it is even better than the mountains, because in the mountains there is so much to see – the birds are there, the animals are there, the trees are there, beautiful peaks with snow are there – there are many possibilities for distraction. But in a desert, as far as you can see there is only desert, and desert…But meditation can be possible even in the marketplace, because it does not have to concentrate on anything. Meditation cannot be disturbed, it is all-inclusive. Concentration is exclusive; it excludes everything and just keeps the mind on one point.Meditation is all-inclusive. The car passes…the mind in meditation is fully aware of the horn. The birds start singing…the mind is fully aware of their singing. There is no question of distraction; nothing distracts. Everything – the mind is no longer there – is simply watched. You are only aware that there is a horn, a car is passing by – but it is not a distraction.Distraction comes only when you are trying to concentrate, then anything – a small ant crawling up your leg – will be enough to distract you. But when you are in meditation, you simply know that the ant is crawling up your leg. If you like it, you allow it; if you don’t like it, you throw it away. But there is no distraction – your silence remains unscratched. How can the noises on the street distract you? You simply listen to them – they don’t make any impact on you. They come and go, and you remain just a witness.Meditation is possible in the hubbub of a marketplace… Ta Hui has heard some man of meditation talking, but he has never meditated himself; all that he knows is concentration of the mind.Vimalkirti said, “It is like this: the high plateau does not produce lotus flowers; it is the mire of the low swamplands that produces these flowers.”He is quoting Vimalkirti, but he is not commenting on it. He is just throwing names in to decorate his sutras. I don’t think he has understood what Vimalkirti means.Vimalkirti was one of the strangest people who came in contact with Gautam Buddha. He never became a sannyasin – he remained a layman – but even Gautam Buddha respected him. He used to come to listen to Gautam Buddha, and he was meditating, but he could not see that there was any need to renounce the world and become a sannyasin and a beggar. He was such a genius that he was the first layman to become enlightened. The first sannyasin to become enlightened was Manjushri, and the first layman to become enlightened was Vimalkirti.But Vimalkirti was a very strange person. For a few days he had not come, and Buddha was concerned…is he sick, or is there some trouble? – why is he not coming? So he asked that one of his disciples should offer to go to Vimalkirti – he lived in the city – to inquire about his health and why he is not coming.But out of ten thousand sannyasins, nobody wanted to go, for the simple reason that even to say hello to Vimalkirti was dangerous! He would make it a point of great discussion – “To whom are you saying hello? Are you certain I am not a dream? Can you give me any evidence that I am not a dream? If you see me in a dream, will you recognize that it is a dream and not reality?”He used to put everybody in such a corner – on any point. If you didn’t say anything and you simply tried to avoid him, he would say, “Hey, where are you going? Is there any place to go? The truth is right here now. Where are you going?” He had tortured almost everybody.Finally one disciple said, “I will go. Whatever he does I will take it easy, but he has to be asked after.” When the disciple went he said, “Gautam Buddha has sent me to inquire about your health. As I came here, just outside your house, your family said that you are sick.”Rather than answering him, the sick Vimalkirti said, “Sick? About whom are you talking? I don’t exist at all, how can I be sick? To be sick you first have to exist – what do you think? I have disappeared long ago in my meditations. So just go back and tell Gautam Buddha, ‘Vimalkirti is no more – there is no question of sickness or health.’”The disciple was very much disturbed, because if he tells Gautam Buddha that Vimalkirti is no more, he will think that perhaps he has died. So he told Vimalkirti, “This statement can be misunderstood. If I say simply that Vimalkirti is no more, the obvious meaning will be that Vimalkirti is dead.”He said, “That’s the right meaning! Vimalkirti is dead. It was a phony name which disappeared with meditation. When I was born I was not Vimalkirti, and when I was reborn in meditation I again became nameless, formless – it is perfectly right. You can even say that Vimalkirti is dead.”The disciple said, “That is too much, because you are alive and I will be in trouble. Tomorrow you may appear before Buddha, and he will ask me, ‘What were you saying?’”And in this way a whole sutra, Vimalkirti’s Hridaya Sutra, has developed between the disciple and Vimalkirti. He is so clear that you cannot catch hold of him, you cannot grasp him. He is so vast that whatever you say, you are immediately caught.Quoting from Vimalkirti is just to decorate Ta Hui’s sutras, but he does not comment on it. Perhaps he does not understand it either.Vimalkirti said, “It is like this: the high plateau does not produce lotus flowers; it is the mire of the low swamplands that produces these flowers.”The lotus comes out of mud, out of swamplands. It is perhaps the best flower – the biggest flower, the most fragrant and the most delicate. No other flower can be compared with it, yet it is born out of mud.Vimalkirti is saying, “Don’t be worried about man’s ignorance, his anger, his greed, his lust, his desire for power and for money, his attachment to things, his aggressiveness, his violence… Don’t be worried – this is the mud out of which the lotus of enlightenment arises. Accept it all, because the lotus flower cannot be born on high land, on a plateau. So you should be grateful to all your ignorance, all your anger, all your greed, your sex…”Whatever the religions have been condemning, Vimalkirti is saying be grateful to it because it is only out of this that the buddha is born, that the lotus flower comes out. But Ta Hui does not make any comment on it. This is strange. If you are not going to make any comment, then there is no need to quote. On the contrary, he goes on speaking in a very ugly way. The old barbarian…he calls Gautam Buddha “the old barbarian.”The Chinese, just like everybody else, think that they are the most cultured people. When Marco Polo reached China, he wrote in his diary:“These people cannot be thought of as human beings. They look like human beings but they are a lower species. They eat snakes, they eat dogs, there is nothing that they will leave; they eat everything! They look very strange, and their ideas are very strange. With high cheekbones they are ugly, but they think high cheekbones are immensely beautiful. They have only a few hairs in their beards, you can count them – at the most twelve! Their mustaches also have very few hairs, which can be counted on the fingers. Very strange people! It seems they are on the way to becoming human beings.”The emperor of China, who invited Marco Polo to his court, told his historian to write about him, “We have heard that these people believe that man has come from the monkeys. We could not believe it because we had not seen these people” – Marco Polo was the first westerner to visit China. The emperor continued, “But they are perfectly right! As far as they are concerned, monkeys are their forefathers. They look like monkeys.”But this is the situation everywhere. Indians think they are the purest Aryans, the Germans think they are the purest Aryans. The word arya is Sanskrit – it means the highest. Everybody thinks… But to use the word barbarian for Gautam Buddha – and that, too, by a man who pretends to be his disciple – is simply inconceivable. If Gautam Buddha is a barbarian, then in the whole world nobody has ever been a cultured man.Even now Buddha is the most cultured man, the most graceful. His beauty is such that Friedrich Nietzsche condemned him because of his grace and his beauty. He looked feminine to Nietzsche, because his idea of a real man was to be strong and to be made of steel…grace, beauty? – those are feminine qualities.Nietzsche condemned Gautam Buddha: “I cannot believe in his teachings. They are dangerous, they will turn the whole world into a feminine world. I want man to keep his manhood and not to be impressed by people like Gautam Buddha.”Nietzsche loved the warrior – that was his ideal for every man – as sharp as the blade of the sword, as hard as steel, neither worried about killing, nor worried about being killed; these are just manly games.Gautam Buddha is teaching nonviolence – don’t kill anybody. He is teaching compassion, he is teaching love, and he is teaching meditation – which will make you graceful, loving, compassionate, but your manhood will disappear. You may become a roseflower, but you will not be a sword.Friedrich Nietzsche may be wrong but his esteem is right. He cannot call Gautam Buddha a barbarian. Perhaps there is no other man who was so cultured as Gautam Buddha. But Ta Hui is calling him, “the old barbarian.”Buddha said, “True thusness does not keep to its own nature, but according to circumstances brings about all phenomenal things…”The quotation is right. Buddha is saying true thusness is always ready to change with the circumstances. It has no resistance, because resistance means ego, resistance means, “I have my own will. I will go on my path.”To accept life in its totality, as it is, means to relax and let life take charge of you; then wherever it takes you, go with it. This is his most fundamental teaching of suchness or thusness.Such a man is always at peace. Whatever happens makes no problem for him; he simply goes with it with total willingness. Not only does he have no resistance, on the other hand he welcomes life in whatever form it comes. He welcomes death – even death cannot disturb him. There is nothing that can disturb him because he goes with everything, allows it…He is just like a leaf dropping from the tree. If the wind takes it up, it goes up; if the wind takes it to the north, it goes to the north; if the wind takes it to the south, it goes to the south; if the wind drops it on the ground, it rests on the ground. It does not say to the wind, “This is very contradictory – you just started going north, and now you have started going south. I don’t want to go south – I am destined for the north.” No, the leaf has no destination of its own.Existence has its own destination, and the man of meditation makes existence’s destination his own destination. He makes no separation at all. If existence feels it is time for death, then it is time for death. His ability to accept is total. Such a man cannot be in pain, in agony, in misery, in anguish – he has cut the very root of all these things.Once you have achieved peaceful stillness of body and mind, you must make earnest effort.Now these are Ta Hui’s words. Whenever he quotes, that quotation is great. But whenever he comes to his own understanding, he falls very low. He says, Once you have achieved peaceful stillness of body and mind…In the first place, a man like Gautam Buddha will not use the word achievement, because it is not an achievement – it is only a discovery. Secondly, he will not say “peaceful stillness of body and mind.” He will say “transcendence of body and mind” – only then can you be still. Body and mind cannot be still by their very nature. Thirdly, he says, …you must make earnest effort. The meditator does not make any effort.The whole idea of Gautam Buddha about meditation is so unique and so tremendously beautiful that it has been a problem for other religions to understand it – because every religion thinks earnest effort is needed. But Gautam Buddha’s idea is beautifully represented by Basho’s haiku: “Sitting silently, doing nothing…the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.” There is no question of any effort; you are simply sitting, doing nothing…If you want to do something, effort is needed. But if you are in a state of non-doing, no effort is needed…and if, for non-doing, effort is needed, what kind of non-doing will it be? Effort is doing, and out of doing, you cannot create non-doing. You have to renounce doing.Sitting silently, doing nothing…the spring comes. It is not your effort that brings the spring; it comes, in its turn. It has always been coming. And when the spring comes, you don’t have to pull the grass and make earnest effort so that it grows – it grows on its own accord. The grass grows by itself…Nobody except Buddha has come to this tremendous discovery, that meditation is a very simple phenomenon. You just relax – but not the American way! I cannot forgive a man who has written a book, You Must Relax! That ‘must’ destroys the whole idea of relaxation, but that is the American idea – “you must relax.” And the book has sold very well, because everybody wants to relax. It is well-written, but the person does not know anything about relaxation. It cannot be a must.Relaxation has to be a very simple understanding…no effort, no doing – you just sit silently, and let your body relax. There is nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to achieve, so there is no point in being tense – because you have it already within you. Relaxation becomes possible without any effort. You are sitting where you want to reach, so what is the point of making any effort? You have always been in the space where you want to be, you just have not looked inward. No achievement, no longing, no desire, nowhere else to go…relaxation comes on its own.A relaxation which has been managed is not much of a relaxation. There is bound to be a subtle tension around it – you are holding it. You can sit silently, still, but deep down you are very tense, you are holding yourself still – no movement. This is not stillness, this is fake. Stillness should be natural. And how can it be natural?Buddha’s whole philosophy gives you the right situation in which it happens on its own accord. There is nothing to achieve – there is no God, there is no heaven, there is no hell. All that you need is already given to you, you have it within you. You are not a sinner that has to pray continuously to get rid of your sins. You are as pure as Buddha himself. The only difference – and that does not make you inferior in any way – is that you are not aware of it.You have the Kohinoor – the most precious diamond – within you, but you are not aware of it. Buddha is aware of it.So all that needs to happen is sitting silently, waiting for the spring, waiting for the right moment…when your relaxation comes to its highest peak, when your silence becomes absolute, the spring has come. And “the grass grows by itself” is only a symbol. It is a symbol that you, your potential, starts growing on its own, spontaneously. It is a natural phenomenon, it is an intrinsic capacity – you don’t have to do anything.So when Ta Hui says you must make earnest effort, he misses completely the whole new message of Gautam Buddha.Do not immediately settle down in peaceful stillness. In the teachings this is called “the deep pit of liberation.”Whenever he quotes, because the quotation is not his, he is right. But whenever he says anything of his own, he is wrong. Now this is certainly right – it is a quotation.“The deep pit of liberation” – there is a danger for all seekers, for all people of the path, that you may settle for a small treasure. Just a little silence, a little relaxation, a little peace, and you may think you have come home. This they call the “deep pit of liberation.” You have settled long before you have blossomed.So one has to be alert not to settle anywhere. Just go on growing – allow your potential to grow. Don’t start feeling, “I have come, I have arrived.” Your potential is immense, and your treasure is incalculable.So go on and on and on…and you will find more and more peace, more profound spaces, more juicy experiences. Your desert-like life you will find slowly turning into a green beautiful garden. You will find many, many flowers blossoming within you. Just go on…there is no end to your growth.One never comes to the end of one’s growth. It is always coming closer – but just coming closer. You cannot come to the end of the road because existence is eternal, and you are one with existence. Your journey, your pilgrimage, is also to be eternal.You must make yourself turn freely…– now these are Ta Hui’s words –… like a gourd floating on the water, independent and free…The gourd is not independent and is not free! The gourd cannot go against the current – how can it go? It is simply moving with the current. Wherever the river is going, it is going – what kind of independence is this? The gourd wants to stop at some place; it cannot, because the river is continuously moving. What kind of freedom is this?No, this example is absolutely wrong. You can say the gourd is relaxed, you can say the gourd is no longer resistant, you can say the gourd has total acceptance – wherever the river takes it. But you cannot say that it is independent and free. That would be an absolutely absurd idea. What independence can it have? It cannot go against the current, it cannot stop when it wants… If the river moves to the south, it has to move to the south; it cannot say, “No, I don’t want to go south.” It is neither free nor independent.He must have heard about the gourd…that a man should relax just like a gourd in the river. It is immensely graceful because there is no resistance, no tension, no fight. In fact, it has become almost one with the river. It has no ideas different from the river, it has no intentions different from the river, it has nothing of what you call ‘will power’. It has surrendered completely to the river. It has great peace and silence, acceptance, thusness.This example of the gourd has been used by Buddha for thusness, for suchness, for tathata. But it is not used for freedom and independence.…not subject to restraints, entering purity and impurity without being obstructed or sinking down.But this does not show its independence! When the river moves into impurity, the gourd has to move in impurity. When the river moves in pure waters, the gourd has to move in pure waters.It simply shows that Ta Hui has not understood the idea of surrendering yourself to nature totally. In that surrender, you have disappeared – who is going to be independent, and who is going to be free? That does not mean that you have become a slave, and that does not mean that you have become dependent. These are the subtleties of the experience of surrender.You have become one with existence. You are neither dependent nor independent – you are no more. And you have been the problem…so now, because you are no more, there is no problem.Only then do you have a little familiarity with the school of the patchrobed monks.No, he is not right.And again he is using sarcastic remarks…patchrobed monks. Buddha used to say to his disciples, “People throw out clothes when they are useless or rotten or have been used too much. Collect those pieces of cloth and make patchrobes; just put those pieces of cloth together and make a robe. That way you will not be a burden on people for your robes.”It was a great idea in itself. Buddha’s whole effort was that his people should not be a burden and parasite on poor people, so he had taken every care. “You should not take your food from one house, you should take your food from five houses – just a small piece from one house, another small piece from another house – so you are not a burden.“You should not remain longer than three days in one place; you should not ask for food from the same house while you are three days in the town; and you should collect thrown-away robes, clothes. And when the days of rain come, and for four months you cannot move and you have to stay in one place, then make patchrobes for yourself, for other sannyasins. You have enough time. So for clothes you are not dependent at all and for food your burden is negligible.”In fact, everybody enjoyed giving some food. Even in the poorest family, if a guest suddenly comes he can be accommodated. And he was not being dependent on one family but five families, and only one meal a day. So Buddha had minimized as much as possible the burden on the people, and people rejoiced without any reluctance. They wanted to share something with the monks, and this much they could manage.Sometimes people used to give clothes to the monks, and Buddha had said that, “If somebody gives you a cloth you should cut it in pieces, because it should not be that some monks are using patchrobes and some monks are using clothes which are not patched. That will create unnecessary competitiveness.”He was very careful to create a commune of equals, without any conflict – and he succeeded in it. There was no conflict. Even the newest clothes were cut down and patched again, so they looked the same as anybody else’s. But Ta Hui’s reference to the school of the ‘patchrobed’ is sarcastic, it is not respectful.If you just manage to cradle the uncrying child in your arms, what is the use?He is saying that just being silent – a small silence, a small peace – is not much use. It is just like cradling the uncrying child in your arms – what is the use? About that he is right.You should go to the profoundest ecstasy. Silence is only the beginning. Stillness is only the beginning, not the end.Lin chi said, “If you can put to rest the mind that frantically seeks from moment to moment, you will be no different from old Shakyamuni Buddha.” He was not fooling people.Lin Chi’s statement is clear: If you can put to rest the mind that frantically seeks from moment to moment, you will be no different from old Shakyamuni Buddha.The only difference between you and the awakened one is that you go on being dominated by the frantic mind, which is continuously restless. Buddha has overcome it; he has put his mind to rest. This is the only difference.But Lin Chi is not being sarcastic – he was a great master. He is saying, “the old Shakyamuni Buddha” – shakya is his clan; hence he is called shakyamuni, the man from the Shakya clan who became utterly silent.In fact, Ta Hui needed a master like Lin Chi. He says that Lin Chi was not fooling people. Why is he saying that? Perhaps unconsciously he knows that he is fooling people. He needed a man like Lin Chi. Lin Chi was the most strange master.I have told you about him…He used to hit people, he used to beat his disciples, for no reason at all. And once he threw a disciple from the window of a two story building and then jumped on top of him. Sitting on his chest he asked him, “Got it?” And the strangest thing is that the disciple said, “Yes, sir!” because this was so surprising…Lin Chi had been beating him – to that he had become accustomed. He knew that whenever he goes, he will get a good beating. But even to be beaten by a man like Lin Chi…he was so beautiful, so loving. He was beating out of love; there was no anger in it. He was trying in every way to wake him up.But beating had become known and familiar. That’s why Lin Chi had to throw him out of the window – to shock him completely: “This is going too far!” Then when he saw Lin Chi coming behind him, his mind must have stopped! And sitting on his chest, Lin Chi asked “Got it?”In that moment the disciple must have been so quiet…the mind cannot figure out what is happening, so the mind has to be at rest in such a moment. And the master’s eyes, and his grace, and his words, “Got it?” The answer came not from his mind, but from his very being. He said, “Yes, sir.”Ta Hui needed a man like Lin Chi. Perhaps then he may have come to a state of no-mind, even for a single moment. And that would have changed his whole approach from intellectual to meditative.Even Bodhisattvas of the seventh stage seek buddha-knowledge without their minds being satisfied: therefore it is called “affliction.” really there is no way to manage: it is impossible to apply the slightest external measure.Again it is a quotation, and the quotation is right: Really there is no way to manage, because you cannot do anything for realization – so naturally, there is no way to manage.Or in other words: if you drop managing, if you drop doing, if you drop effort, it happens on its own accord. But you cannot manage it, you cannot manage to be a buddha. If you manage to be a buddha it will only be a hypocrisy; you will be only an actor and nothing else.Several years ago there was a certain layman, Hsu, who was able to find an opening; he sent me a letter expressing his understanding, that said…Here you will see that an ordinary layman has come to a great understanding of truth. The answer that Ta Hui sends him is so ordinary and irrelevant that it will make it clear to you that there is no question of comparing him with any Zen master. He is not even capable of understanding the experience that has happened to a layman, an ordinary man, and the way that man has expressed it.Layman Hsu sent Ta Hui a letter, and said in the letter,“Empty and open in my daily activities, there is not a single thing opposing me; finally I realize that all things in the three worlds are fundamentally nonexistent. Truly this is peace and happiness, joyful liveliness, having cast it all away.” Accordingly I instructed him with a verse:Hsu does not need any instruction from Ta Hui, but Ta Hui is pretending to be a great teacher.Hsu has expressed his experience, which is perfectly in tune with Gautam Buddha and the Zen masters. The instruction that Ta Hui has sent is absolutely irrelevant. First he says,Don’t be fond of purity. Now in the letter the poor man has not said anything about purity!Don’t be fond of purity: purity makes people weary. Don’t be fond of joyful liveliness.Hsu has not said anything about that. He has simply said that a joyful liveliness has happened to him; he has not said that he is fond of it.Joyful liveliness makes people crazy.Ta Hui’s instruction is dangerous…because he was thought to be a great Zen master, accepted by the emperor. The poor man must have been disturbed by the instruction he was sent.As water conforms to the vessel, it accordingly becomes square or round, short or long. As for casting away or not casting away, please think it over more carefully.He does not need the word think.The three worlds and myriad things are no refuge – where is there any home?Hsu has not talked about all these things in which Hui is instructing him.If you are just thus, this is a great contradiction. This is to inform layman Hsu that his own kin are creating disaster – open wide the eye of the thousand sages, and do not keep praying for relief.He is not praying for relief, he is not disturbed by anything, he is not in any contradiction, he is not seeking any refuge…! I would like to read Hsu’s words again, so you can see how irrelevant is the instruction. But just to be the teacher, Ta Hui has to say something…Ta Hui has not even understood the layman’s statement: “Empty and open in my daily activities, there is not a single thing opposing me.”When you are empty and open, how can anything oppose you? Opposition comes when you are there with a will, with a certain ego, with a certain desire – then there is opposition. But if you are empty and open, naturally there is no opposition possible.“Finally I realize that all things in the three worlds are fundamentally nonexistent.” It has to be understood what, in the heritage of Gautam Buddha, the word nonexistent means. It simply means nothing is stable, everything is changing.Buddha’s definition of the existent is “that which always remains the same.” There is only one thing that is existent, and that is the witnessing self, the witnessing consciousness. It remains always the same…past, present, future, from eternity to eternity, it is the same. This is the only existent thing. Everything else changes; every moment it is changing, and that which is changing is nonexistent. It does not mean that it is not there; it simply means that while you are seeing it, it is already changing. While you are listening to me, you are already changing – your death is coming closer.This world is ephemeral. The word nonexistent in Buddha’s philosophy simply means “that which is ephemeral, that which goes on changing” – you cannot rely on it. The only thing you can rely on is your witnessing consciousness. It never changes. It is the very center of the cyclone. But about this, in his great instruction, Ta Hui does not say anything.“Truly this is peace and happiness, joyful liveliness, having cast it all away.”Hsu is not saying, “I am fond of these things” – that, “I desire them.” He is saying, “I have found them, they are there.” And Ta Hui’s instruction is absolutely out of place:Don’t be fond of purity –I am amazed that he cannot see that what he is saying has no reference to the layman’s letter –Purity makes people weary. Don’t be fond of joyful liveliness: joyful liveliness makes people crazy. As water conforms to the vessel, it accordingly becomes square or round, short or long. As for casting away or not casting away, please think it over more carefully.Thinking is a very low activity; it is of the mind. Meditation is the highest within you; it is beyond mind. The layman has touched something beyond mind, and Ta Hui is dragging him down by saying,Please think it over more carefully. The three worlds and myriad things are no refuge – where is there any home?But the poor fellow has not asked about the home or any refuge.If you are just thus, this is a great contradiction.Hsu has not said that he is just thus! He is simply saying that this is his awareness, his consciousness. He can see it, he is aware of his emptiness, his openness. And he has found that since the moment he became empty and open, not a single thing opposes him.“And as I have entered into this emptiness and openness, I realized that all things in the three worlds are fundamentally nonexistent. Truly, this is peace and happiness, joyful liveliness.” He is simply stating the experience of his meditation.Ta Hui has not been able to understand it; his instruction is absolute nonsense. Finally he says, …and do not keep praying for relief.Anybody can see that he is saying things just to pose as a great instructor.In the daily activities of a student of the path…Ta Hui does not understand the difference between a student, a disciple, and a devotee. The student is never on the path.In the daily activities of a student of the path, to empty objects is easy but to empty mind is hard.It seems to be his own experience; otherwise to empty the mind is the simplest thing. A thing is hard when it needs great effort to do it, but to empty the mind needs no effort at all. How can it be hard?If objects are empty but mind is not empty, mind will be overcome by objects.Just empty the mind, and objects will be empty of themselves. If the mind is already emptied, but then you arouse a second thought wishing to empty its objects, this means that this mind is not yet empty and is again carried away by objects. If this sickness is not done away with, there is no way to get out of birth and death.Haven’t you seen the verse which layman P’ang presented to Ma Tsu?In the ten directions, the same congregation: each and every one studies non-doing.Ta Hui is not clear anywhere that a seeker does not study. Only a student studies. A seeker absorbs, drinks. He absorbs the presence of the master, he allows the master’s energy to transform his energy. The student collects information; the seeker is not interested in information – his only interest is transformation. These are totally different things.…each and everyone studies non-doing. How can you study non-doing? Either you can be in the state of non-doing, or you cannot be. But studying is not possible.This is the place where buddhas are chosen: minds empty, they return successful.Gautam Buddha will not use the word successful. When you are not, there is no success, no failure. Success is an ego-projection. Failure is when that projection does not succeed and your ego feels hurt.A buddha knows no success, no failure. He simply knows one thing: his awareness. And that awareness has always been there, there is no question of success. Even if he had slept a few lives more it would have remained there. Asleep or awake, it is always there.If you are asleep you may be dreaming a thousand and one things; if you are awake those dreams disappear. So the only difference is that the sleeping person dreams, and the person of awakening stops dreaming. But that is not much of a difference…dreams are just dreams, they are not even as real as soap bubbles.To allow such people as Ta Hui and his sutras to be holy scripture is a great misunderstanding on the part of people who have followed the path of Zen. Perhaps they have committed the same fallacy as other religions go on committing: if they see something wrong in their scriptures they ignore it, or they try to patch it up, or they try to interpret it in a way that somehow fixes it.But I am not a person to do any patchwork. I am not the person to interpret somebody just so as to give the feeling that everything is right. When things are right, I am absolutely in support; when things are wrong, I am absolutely against them.My commitment is toward truth.My commitment is not toward anybody else.Even if Jesus Christ or Buddha or Mahavira or Lao Tzu – the great masters – commit something which looks to me to be against my experience of truth, I am going to criticize it. That does not mean that I am against them. It simply means that I am totally for truth, and if I find anybody somewhere mistaken, in a fallacy, then with all due respect I have to point it out so that in the future nobody is confused by it.Now this Ta Hui calls Buddha ‘the old barbarian’ – that I cannot tolerate! That piece I have to just throw away…! [Osho tears up the paper into four pieces, and throws it away.]

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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IllusionSpeaking of “empty illusion,” it is illusion when created, and illusion when experienced too; it’s illusion when you’re knowing and aware, and illusion when you’re lost in delusion too. Past, present, and future are all illusions. Today, if we realize our wrong, we take an illusory medicine to cure an equally illusory disease. When the disease is cured, the medicine is removed, and we are the same person as before. If you think that there is someone else or some special doctrine, then this is the view of a misguided outsider.In the instant of Maitreya’s finger-snap, Sudhana was even able to forget the meditative states fostered in him by all his teachers: how much more so the beginningless habit energy of empty falsehood and evil deeds! If you consider the mistakes which you committed in the past as real, then the world right in front of you now is all real, and even official position, wealth and status, gratitude and love, are all real.Non-dualityIf your mind does not run off searching, or think falsely, or get involved with objects, then this very burning house of passion is itself the place to escape the three worlds. Didn’t Buddha say, “Not depending on, or abiding in, any situation, not having any discrimination, one clearly sees the vast establishment of reality and realizes that all worlds and all things are equal and non-dual.”Though a bodhisattva of the “far-going” stage appears to act the same as outsiders, he does not abandon the Buddhist teachings; though he appears to go along with all that is worldly, he’s perpetually practicing all world-transcending ways. These are the real expedient devices within the burning house of passion…Only having penetrated all the way through can you say that affliction is itself enlightenment and ignorance is identical to great wisdom. Within the wondrous mind of the original vast quiescence – pure, clear, perfect illumination – there is not a single thing that can cause obstruction. It is like the emptiness of space…One of the most fundamental problems that has to be faced by everyone on the path to enlightenment is that when you become enlightened, all that you have passed through looks illusory. It is just as when you wake up in the morning, the whole night of dreams simply becomes unreal; you don’t even think about it. But while you are asleep, the dreams are very real.In a very strange way, while you are awake you may doubt whether that which is surrounding you is real or not. At least, doubt is possible. Who knows? you may be seeing just a dream. But while you are dreaming even the doubt is not possible. You cannot doubt – “What I am seeing perhaps is not real.” The dream seems to be more deep-rooted in the mind than our so-called reality.The reality at least allows doubt. The dream does not allow doubt. In fact, that is the only criterion to distinguish between them. If you can doubt, it means you are awake. If you cannot doubt, it means you are fast asleep. A very strange criterion, but that is the only criterion.Because all the religions are against doubt, they have destroyed the most fundamental criterion available to man. All the religions of the world, without exception, insist on believing. And belief is the antidote to doubt.One can condition oneself to such an extent that doubt does not arise, but then you have lost the only criterion you have for making the distinction between what is real and what is unreal. Dreams cannot be doubted – reality can be doubted.In the life of Chuang Tzu comes one of the most beautiful incidents.One morning he was sitting in his bed – very sad, very serious…and sadness and seriousness were absolutely against his nature, his philosophy. He was the most hilarious man. He has written the most absurd stories with such great significance – illogical, irrational, but yet pointing to the truth.His disciples gathered and they were worried, “It has never happened, he has never been sad. He is a man of laughter, and he is looking so serious. Is he sick, or has something gone wrong?”Finally some disciple asked, “What is the matter, master?”Chuang Tzu said very seriously, “The matter is almost beyond my comprehension, and I don’t think you will be in any way helpful to me, but still I will tell you. In the night I dreamt that I had become a butterfly.”All the disciples laughed and said, “That is nothing to be serious about. It was only a dream, so you don’t have to be so worried. Now you are awake; the dream is finished.”He said, “You first listen to the whole story. When I woke up this morning, a strange idea arose within my heart: “If Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly in his dream, why cannot a butterfly become Chuang Tzu in her dream? There seems to be no logical reason why a butterfly cannot dream to be Chuang Tzu.”Still the disciples said, “You don’t need to worry about butterflies! Let them dream whatever they want to dream, but why are you sad?”Chuang Tzu said, “You still have not grasped the problem. The problem for me now is – who am I? Am I a butterfly dreaming to be Chuang Tzu? Because Chuang Tzu was able to dream of being a butterfly, how am I to feel satisfied that I am not just a butterfly dreaming myself to be a Chuang Tzu?”The disciples became sad themselves, because it was really a problem that could not be solved. And it has remained unsolved for almost twenty five centuries.Unfortunately I was not there as one of his disciples, because to me the basic criterion is: while you were a butterfly in your dream, did you have any problem? was there any doubt? Now that you are awake, you can doubt – who knows, you may be a butterfly.This is the only distinction between the dream and the real: reality allows you to doubt, and the dream does not allow you to doubt. Obviously you are Chuang Tzu, don’t be worried. Certainly you were not a butterfly; it was a dream, because it did not allow you to doubt.To me, the capacity to doubt is one of the greatest blessings to humanity. The religions have been enemies because they have been cutting the very roots of doubt, and there is a reason why they have been doing that: because they want people to believe in certain illusions that they have been preaching.A man who believes that if he prays earnestly, sincerely… Then Krishna may visit him, or Jesus may appear before him. These are ways of creating dreams while you are awake, with your eyes open. But because you are awake, you can doubt. So first doubt has to be destroyed; otherwise Jesus may be standing before you and you may start doubting – who knows, perhaps it is just an illusion. What evidence have I got that it is not an illusion?There are thousands of people in madhouses around the world who believe in their illusions so deeply that they talk with people whom you cannot see – only they can see. And they not only talk, they also get a response; they do the work of both themselves!The strangest thing is that when they speak from one side, their side, they have their own voice, and when they answer from Jesus Christ’s side, their voice changes. It has a different quality to it, a different authority to it. You can see that they are doing both things – the question and the answer – and that there is nobody else. But because they cannot doubt, their illusion becomes a reality.Let me tell you:If you can doubt, even the reality becomes illusory.Why have the people like Gautam Buddha been so insistent that the whole existence – except your witnessing self, except your awareness – is just ephemeral, made of the same stuff as dreams are made of? They are not saying that these trees are not there. They are not saying that these pillars are not there. Don’t misunderstand because of the word illusion.In English you don’t have an exact translation of the word maya; in English, either something is real or it is illusory. Maya is just in between the two: It looks real, but it is not real. It appears real, but it is not real. In English there is no word which exactly translates maya. It has been translated as illusion, but illusion is not the right word. Illusion does not exist. Reality exists. Maya is just in between – it almost exists. As far as day-to-day activities are concerned, it can be taken as reality. Only in the ultimate sense, from the peak of your illumination, it becomes unreal, illusory.The problem is that what becomes illusory in the experience of enlightenment cannot be conceived of as illusory by people who are not enlightened. How can you think that your wife, your husband, your house, your car, your neighborhood that all this is just a dream?It is not a dream the way you know dreams are; hence the word maya has to be kept untranslated, because maya does not mean dream. It simply means that things which are not eternal cannot be accepted as real. They are born, they are there, and they are constantly dying. From the very moment something is born, it starts dying – what kind of reality is this?Your birth was the beginning of death. Since then you have not been doing anything except dying – every day, continuously – although the process is very slow. It may take seventy years or eighty years to reach your grave, but you have been moving toward it since you left your cradle…consistently…never taking a single holiday, never going astray. There is no way of going astray! Whatever you do, wherever you go, you are going toward the graveyard. One day you were not…one day you are again not – although you existed for seventy years.Your dream also exists, for the time being. It may be only seven minutes, or seventy minutes, but that does not make any difference. The dream is born, it remains there…you are affected by it, as you are affected by anything real, and then it dies.The same is the nature of our so-called reality. Perhaps it is on a bigger scale, the dream lasts longer. But millions of people have lived here before us, and we don’t know even their names. We don’t know that they had fallen in love, that they had fought, that they had killed, murdered, that they had committed suicide, that they had become prime ministers, presidents, super-rich…and they have all disappeared as if they were nothing but writing on water – or at the most writing on the sand. It lasts a little while, then a strong wind comes and all the writing disappears.According to the people of enlightenment, that which is just writing on the water…or it may be writing on the sand, or it may be writing on the granite lasting for thousands of years – the difference is only of time; otherwise there is no difference. The difference is only of the medium – water, sand, or granite. The writing is the same: one day it was not, for some time it remains, one day it is again not.Everything comes from nothing and everything moves into nothing: that is the meaning of maya. It does not mean unreal, because even the writing on the sand is real. Even the writing on water has its own reality, although it is very fleeting – you have not even written and it has disappeared! The writing on granite will last for thousands of years. Yet one thing is certain: they are all real, but one day they come out of nothing, and one day they go back into nothingness. That is the meaning of the word maya. It is not equivalent to illusion.The man of enlightenment sees the whole existence as maya. It comes into existence, it disappears. It is not an eternal reality, that which never begins and never ends.The whole search of truth is for that which remains always and always the same. It neither comes into existence nor does it go out of existence. And thousands of seekers have come to the same conclusion: that there is only one thing, only one thing in the whole existence that remains always the same, and that is your awareness.Except awareness, everything is maya.Only awareness, the watcher within you, belongs to eternal reality – is the only reality. It is never born…never dies. It has always been, and it will be always.The experience of enlightenment makes it so clear. But to bring it into language that can be understood by people who don’t have the experience yet has been always a great problem, and many misunderstandings arise.For example, if you call the world illusory, then people think, “Then what is the difference between good and bad? Whether you are a saint or a thief, it is all the same – it is just a dream. Whether you kill somebody or you save somebody from drowning in a river, it is all the same – both are illusory, so there is nothing that can be called moral, and nothing that can be called immoral.” It is very disturbing to the society, and it is very disturbing to the people who have to manage the society and its affairs.Actually, there is no way to reduce the experience of enlightenment into the languages of people who are asleep. You have to use their words, and their words have their own connotations. The moment you say something, you immediately feel that you have brought the truth in words which are going to be misunderstood.This country has remained in slavery for two thousand years, and one of the most basic reasons was the idea that everything is illusory. Whether the country is free or a slave, it does not make much difference. India has been ruled by such small, barbarous tribes, and it is such a vast continent; it is simply unbelievable that such a big country could be controlled by a small tribe. But the reason was that India never gave any resistance. It never fought. It simply accepted slavery as part of a dream. Freedom is a dream and slavery is a dream…People coming from advanced countries cannot believe it – so much poverty, and yet the poor people are utterly contented. The rich people in the advanced countries are in so much anguish, agony, angst…such a great discontentment. And the people in the East, particularly in India, don’t have anything – and yet they seem to be fully contented.The reason is, men like Gautam Buddha and Mahavira and Neminatha and Adinatha, a long line of enlightened people, have been talking about their experience – that when they have come to the ultimate height of their consciousness, the whole of life appears to be just a mirage…just maya, a magical creation with no substance in it. They were perfectly right, but they forgot one thing: the people they are talking to are not enlightened.Sometimes even the greatest truth can become a calamity. It has been so in this country. Poverty has been accepted, slavery has been accepted, because it is all just a dream – one need not be disturbed by it. This can be dangerous. This has proved to be dangerous; hence I don’t say that the world is a dream. I can see that the implications have proved very dangerous.There was no intention on the part of the awakened people, but still the responsibility lies on their shoulders. They told things to people who were not ready to understand them. It was absolutely certain that they would be misunderstood – and they have been misunderstood.India has lived in poverty without any revolution. The very idea of revolution is irrelevant – one never revolts against a dream. One simply accepts that a dream is nonexistential, it does not matter at all. But to the ignorant people, it matters – hunger matters.I have been in immense difficulty to say the ultimate truth to people, because the question is what the effect is going to be on their minds and their lives…to say to a hungry man who is dying, starving, “Don’t be worried, it is all just a dream.”I am reminded of a story…In ancient China, the wells were made without any protective wall around them. There was going to be a big fair and one man fell into a well, but there was so much noise that, although he was shouting from the well, nobody heard him.Just by coincidence a Buddhist monk passed by the side of the well, and because he was accustomed to silence he was able to hear, even in the hubbub of the fair, that somebody was shouting from the well. He went close by and the man said, “Please save me.”The Buddhist monk said, “There is no point. Everybody has to die; it is only a question of time. Remain peaceful. The great Gautam Buddha has said that life is just a dream, so if you have fallen in a dream into a well, don’t unnecessarily shout. Just relax.”The man said, “I am ready to listen to all your teachings – first take me out!” He could not believe that somebody would give him such a strange sermon in such a situation, when he is dying!But the Buddhist monk said, “Our master Gautam Buddha has said, ‘Never interfere into anybody’s life.’ So excuse me, I cannot do anything. I can only help you by giving you the real teaching: at the time of death, if you can be silent and peaceful, you will be born in a higher stage of consciousness.”The man said, “I simply want to get out of this well! I don’t want to be born in higher stages….”But the Buddhist monk went on his way.A Confucian monk heard the man, he looked inside. The man said, “You are not a Buddhist” …and Confucius is very pragmatic. He is not an enlightened being and he is not an idealist. He is very moralistic, realistic, practical. He does not believe in any other life beyond death. He does not believe that consciousness has a separate existence. So the man said, “It is good. I am happy that a Confucian has come, because just now a Buddhist monk has gone by, giving me the advice to relax and die peacefully.”The Confucian monk said, “Don’t be worried! I will go into the crowd and immediately I will start a revolution in the country.”The man said, “For what?”The Confucian said, “Our master Confucius has said that every well should have a protective wall around it. It is not a question only of your life; it is a question of millions of people’s lives. You should not be worried for your tiny self. Think of the generations to come, and feel satisfied that you have come across me. I will create a great upheaval in the whole country, that every well should have a wall.”The man said, “That is perfectly okay, but what about me? By the time the revolution succeeds and every well has a wall, I will be gone.”The Confucian said, “I am sorry, but I believe in social changes. Our concern is not with individuals, but with society….”Just behind him comes a Christian missionary with a bucket and a rope, and before the man says anything he throws the bucket in, and he says, “We will talk later on. First you have to be saved. Just sit in the bucket and I will pull you out.”Out of the well, the man said, “You are the only religious person. That fellow just now has gone to create a revolution – I am dying here! The other one wanted me to be born in a higher stage of consciousness…. But you are really religious. Just one question, why have you been carrying this bucket and rope?”The Christian missionary said, “I am always ready and prepared for every emergency, because Jesus Christ has said, ‘If you save people, if you serve people, immense will be your reward in the kingdom of God.’ So don’t think that I am interested in saving you; my interest is to earn more virtue. I am going to fight that Confucian because his revolution will stop people falling into wells. That means ultimately, we will not be able to save them, and without saving them there is no way to the kingdom of God. I have saved you, you teach your children always to fall into wells…and I am always around here. You can call me, and I am always ready for every emergency. This is my whole service to the people.”The religions have not been at all concerned with humanity at large. I cannot say to the hungry people, “Your hunger is just a dream,” and I cannot say to a thirsty man, “Just die peacefully. Don’t ask for water, don’t demand anything because that will create a bad impression for your future life.”You can understand my difficulty.I am absolutely aware that everything is illusory, and yet I would not like people to take the idea as a belief system, because that belief system, without an experience, is going to destroy their whole life in many ways. I would like them to enter on the path, to realize for themselves what it means that life is just a dream, or maya, and be freed from this illusory misery, suffering, anguish.Help others also to rise to the same meditative consciousness. But don’t give people ideas as beliefs – which they don’t have as their experience – because they will start acting according to them, and their actions will be tremendously dangerous to them.India has suffered so much from its enlightened people. No science could grow in this land. Mathematics was found for the first time here, but it could not produce an Albert Einstein. Many scientific inventions had their beginning in the East. The first printing presses were born in China three thousand years ago, the first currency notes two thousand years ago.But science could not progress, because if the idea is prevalent that everything is illusory, what is the point in searching and analyzing the illusory world? So there have been tremendous geniuses, but they were all devoted to only one thing – to find their own interior consciousness. They had no interest in the outside world.The idea of meditation and enlightenment has created an introversion, and just the opposite has happened in the West. The West is extrovert. It only looks at the outside – the outside is real and the inside does not exist; it is illusory. But in a way, both are the same. The East accepts one half, the inside, and denies the other half, the outside; the West accepts one half, the outside, and denies the other half, the inside.The West has become scientifically, technologically rich, but has lost its soul. It has become spiritually poor. The East has been spiritually rich, but it has lost all grip on the outside reality and has become so poor that by the end of this century perhaps half the population of India – that means five hundred million human beings – will be dying. And this will not be the case only in India, but in all the Eastern countries which have remained poor.It is not coincidental. To me it is absolutely clear why it has happened: the whole man has never been taught.I stand for the whole man. His outside – I will not call it illusory, I will call it “changing reality” – and his inside, unchanging reality. That is the only difference I will make. The changing reality has its own beauty, just as unchanging reality has its own beauty. And both have to be fulfilled.Man needs religiousness as much as he needs the scientific approach. Science is for the outside, the objective world, and religion for the inside, the subjective world. If both can grow together, just like two wings of a bird, then there is a wholeness. And to me, when man is whole only then he is holy.Our scientists are incomplete, our saints are incomplete. The complete man has not come yet into the world. My every effort is to make you aware that the world needs immensely, urgently, the birth of a whole man – a man who is not split into the inner and the outer. Only this man can make this existence beautiful, can make his awareness a great light, a great joy.I am, from the very beginning, against this attitude of calling the world illusory. It is a changing reality, it is a flux. In fact, if it were not a changing reality it would have been very boring. Its continuous change of climate, of day into night, of night into day, its continuous change from life to death, from death to life, keeps it interesting, keeps it an adventure, a continuous challenge for investigation into unknown territories.The same is true about the inner world. If it were also changing, then you would not be the same person for two consecutive days. Yesterday you borrowed money from somebody; the next day, it is not you who is supposed to return it. Somebody else has borrowed – you are not that person. And if inner and outer both are continuously changing, then against what will you see that they are changing? – change requires something unchanging as a background.Your awareness is the center of the cyclone.Everything around you goes on changing; just you, at the innermost being, remains always the same. With this understanding, I will talk about Ta Hui’s sutras.Speaking of “empty illusion,” it is illusion when created, and illusion when experienced too……he is not right in what he is saying, not right according to the experience of enlightenment. He remains an intellectual. He never rises to the heights of intelligence, at least not yet. Perhaps in his future sutras he may be able to enter higher realms, fly a little higher. But he seems to be very unaware of what he is saying, yet his pretension is that what he is saying, he knows.The first thing, speaking of “empty illusion”… Now this is a repetition of terms. Illusion is obviously empty. There is no need to call it empty illusion; it is redundant, it is unnecessarily repetitive. Illusion means empty. Illusion means there is no substance in it – now why call it empty illusion? Are there some illusions which are not empty? What kind of illusions will they be which are not empty, and how can you call them illusions if they have substance? Dreams don’t have any substance.It is possible to use such terms only because he has heard from many masters, he has read many scriptures, but it is not his own experience.…it is illusion when created, and illusion when experienced too…That is absolutely absurd! It is illusion only when you are not aware. The moment you are aware and you experience it, it disappears. You have been dreaming and you wake up – do you think the dream continues when you are awake? The moment you are awake, the dream is finished. Your awareness and your dreaming cannot continue simultaneously.The moment somebody becomes enlightened, all that is dream disappears. He finds only pure consciousness all over the universe, just an ocean of consciousness. All the forms that used to appear before have disappeared…just a formless, universal consciousness. There is no dream anywhere, there is no illusion anywhere. It is because of this experience that he says that people who are living unconsciously are living in illusion. Where they are seeing forms there are no forms; where they are seeing great things there is nothing, no substance.What is the substance in your ambitions, what is the substance in your greed? What is the substance in your lust, what is the substance in your will to power? Even if you become the most powerful man in the world, an Alexander the Great, what is the substance in it?When Alexander the Great was coming to India he met one great man, Diogenes. In their dialogue there is one point which is relevant. Diogenes asked him, “What are you going to do after you have conquered the whole world?”Alexander said, “After I have conquered the whole world, I am going to relax, just like you.”Diogenes was having a sunbath, naked. He lived naked, by the side of a river, and he was lying in the sand enjoying the morning sun and the cool breeze. Diogenes laughed and he said, “If after conquering the whole world you are just going to relax like me, why not relax right now? Is conquering the whole world a precondition for relaxation? I have not conquered the whole world.”Alexander felt embarrassed because what he was saying was right. Then Diogenes said, “Why are you wasting your life in conquering the world – only to relax, finally, just like me. This bank of the river is big enough, you can come, your friends can come. It is miles long and the forest is beautiful. And I don’t possess anything. If you like the place where I am lying down, I can change!”Alexander said, “Perhaps you are right, but first I have to conquer the world.”Diogenes said, “It is up to you. But remember one thing: have you ever thought that there is no other world? Once you have conquered this world, you will be in difficulty.”It is said that Alexander became immediately sad. He said, “I have never thought about it. It makes me feel very sad that I am so close to conquering the world…and I am only thirty-three, and there is no other world to conquer.”Diogenes said, “But you were thinking to relax. If there was another world, I think first you would conquer that and then relax. You will never relax because you don’t understand a simple thing about relaxation – it’s either now or never. If you understand it, lie down, throw these clothes in the river. If you don’t understand, forget about relaxation. And what is the point in conquering the world? What are you going to gain by it? Except losing your life, you are not going to gain anything.”Alexander said, “I would like to see you again when I come back. Right now I have to go, but I would have loved to sit and listen to you. I have always thought of meeting you – I have heard so many stories about you. But I have never met such a beautiful and impressive man as you. Can I do anything for you? Just a word, a hint from you, and it will be done.”Diogenes said, “If you can just stand a little to the side, because you are preventing the sun. That will be enough gratitude – and I will remain thankful for my whole life.”When Alexander was leaving him, Diogenes told him, “Remember one thing: you will never be able to come back home because your ambition is too great and life is too short. You will never be able to fulfill your ambitions, and you will never be able to come back home.” And actually it happened that Alexander never could reach back home. He died when he was returning from India, just on the way.A fictitious story has been prevalent for these two thousand years. The story has some significance, and some historicity also about it, because on the same day Diogenes also died. Both died on the same day, Alexander a few minutes before, and Diogenes a few minutes after him; hence the story has come into being….When they were crossing the river that is the boundary of this world and the kingdom of God, Alexander was ahead of Diogenes, just a few feet ahead, and he heard a laughter from behind. It seemed familiar and he could not believe it – it was Diogenes. He was very much ashamed, because this time he was also naked. Just to hide his embarrassment, he told Diogenes, “It must be an unprecedented event that on this river a world conqueror, an emperor, is meeting a beggar” – because Diogenes used to beg.Diogenes again laughed and said, “You are perfectly right, but on just one point you are wrong.”And Alexander asked, “What is the point?”Diogenes said, “The emperor is not where you think he is, nor is the beggar where you think. The beggar is ahead of me. You have come losing everything; you are the beggar. I have come living each single moment with such totality and intensity, so rich, so fulfilled, that I can only be called an emperor, not a beggar.”This story seems to be fictitious, because how can one know what happened? But it seems to be significant. The moment you know that life and existence are fleeting phenomena…it does not mean you have to renounce them; it simply means: before they fly away, squeeze the juice of every moment.That’s where I differ from all the enlightened people of the world. They will say, “Renounce them, because they are changing.” And I will say, “Because they are changing, squeeze the juice quickly. Before they escape, taste them, drink them, rejoice in them. Before the moments go away, make them a celebration, a dance, a song.” Because they are fleeting, that does not mean you have to renounce them. It simply means that you should be very alert, so nothing can escape without being squeezed completely.This world has to be lived as intensely and totally as possible, and it is not against your awareness. In fact, you will have to be very aware not to miss a single moment. So awareness and enjoying this life can grow together simultaneously. And this is my vision of the whole man.…it is illusion when created, and illusion when experienced too; it’s illusion when you’re knowing and aware…This is absolutely wrong. When you are knowing and aware, all that is illusion disappears……and illusion when you’re lost in delusion too.It is delusion only when you are lost in it. When you are standing aside as a watcher, as a witness, it is just a fleeting phenomenon. That is the meaning of the word maya, which illusion does not rightly translate.You know it – everything is fleeting. Either you can renounce it, which in the past people have been doing…but I am against renouncing it. What is the point of renouncing?Something which is renouncing you, which is every moment going into annihilation…It is better, it will make you richer, it will make you more mature to take hold of it before it is gone, to live it.And the man who lives every moment, alert, watchful, knowing perfectly well that there is nothing to cling to – everything is going away, it will also go away – he has no misery, no regret, no complaint, no grudge against life. Life is fleeting – fleeting is its suchness, its thusness. It is its nature – and your nature is absolutely and eternally the same. Why not enjoy it?It is true. The roseflower that has blossomed in the morning, will be gone by the evening. But does that mean destroy it in the morning because it will be gone in the evening? That will be sheer stupidity. But that has been the whole history of all your religions.I say unto you: because the roseflower which has blossomed in the morning and is dancing in the sun and in the air and in the rain will be gone by the evening…before it is gone, dance with it, rejoice with it, let its fragrance become part of you. Don’t cling to it! When it is there, be grateful to existence. When it is gone, it will leave a beautiful memory in you, a great remembrance. But nothing to be worried about because more and more roses will be coming.One has to learn the art of living with awareness. To me, that can be the definition of religion: the art of living with awareness – not renouncing, but rejoicing.Past, present, and future are all illusions. Today, if we realize our wrong, we take an illusory medicine to cure an equally illusory disease. When the disease is cured, the medicine is removed, and we are the same person as before. If you think that there is someone else or some special doctrine, then this is the view of a misguided outsider.He himself is an outsider. He does not know what he is saying. He is simply repeating the stale words of all the enlightened people. I say that it is not his experience, because he commits so many mistakes which show that. A man of experience cannot commit those mistakes.In the instant of Maitreya’s finger-snap, Sudhana was even able to forget the meditative states fostered in him by all his teachers: how much more so the beginningless habit energy of empty falsehood and evil deeds! If you consider the mistakes which you committed in the past as real, then the world right in front of you now is all real, and even official position, wealth and status, gratitude and love, are all real.He quotes a very significant incident, but without commenting on it. It is strange. He goes on throwing in big names and incidents just to show his scholarship, his learning. But the incident is so tremendously significant that to talk about it and not to make any comment on it shows that he has not understood what it means.In the instant of Maitreya’s finger-snap, Sudhana was even able to forget the meditative states fostered in him by all his teachers.The story is that Sudhana was learning with many teachers, many techniques of meditation. And then he came in contact with an enlightened master, Maitreya. As he touched Maitreya’s feet and Maitreya looked at him, Maitreya snapped his fingers – and something strange happened. Sudhana simply became silent. He had never been in such a space, even though he had been practicing meditation, had been living with many teachers. Just this finger-snap…Perhaps he was just on the verge. It can happen. Just a little push, it can be anything. Just as he was rising from touching his feet and Maitreya snapped his fingers, he may have looked at Maitreya – what is he doing? For a moment he forgot his mind, all his thoughts, all his meditations. For a moment there was a gap, and that gap opened the doors of eternity.It can be anything. If a person is just on the verge, then a man who understands and can see inside you, and can see that you are just on the verge…a little push, and you will have moved into a totally new dimension.This simple gesture, a finger-snap, and Sudhana became enlightened. He had come to ask many questions, but all questions were finished. He had just touched the feet of Maitreya as a newcomer – and after this small gesture, he had to touch the feet of Maitreya again, just to thank him. Not a single word was said by Maitreya, not a single word was said by Sudhana…and everything happened.When Sudhana left, Maitreya said to his other disciples, “Look, you are working so hard, and I have been beating you so hard…” And he told them that Gautam Buddha was right when he said that there are a few men who are like the horses which will not move unless you beat them really hard, and there are a few men who are like a different kind of horse – just a little hit by your feet is enough for them to move. And there are horses which don’t need even that; just the shadow of your whip will be enough.“I have heard it,” Maitreya said, “but for the first time I have seen a man who belongs to the third category of horses. Just the shadow of the whip, not even the whip, and he has moved into the other world.”Ta Hui mentions this great incident, but without commenting at all about it. It is very strange that one can talk about such great incidents and not comment at all. Perhaps he has not understood it. Perhaps he belongs to the first category of horses!If your mind does not run off searching, or think falsely, or get involved with objects, then this very burning house of passion is itself the place to escape the three worlds.What he is saying is right: You don’t have to go anywhere. Mind is always interested in going somewhere. Mind is American, always going somewhere – it does not matter where. What matters is going.I have heard about a couple…the husband is driving the car so fast, and the wife is concerned. She goes on saying, “At least you should look at the map! Are we on the right road or the wrong road for where we are going?”And the husband snapped back, “You shut up! You don’t see how fast we are going. It does not matter where we are going, what matters is the speed, just the joy of speed.”I have heard that Ronald Reagan was visiting Greece and had gone to see an old volcano. He looked inside, deep in the volcano, and he said to the guide, “My God, it looks like hell.”And the guide said, “You Americans, you have been everywhere!”Mind is American, that is absolutely certain; otherwise there is no need to move anywhere. Wherever you are is the place of your enlightenment.…the place to escape the three worlds – hell and earth and heaven. In Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, all the three religions born outside of India – heaven is the ultimate. But the religions born in India don’t think of heaven as the ultimate. To be free from all these three is their ultimate goal, and that fourth is called moksha – authentic liberation.Heaven is nothing but a holiday resort. You have earned some money and then you rush to a holiday resort. Heaven is nothing according to the Eastern religions, only a holiday resort. You have earned a little virtue, you have donated to charitable causes, you have been running orphanages, and things like that; these things are absolutely needed, otherwise you will not be able to get into heaven, because from where will you get your bank account to be opened in heaven?Bertrand Russell was right when he said that if there is no poverty in the world, if everybody is comfortable, happy, living joyously, all so-called saints will disappear. Who would need their services? These saints need people to be poor, to be orphans, to be beggars, so that they can earn virtue. Virtue is a kind of currency that is used in heaven.According to Indian religions, when you reach heaven you live there as long as your account lasts, and when your account is finished you are back on the earth – again the business of earning virtue. So they call these “the three worlds.” A few people open their accounts in hell by doing evil acts. They also come back. When their account is finished and they have been tortured enough, they also come back.This earth, this world, is just a place from where people go in all directions – and they go on coming back. When the account is finished, they have to come back here. This is a vicious circle.The Eastern religions call it the circle of birth and death. And to be totally free from it, they have a different name – which is not available in the religions born outside of India – moksha, or nirvana. That means now you have gone forever, the point of no return. You will not be coming back again.You can leave all the three worlds just from the place where you are. You don’t have to move anywhere – to the Himalayas, to some caves, to some monasteries. All you have to do is to move withinward, to your awareness.Did not Buddha say, “Not depending on, or abiding in, any situation, not having any discrimination, one clearly sees the vast establishment of reality and realizes that all worlds and all things are equal and non-dual.”Though a bodhisattva of the “far-going” stage appears to act the same as outsiders, he does not abandon the Buddhist teachings; though he appears to go along with all that is worldly, he’s perpetually practicing all world-transcending ways. These are the real expedient devices within the burning house of passion…Only having penetrated all the way through can you say that affliction is itself enlightenment and ignorance is identical to great wisdom. Within the wondrousno-mind…I am saying “no-mind.” Ta Hui continues to say “mind” – and that is absolutely wrong. Gautam Buddha’s whole teaching is based on no-mind, on going beyond mind.…within the wondrous– no-mind –of the original vast quiescence – pure, clear, perfect illumination – there is not a single thing that can cause obstruction. It is like the emptiness of space…He is saying: You can live in the world and yet not be of the world. You can live in the world and not allow the world to live in you. All that is needed is a little watchfulness.A small story in the end…. Just as you have heard the name of Cleopatra – one of the most beautiful women of Egypt – in the East, equivalent to Cleopatra, we have the name of a beautiful woman contemporary to Gautam Buddha, Amrapali.Buddha was staying in Vaishali, where Amrapali lived. Amrapali was a prostitute. In Buddha’s time, in this country, it was a convention that the most beautiful woman of any city will not be allowed to get married to any one person, because that will create unnecessary jealousy, conflict, fighting. So the most beautiful woman had to become nagarvadhu – the wife of the whole town.It was not disrespectable at all; on the contrary, just as in the contemporary world we declare beautiful women as “the woman of the year”, they were very much respected. They were not ordinary prostitutes. Their function was that of a prostitute, but they were only visited by the very rich, or the kings, or the princes, generals – the highest strata of society.Amrapali was very beautiful. One day she was standing on her terrace and she saw a young Buddhist monk. She had never fallen in love with anybody, although every day she had to pretend to be a great lover to this king, to that king, to this rich man, to that general. But she fell suddenly in love with the man, a Buddhist monk who had nothing, just a begging bowl – a young man, but of a tremendous presence, awareness, grace. The way he was walking… She rushed down, she asked the monk, “Please – today accept my food.”Other monks were also coming behind him, because whenever Buddha was moving anywhere, ten thousand monks were always moving with him. The other monks could not believe this. They were jealous and angry and feeling all human qualities and frailties as they saw the young man enter the palace of Amrapali.Amrapali told him, “After three days the rainy season is going to start…” Buddhist monks don’t move for four months when it is the rainy season. Those are the four months they stay in one place; for eight months they continuously move, they can’t stay more than three days in one place.It is a strange psychology, if you have watched yourself… You can watch it: to be attached to some place it takes you at least four days. For example, for the first day in a new house you may not be able to sleep, the second day it will be little easier, the third day it will be even easier, and the fourth day you will be able to sleep perfectly at home. So before that, if you are a Buddhist monk, you have to leave.Amrapali said, “After just three days the rainy season is to begin, and I invite you to stay in my house for the four months.”The young monk said, “I will ask my master. If he allows me, I will come.”As he went out there was a crowd of monks standing, asking him what had happened. He said, “I have taken my meal, and the woman has asked me to stay the four months of the rainy season in her palace. I told her that I will ask my master.”People were really angry – one day was already too much; but four months continuously…! They rushed toward Gautam Buddha. Before the young man could reach the assembly, there were hundreds standing up and telling Gautam Buddha, “This man has to be stopped. That woman is a prostitute, and a monk staying four months in a prostitute’s house…”Buddha said, “You keep quiet! Let him come. He has not agreed to stay; he has agreed only if I allow him. Let him come.”The young monk came, touched the feet of Buddha and told the whole story, “The woman is a prostitute, a famous prostitute, Amrapali. She has asked me to stay for four months in her house. Every monk will be staying somewhere, in somebody’s house, for the four months. I have told her that I will ask my master, so I am here…whatever you say.”Buddha looked into his eyes and said, “You can stay.”It was a shock. Ten thousand monks… There was great silence, but great anger, great jealousy. They could not believe that Buddha has allowed a monk to stay in a prostitute’s house. After three days the young man left to stay with Amrapali, and the monks every day started bringing gossips, “The whole city is agog. There is only one talk – that a Buddhist monk is staying with Amrapali for four months continuously.”Buddha said, “You should keep silent. Four months will pass and I trust my monk. I have looked into his eyes – there was no desire. If I had said no, he would not have felt anything. I said yes…he simply went. And I trust in my monk, in his awareness, in his meditation.“Why are you getting so agitated and worried? If my monk’s meditation is deep then he will change Amrapali, and if his meditation is not deep then Amrapali may change him. It is now a question between meditation and a biological attraction. Just wait for four months. I trust my young man. He has been doing perfectly well and I have every certainty he will come out of this fire test absolutely victorious.”Nobody believed Gautam Buddha. His own disciples thought, “He is trusting too much. The man is too young; he is too fresh and Amrapali is much too beautiful. He is taking an unnecessary risk.” But there was nothing else to do.After four months the young man came, touched Buddha’s feet – and following him was Amrapali, dressed as a Buddhist nun. She touched Buddha’s feet and she said, “I tried my best to seduce your monk, but he seduced me. He convinced me by his presence and awareness that the real life is at your feet. I want to give all my possessions to the commune of your monks.”She had a very beautiful garden and a beautiful palace. She said, “You can make it a place where ten thousand monks can stay in any rainy season.”And Buddha said to the assembly, “Now, are you satisfied or not?”If meditation is deep, if awareness is clear, nothing can disturb it. Then everything is ephemeral. Amrapali became one of the enlightened women among Buddha’s disciples.So the whole question is: wherever you are, become more centered, become more alert, live more consciously. There is nowhere else to go. Everything that has to happen, has to happen within you, and it is in your hands. You are not a puppet, and your strings are not in anybody else’s hands. You are an absolutely free individual. If you decide to remain in illusions, you can remain so for many, many lives. If you decide to get out, a single moment’s decision is enough.You can be out of all illusions this very moment.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Nothing To Be GivenThere has never been anything to give to people, only folks who have been able to point out the road for people. An ancient worthy said, “Having some attainment is the jackal’s yelp; having no attainment is the lion’s roar.”Buddha was someone who had mastered adaptation: in the course of forty-nine years, in more than three hundred and sixty assemblies where he taught the dharma, he guided people according to their individual faculties. Thus he preached with one voice through all realms, while sentient beings each obtained benefits according to their kind. It’s like: “One gust of the east wind, and the myriad grasses all bend down.” the dharma preached by the Buddha is also like this.If he had had the intent to create benefit in all realms, then this would have been preaching the dharma egotistically. To want to cause myriad beings to gain deliverance according to their kind – isn’t this after all impossible? Haven’t you read how Sariputta, at the assembly where the perfection of wisdom was preached, asked Manjushri, “Don’t all buddhas, the tathagatas, awaken to the realm of truth?” Manjushri said, “No, Sariputta. Even the buddhas cannot be found: how could there be buddhas who awaken to the realm of truth? Even the realm of truth cannot be found: how could it be realized by the buddhas?” See how those two men spurred each other on this way. When did they ever set their minds on anything? All the buddhas and all the patriarchs since antiquity have had a style like this in helping people. It’s just that later descendants have lost the essence of the school and set up their own individual sects, making up strange things and concocting marvels.It is beautiful when Ta Hui simply quotes the words of the awakened ones. But the moment he brings himself in, the whole glory and the splendor is lost. He is trying hard to pretend that he is enlightened, but he cannot hide it – he cannot hide it from eyes which can look deep into his very self. It will be a great event when he realizes his pretensions.It will not be difficult for him to become enlightened. All that he has to know is that he does not know, and that will be the immediate transformation. He knows too much and his experience is absolutely nil. but I hope that slowly, slowly he is coming closer to realize this, because now he is not adding his own statements, he is just quoting the buddhas.The first sutra is a very ancient one it has not even originated with Gautam Buddha. Perhaps all the awakened ones have emphasized the fact – they have to because it is so real and so significant, it has to be told to the people – that the master cannot give anything to you. If he could, he would have given you everything. But as far as enlightenment is concerned it is absolutely your individual, private territory. Nobody can interfere with it.Then what is the purpose of the master? His purpose is to take away from you things which you think you are. His purpose is negative – he simply takes away your false conceptions. And once all false conceptions are taken away from you, that which is real illuminates in all its beauty. He has not given you anything, but he has removed all the obstructions, all the hindrances which you were clinging to.The moment you become enlightened, you will know that this experience has been always with you – just your eyes were closed. The master tries in every way, with arbitrary devices, to wake you up. Once you are awake nothing has to be said, because you are seeing yourself. And the experience of enlightenment is exactly the same.Ta Hui is quoting the ancient sutra:There has never been anything to give to people, only folks who have been able to point out the road for people.The actual words of Buddha are: “I can show you the path, but you will have to travel it. I cannot travel it for you. Not that I don’t want to, but it is simply not in the nature of things.”…able to point out the road for people. An ancient worthy said, “Having some attainment is the jackal’s yelp; having no attainment is the lion’s roar.”On the path there are many moments when you will feel, “I have attained it, I have got it.” Remember a criterion: whenever the idea arises in you, “I have got it,” you are without any doubt wrong. The very idea, “I have got it,” means an ego achievement. You are there and some goal has been achieved. It may be some beautiful experience, but still illusory; hence: The ancient worthy says, “Having some attainment is the jackal’s yelp; having no attainment is the lion’s roar.”On the path that moment comes when the seeker is lost, and the desire to attain anything leaves you. As you are not there, who is going to attain? When you are so simple and innocent that you cannot manage to say “I,” there is no question of attainment – because there is no attaining mind. But this is the attainment: losing everything, even the seeker. You have found what the seeker was seeking, but now there is nobody to declare it.Then comes just a lion’s roar: a simple recognition with no word. You explode into a rejoicing, into a dance – all is lost. And when you are standing in a state of utter nothingness, from the other side all is gained.But those words do not apply any more, and you cannot say, “I have attained it.” It is a simple recognition that it has been always with you; hence the lion’s roar.Buddha was someone who had mastered adaptation: in the course of forty-nine years, in more than three hundred and sixty assemblies where he taught the dharma, he guided people according to their individual faculties.Ta Hui’s statement is true. Buddha does not believe in the collective mind, he believes in individual consciousness. Perhaps he is the first man to declare that the very existence of God deprives man of his individuality. His reason for denying God is not theological – he is not an atheist. His denial of God is to declare that individual consciousness is the highest growth in existence: nobody is above it.All the religions think that God created the world – he created man, he created woman and everything that is in the world. To Buddha it is a very insulting, humiliating idea. If God can create, he can uncreate at any moment; you are just puppets in the hands of a puppeteer. Then all talk of individuality and freedom and enlightenment is just futile. God has to be removed as a hypothesis because he is the greatest hindrance to your individuality.Nietzsche recognized it, after twenty-five centuries, in a different context, but the realization is the same. He said, “God is dead and now man is free!” If God is still alive man cannot be free – how can you be free?The very idea of all the religions that god created man out of mud…that’s the meaning of humus, from which comes the word human. That is also the meaning of Adam – Adam means mud. God made Adam out of mud and then breathed life into him. It is almost like creating a toy. What freedom, what individuality, what liberation exists for a puppet?Buddha dropped the hypothesis of God twenty-five centuries before it was a great, rebellious idea. Nietzsche was only a thinker, he could not influence many people. But Buddha dropped God in favor of man’s consciousness, so that it can grow unhindered, so that his privacy is sacred and nobody can enter into it. The religions say that God is watching you every moment. In the sight of God you don’t have any privacy.I have heard about a nun who used to take a bath in her bathroom with closed doors, but always keeping her clothes on. Other nuns became a little suspicious, “Is she a little crazy or what?” So they asked her, “What is the matter? The doors are closed, you can remove your clothes.”She said, “But, God is omniscient. He looks every moment in every place. Are you suggesting to me to be naked before God?” But the poor woman did not understand that if God’s eyes can penetrate walls they can penetrate clothes, they can penetrate your skeleton.The very idea of God is inhuman, and Buddha was the first man to recognize the fact that as long as God exists, man will remain a slave. God has to be completely dropped as a useless hypothesis. Then man is absolutely free, individual, has his own private world of consciousness and realization. Any master worth calling a master always takes each individual and teaches him according to his potentialities, according to the stage where he is. This sometimes creates discrepancies, contradictions, but they cannot be avoided, because it is impossible to talk to each individual.For example I have to talk to you all. And I am not only talking to you; what I am saying to you is going to reach around the world to all of my people. When I am talking to you I am also talking to them. As far as I am concerned they are as much present to me as you all. But it creates a problem: I am saying something which may be applicable to a certain individual and may not be applicable to somebody else. In their past lives they have grown different individualities, and they have come to different points.Just last night we saw how Maitreya did not say anything to Sudhana but just a finger-snap, which was absolutely absurd, unrelated to anything…but he clicked his fingers and something transpired through that small gesture: Sudhana became enlightened. He was already ready, just standing on the border line, and this simple gesture pushed him.But there are thick skulls! You go on hammering on them, and they think some kind of massage is being… You go on telling them the most profound truths, and they think it is a great entertainment. Enlightenment to them is nothing but a curiosity. They don’t want to become enlightened, but they want to understand – perhaps sometime it may be a good dimension to explore.One great master from Sri Lanka was dying. He called all his disciples, and his last words were, “You have been listening for almost half a century, but you go on listening, accumulating knowledge, and nothing seems to change in your being. So as a last resort I have decided that those who want to become enlightened I will take with me. I am dying; they will have to die with me. So if anyone is really interested, stand up!”Thousands of monks…and they started looking at each other – “You are senior, you should stand up. You, a great knower, should stand up. You are so learned in scriptures, you give such beautiful sermons, now is the time – get up!” But nobody was getting up.The old man said, “I don’t have much time.” Then a man raised his hand, but he also did not get up. The old man said, “Just raising the hand won’t do. Stand up.”The man said, “Forgive me, but I have many other things to do first. I am raising my hand to inquire, because you will be gone and I don’t know anybody else who can show me the way. In short, just tell me! If some day my work is finished, my complicated affairs are settled. I may follow but right now…please forgive me. Don’t misunderstand my hand – that’s why I am not standing, only the hand is standing. I don’t want to become enlightened right now, but I would like to know the right path.”The old man said, “For half a century I have been talking about the right path, and you have not understood it. How can you understand within a few minutes? – because my time has come. But this has given me a great insight that your curiosity, your inquiry, was not for enlightenment. It was a kind of spiritual entertainment.”So there are different people… There are people who are ready; they need just a small help, just the shadow of a whip. And there are people who would not budge from their state of affairs, even if all the buddhas of the past and the present and the future were trying to make them enlightened. Nobody can make you enlightened unless it has become your own innermost longing.Individuals differ, hence Gautam Buddha was always giving instructions to individuals. He was speaking in big assemblies of thousands of monks but he was answering a particular individual and his question. Or he was saying something to a person who was not even aware that it is being said to him. But the person who is ready will catch it immediately, whether he understands that it is especially for him… It will start working in his being.Because of differences in individuals the teaching cannot be a philosophical system. It cannot be logical non-contradictory. It has to be multi-dimensional. And Ta Hui is right when he says…he guided people according to their individual faculties.He is talking about Gautam Buddha. It seems he has come to a little sense. He is no longer calling him the pale face, the old barbarian……through all realms, while sentient beings each obtained benefits according to their kind. it is like: “One gust of the east wind…The quotation is from Gautam Buddha but so beautiful and so poetic… “One gust of the east wind, and the myriad grasses all bend down.”Just when I come in and I see you bending down I remember the statement of Gautam Buddha: “One gust of the east wind, and all the grasses bend down.”A man of enlightenment is nothing but a gust of the east wind. Just his being present is enough for those who are capable of some intelligence, who are not prejudiced, who are open and available like the open sky, and who are as innocent as the trees, as the grasses…it is irresistible not to bow down. You are not stone statues. But there are idiots in the world…Just a few days ago there were seventy people from The Times Of India group of papers. This is the biggest organization of papers, the biggest network, in India – and the oldest. The owners were all here except for one person, the owner himself, who has been in love with me for a long time, since when he was a small child and I used to stay in their house in Calcutta.He wanted to become a sannyasin – he had been here in the ashram before for a few days to meditate, but his father is very much against me. For two reasons his father is against me. First, that boy is his only son, and they are one of the topmost super-rich people in India. He is afraid that his son becomes a sannyasin, then who is going to take over his great empire? And the fear that he may start helping the movement with his money… And secondly he was angry with me, although we had not even quarreled or harmed each other. He was so afraid of me that when I used to stay in their house – because his wife has always been interested in me – he would go out of town immediately. Until I left their house he would not come home again. Just a casual encounter and there may be some trouble…The second reason for his antagonism toward me was that his wife had asked me, “When a wife ceases to love the husband, is it right to sleep with him?”I said, “That is prostitution! One has to be very sincere about it. If you don’t love him, you have to say it. Don’t try to pretend – at least in matters like love.”Then she asked me, “If the wife loves somebody else…?”I said, “Love is the highest law, and you should not be dominated by any lower law of morality, of society. When you are following the highest law, nothing goes wrong.”She was asking these questions not just out of curiosity or for somebody else; she was asking for herself. The husband was angry that I had supported his wife, and he was worried – the wife is already impressed with me, the son is impressed and the daughter is impressed.So he prevented the son, made it clear that, “If you become a sannyasin I will disown you. With my money you cannot help a movement that I don’t like, a man who has been disturbing our old tradition, our religion, our morality and who is corrupting the mind of the youth.” Now the son has become the director of The Times Of India group of papers, and the daughter also – associate director.So they were here, the mother was here, and seventy people from the staff. They insisted that they wanted their questions to be answered. I agreed, because of a long relationship with their family. But when I came in I was surprised, those seventy persons were sitting like stone statues. They could not even answer my greeting, with folded hands. I was initiating the greeting but they could not raise their hands. It was hilarious that because of those seventy people… The wife, who is really now the owner of the whole thing because the husband is absolutely weak and cannot do anything that the wife does not want, she is now the queen of the whole empire that they have created…even she was sitting like a stone statue, worried about those seventy people – what if they see her? And greeting is a common practice; even on the street if you see a stranger, just to greet him… The only person who greeted me was Sameer, the young man who wanted to become a sannyasin.The girl Nandita greeted me in a very strange situation: on one side was Sameer, greeting me just as any sannyasin, in the middle was her mother who was sitting like a dead corpse, and behind them the seventy corpses. The girl wanted to greet me, but she could not go the whole way. She compromised; she just raised her hands this much. She could not bring them together – a compromise. But when all these three saw me the next day, they all touched my feet. People have such public faces and such private faces!But I was really feeling sad for those seventy people. They had come just to listen to me, to the answers – to the questions…and I devoted the whole meeting to their questions. If they cannot even greet me, do you think they can understand me?The east wind comes – only dead trees will remain static. All the living trees will start bowing down.These are the foremost journalists of the country, but with such prejudiced minds! I have answered their questions, but they don’t have the guts to publish their own interview in their own newspapers! They are afraid of the government, they are afraid of the public, and perhaps they are afraid of themselves – “What people will say? …because you listened to all this hammering on journalists and you could not speak a word…“Looking at them…finally I decided not to look at them, because looking at them was such a pitiable scene. I simply forgot all about them. I looked at my people who are unprejudiced, open, available – and if the east wind comes to them, they will rejoice in its coolness.In India the east wind is a special symbol, it has a meaning to it… From the east the coolest wind comes, very soothing to the heart, very refreshing to your whole being. But it cannot do anything to a corpse, neither can it give him coolness nor freshness. On the contrary, the corpse will give the cool wind its disgusting foul odor.Buddha is saying,“One gust of the east wind, and the myriad grasses all bend down.” The dharma preached by the Buddha is also like this.If he had had the intent to create benefit in all realms, then this would have been preaching the dharma egotistically.Buddha preaches without any intention. He preaches the way flowers release their perfume – without any intention. Even in the loneliest forest where nobody ever goes, when the flower opens it petals it releases its perfume. It is not a question of waiting for somebody to appreciate. It is not intentional. It is spontaneous.Ta Hui, at least on this point, is right – and he is right perhaps because he himself is teaching with an intent to change people, to create benefit in all realms. And he is becoming a little aware of the fact that he himself does not know it; he has heard about it, and he is clever enough to manage intellectually to give it a form – systematized and logical and rational. But one cannot deceive oneself for long. Sooner or later one comes to know: What I am saying is not my experience, because my actions don’t show that they are coming from an enlightened being.To want to cause myriad beings to gain deliverance according to their kind – is not this after all impossible? Have not you read how Sariputta, at the assembly where the perfection of wisdom was preached, asked Manjushri….These two are very intimate disciples of Gautam Buddha, perhaps the most learned. But they dropped all their learning. The dialogue between them has to be very minutely and very lovingly understood, because this is how Buddhist enlightened people had been talking to each other for centuries. This is something special to Buddhism, in no other religion does such a thing happen. Both are enlightened beings.Sariputta asked,“Don’t all buddhas, the tathagatas, awaken to the realm of truth?He knows the answer but he is simply asking Manjushri, who has just become enlightened.Manjushri said:No, Sariputta. Even the buddhas cannot be found: how could there be buddhas who awaken to the realm of truth?The question was just to test how deep Manjushri has reached into his enlightenment. And Manjushri shows a tremendous insight. He says, “When you become enlightened you are no more. You don’t find a buddha. You are no longer a person, you are only a presence. And when there is no buddha, how could there be any truth to be found? Who will find it? The seeker, the searcher, the finder is no more – who will find the truth?Even the realm of truth cannot be found: how could it be realized by the buddhas?That which cannot be found certainly cannot be realized.Ta Hui does not understand the intention of this small dialogue. He thinks, See how those two men spurred each other on this way. They have reached beyond the way; there is no question of being spurred by each other! Sariputta is simply trying to find how much depth there is to Manjushri’s enlightenment – and he is perfectly satisfied.Enlightenment means: you become only a presence, and that very presence is the truth. There are not two persons – the finder and the found. the seeker has dissolved, and what has remained is just a pure awareness with no identity, with no personality, with no ego. This very presence is truth. There is no other truth than your awareness.But Ta Hui does not say that Sariputta was immensely satisfied that Manjushri has reached to this place. His question was not a curiosity; his question was to fathom the depth. Manjushri has just gone through the transformation, and this was a usual practice among Buddha’s disciples: when somebody becomes enlightened, all other enlightened people will ask him strange questions – not that they don’t know the answer, they want to hear the answer from this man who has freshly entered into the eternal source of life.But Ta Hui has left the dialogue incomplete. Sariputta was over-enjoyed, and he said to Manjushri, “So you have reached! Now there is nothing more, nowhere else to go. You have found your authentic reality.” Because Ta Hui does not say that, my feeling is he has not understood the purpose of the dialogue.When did they ever set their minds on anything?He cannot yet conceive the space of no-mind. He remains in the mind. Once in a while he comes to the very boundary of the mind, but then he again goes back; he does not step out of it. For example, this dialogue could have helped him to come out of the mind. There are no buddhas in enlightenment; there is no realization of truth in enlightenment, but only a pure presence, a pure life, pure consciousness but that is what we call the buddha, that is what we call the truth.But Ta Hui’s approach is through the intellect and the mind, so he finishes by commenting:See how those two men spurred each other on this way. When did they ever set their minds on anything? All the buddhas and all the patriarchs since antiquity have had a style like this in helping people.They are not helping. The dialogue is not a question of helping, because both are enlightened. There are millions of dialogues…so beautiful. I have been thinking sometimes just to talk about those dialogues which have happened between enlightened people.For example, Lin Chi is standing on a bridge with his master. He says, “Master, is it true” – because Buddha says everything is a flux – “that we are standing on a bridge which is in a flux? – it is dangerous. The river is moving, that is true, but the bridge is not moving.”The master hit Lin Chi and told him, “You idiot! The river is not moving, the bridge is moving. Meditate over it!” And Lin Chi had to meditate over it and recognized…in a certain silence the bridge is also moving, but very slowly. To say that the river is moving is meaningless because the very meaning of the word river is movement; to say “movement is moving” is absurd. But the bridge that looks stable and permanent is moving, it is getting old. One day it will collapse. It is not a fast runner – very slow movement, so slow that you cannot detect it.He went back to the master and said, “Forgive me. The river is not moving, the bridge is moving. River means movement, so there is no point in saying that it is moving. The real question is the bridge.”And the master said, “You managed to see. In the right perspective, even mountains are moving, even stars are moving, because everything is in a flux. The river is moving so fast that you can see it, but that which you can see is not a great realization…until you start seeing that which is happening that you are not aware of.”It is just that later descendants have lost the essence of the school and set up their own individual sects…He himself belongs to an individual sect, and he is saying, It is just that later descendants have lost the essence of the school…He knows it from his very inner feeling: he has also lost the essence, and he has also become part of a sect…making up strange things and concocting marvels. But it seems he is becoming a little alert about the situation; there is every possibility, because however asleep a man may be, he is going to awake sooner or later.I would love to see Ta Hui…before he ends his sutras I would love to be able to say to you that he has come home. He wandered much; he went astray many times; he committed great mistakes, but all that can be forgiven if he comes back home. If he realizes even in the last sutra the essence of enlightenment, then everything else can be forgiven.Man is very frail, very vulnerable. Ta Hui is not an exception. When he called Gautam Buddha “the barbarian” he was at the farthest point from realization; – he was lost in a jungle. To call Buddha a barbarian means there is no hope for man, ever. Buddha is a great hope in the sense that he has shown what is hidden in man’s being, and he has brought it more clearly than anybody else in the world.Bertrand Russell remembers… He lived a long life, almost one century and saw many things happening – a long life of tremendous changes, revolutions, wars. He was brought up with a very fanatic Christian conditioning, but he was a man of tremendous intelligence and courage. He dropped all that conditioning because he looked into the Bible with an open mind – not as a Christian – and he found so many stupid statements that he had to write a book: Why I Am Not A Christian.But he remarks in his autobiography: “Although I have dropped almost all my conditioning, it is an impossible task – even through the conditioning has been dropped, some traces somewhere have still remained. I became aware of those traces because when I read Gautam Buddha I was immensely satisfied that this is the man, the greatest man who has walked on the earth. But then suddenly something in me felt uneasy – how can somebody be a greater man than Jesus Christ. And I was amazed; I had been thinking that I am no longer a Christian!”He has criticized Jesus on many points, and with such clear logic that no theologian of Christianity has been able to answer him – and I suspect even Jesus may not have been able to answer him! His questions are very clear.For example he says, “Jesus goes on talking about compassion, love: ‘Love your enemies, love your neighbors’” – which is an even more difficult thing because enemies live far away. You don’t have to bother about them the whole time, but the neighbors are very close enemies continuously harassing you in some way or other. Christians call Jesus a prince of peace, but Bertrand Russell finds in the Bible incidents which prove that Jesus was not a man of peace. And he is caught up in such stupid incidents that there is no way to clean it up or to explain it away.One day they had been hungry – he and his followers – because the people of the town had refused to give them any food. Jesus was so angry that when he came close to a fig tree…it was not the season for figs and the tree was without any fruits, but he was so blind in anger that he cursed the tree, “You will always remain an ugly tree because the only begotten son of God has come to you, and you are not ready with fruits – with no welcome!”Bertrand Russell says, “Intellectually I understand perfectly that Gautam Buddha is perhaps the highest expression; Jesus is no comparison to him. But somewhere deep down I could not manage…the most I could do was to say that both were equal. I could not put Jesus Christ lower than Gautam Buddha knowing perfectly well that Gautam Buddha is far higher. But that is only intellectual understanding. The conditioning goes into the unconscious, and the unconscious becomes restless unless you satisfy it. As he accepted that perhaps they are both of equal status, the restlessness disappeared.And this is from a man who is very intelligent, a genius – not only about the world but about himself also. He is watching how his mind functions. His intellect is saying that it is absolutely certain, but his unconscious feels disturbed. The unconscious is nine times bigger than your conscious, and to feel the unconscious disturbed is a kind of sickness, a nausea. To settle it down he agrees that both Buddha and Jesus are equal, and immediately the restlessness disappears.Ta Hui is an intellectual. Calling Buddha “a barbarian,” sooner or later he must have realized that that was going too far – and it was too ugly.I hope that he will come back. Even if he can come back at the last moment of his death, everything else can be forgiven. It is human to forgive… The ancient saying is, “It is human to err and it is divine to forgive.” I want a little change in it: “It is human to err, it is more human to forgive.” Why bring in the divine unnecessarily? The scientific mind always tries to have as few hypotheses as possible.Maneesha had asked last night, seeing that Ta Hui has not proved a great treasure of enlightenment, “We can finish the discourses on Ta Hui tonight…”I said; “No, because that will be an injustice. I have hammered him. If he can come back home I would like to appreciate him also; so I will go through all the sutras.I don’t know what is going to happen in them. But a man, even though he may be an intellectual…if he continues, sooner or later he is going to recognize that he is going round and round in a circle. There is much more than this continuous circle, but that much more can be seen only if you stand out of the circle as a witness. And I think he is capable – because everybody is capable. It is only a question of when you turn inward, only a question of when you drop your pretensions and hypocrisies.So I will wait for two weeks – she says there will be sutras for two weeks more. If he goes astray, he will get hit. But my feeling is, a man who is interested may realize at some point that what he is doing is only intellectual gymnastics – and that may prove a turning point in his life. If it happens, then this whole series on Ta Hui will be of immense significance, because it will be the story of any man – wandering, going astray, coming back to the path and then falling again and again, but at the end, finally he becomes a light unto himself.I will also feel at ease, because I don’t like to hit anybody. If I can see him coming back with the insight of enlightenment as his own experience, I will also feel good: ‘The man was worth hitting. You were not hitting just an ordinary idiot – he was extraordinary!”I don’t know what is going to happen in these two weeks. It all depends on Ta Hui – how many times he is going to go astray, and whether he has the potential to realize, or he dies without realization.It will be a sad affair if he dies without enlightenment. I would like it to be a celebration…and my hope is that the man is capable.Any moment the turning point can come, and any moment his inner flame can burn bright. So you will have to tolerate Ta Hui for at least two weeks more.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Profound ClarityI am giving you the name Chan-Jan, “profound clarity.” a patriarch said, “As long as there is mental discrimination, and calculating judgment, all the perceptions of one’s own mind are dreams. If mind and consciousness are quiescent and extinct, without a single thought stirring, this is called correct awareness.”These days there’s a kind of phony, whose own standpoint is not genuine: they just teach people to control their minds and sit quietly, to sit to the point where the breath ceases. I call this lot pitiable. I’m asking you to meditate in just this way, but though I instruct you like this, it’s just that there’s no other choice….Beginners’ DiseaseBuddhist disciple Ch’en, you have realized that personal existence is false, and that things are illusory. Amid illusory falsehood you were able to contemplate the saying “a dog has no buddha-nature” – you sent me a letter expressing your understanding. Though in the main your basis is already correct, you are not yet clear about the great dharma – this is a common disease of beginners entering the path.Old Shakyamuni Buddha said, “This way is all right, and not this way is all right too; this way or not this way, it’s all all right.” Just get the root, don’t worry about the branches. Over a long, long time it will sink in thoroughly: don’t worry that you won’t attain oneness. Work on it!I can see the difficulties Ta Hui is passing through. He can intellectually understand the path of awareness, he can also intellectually explain it to others – but he himself still remains only a philosopher. He has not transformed himself into a mystic.The philosopher talks about truth.The mystic is truth.And there is a profound difference between talking about it and being it.Certainly the people who have reached to the point of being truth itself also can talk, but their words vibrate on a totally different level, and it can be seen very clearly that they are not coming from the mind.They are coming from an absolute nothingness.They carry something of nothingness with them.You cannot grasp it but you can feel it…a very subtle fragrance…you cannot see it, but you can smell it. You may not be able to prove it, but you yourself know, it is absolutely certain.Ta Hui’s problem is that from the very beginning he has taken the standpoint of an intellectual. If he was just an ordinary intellectual, satisfied with his intellect and his conceptualizations, there would be no difficulty. But there is some part of him which does not simply want to live with borrowed knowledge. A part of him longs to realize and experience and know the mystery firsthand.This is his dilemma, and he is continuously moving from one part to another part. As we are going further into his sutras, I feel a hope that his mystical part is winning ground. His intellect is lagging behind – although it is not defeated yet. The first sutra:I am giving you the name Chan-Jan, “profound clarity.” a patriarch said, “As long as there is mental discrimination, and calculating judgment, all the perceptions of one’s own mind are dreams. If mind and consciousness are quiescent and extinct, without a single thought stirring, this is called correct awareness.”The first thing: clarity is always profound. There is no other way for clarity to be. “Profound clarity” does not make sense.It is just like somebody telling you, “I love you very, very much.” In fact, you cannot love less, and you cannot love more. Love does not belong to the world of quantity; hence ‘less’ and ‘more’ are irrelevant. You can either love, or not love. How can you love less, and how can you love more?Still people go on saying, “I love you very much,” not seeing the tremendous fallacy that love is a quality and not a quantity. A quality is either present or not present. More and less belong to the world of quantities.The English word matter and the French word meter come from the Sanskrit word matra, and matra means quantity. That which can be measured is matter – matter simply means measurable – and that which cannot be measured, that which is not within the territory of quantity, is consciousness.He’s saying, I am giving you the name Chan-Jan. He must be initiating somebody into sannyas and giving him the name Chan-Jan, which means “profound clarity.” But he does not understand that clarity is always profound; it is never less and never more. Nothing can be added to it, and nothing can be taken out of it.This is the problem with intellectual understanding. You seem to understand, and still you go on somewhere missing the point. The intellectuals try in every way to be as profound as the mystics, but their profundity is hilarious.I am reminded of an ancient parable.A great archer – he was also the king of his country – was going through a village in his golden chariot, and he was amazed to see that on every tree there was a target, and an arrow or many arrows exactly hitting the bull’s-eye. There was a circle, and the arrow was exactly in the middle; there was not a single miss, and on almost all the trees there were a few arrows. He could not believe that in this small village there was such a great archer.He stopped his chariot, and he inquired about the archer. The person he inquired of started laughing. He said, “He is an idiot! Don’t be worried about him.”But the king said, “You don’t understand. He may be an idiot – I’m not concerned with that – but he is a greater archer than me, that is certain. I would like to see him.”A crowd gathered, seeing the king, and they all laughed and said, “It is pointless. He is really a fool.”But the king could not understand how an idiot can manage such good shots, absolutely perfect, impeccable. He said, “Stop laughing and call the man!” A young man was brought to him; he looked stupid, retarded. The king was also puzzled. He asked the young man, “What is your secret?”The young man said, “What secret?”The king showed him that every arrow is exactly in the middle of a circle.The young man started laughing. He said, “I cannot lie to you. The truth is, first I shoot the arrow and then I draw the circle. Naturally, one hundred percent… It does not matter where the arrow goes; wherever it goes, I make the circle later on. Everybody who passes through this village is struck by the great art. I remain quiet, I never say the truth to anybody, but you are the king and I cannot lie to you.”This is really the situation of intellectuals. They are profound archers – but first they shoot the arrow and then they draw the target! Their work appears, to those who don’t know their way and their strategy, as perfect.Now, giving a disciple the name “profound clarity,” he cannot even think that he is doing something wrong. He does not know what clarity is, as an experience; otherwise he would never have given the name, “profound clarity.” Clarity is enough unto itself.A patriarch said, “As long as there is mental discrimination, and calculating judgment, all the perceptions of one’s own mind are dreams. If mind and consciousness are quiescent and extinct, without a single thought stirring, this is called correct awareness.”Whenever he quotes, almost always he is right, but only when it is a quotation. These are not his words. I am coming to his words, and then you will see how the intellectual falls far below the mystic and his experience. These are his words:These days there is a kind of phony, whose own standpoint is not genuine: they just teach people to control their minds and sit quietly, to sit to the point where the breath ceases. I call this lot, pitiable. And, I am asking you to meditate in just this way…– which he calls pitiable –…but though I instruct you like this, it is just that there is no other choice…Can you see the stupidity of our intellectual effort to understand that which is beyond? He is teaching the same kind of meditation to people – then it is right. And when others are teaching the same kind of meditation it is “pitiable”; these people are “phony.”It is so difficult to save him. In the first place, if this is the same meditation that he himself is giving to others, on what grounds is he calling others phony who are giving the same meditation? He has not made it clear in any way why they are phony, why they are not genuine – because their teaching of meditation is the same as his own.And secondly, he says, “I have to teach this way because…it is just that there is no other choice.” That too is absolutely wrong; there are hundreds of methods of meditation – but he has never meditated. But there is always in intellectuals a kind of rivalry, a kind of competition, a kind of jealousy.You must have seen dogs barking at each other for no reason at all; they just cannot resist the temptation. Once a dog sees another dog, then immediately they both start barking.I have heard a story about a dog… He used to live in Varanasi, the holy place of the Hindus. But everybody was going toward New Delhi, so he inquired, “What is the matter? Why is everybody going to New Delhi?” And he found out that those who were representatives of the people were going to Delhi to be members of the parliament. So he collected a great crowd of dogs – and he was a very big dog, and could bark better than anybody else – and naturally he was chosen the leader. He informed the dogs of Delhi beforehand, “I have been chosen from Varanasi, and I am coming. It will take almost one month because I will be walking from Varanasi to New Delhi” – but he reached in three days.The dogs of New Delhi were simply amazed. They could not believe that a journey of one month… “How did you manage to do it in three days?”He said, “You don’t know our people! The dogs would not let me rest anywhere. These three days I have been running non-stop. The dogs from one village would follow me barking, and by the time I reached into another village, another group of dogs would follow me. There was no time for anything – to rest or to sleep or to eat or to drink. All the way I have been running and running.”The dogs said, “This is one of our great qualities. It is said in our holy scriptures that intellectuals are born as dogs.” It is their old habit of barking at each other… Everything they have forgotten, but the barking has been their very soul.Now, as you can see, this man is calling others phony. I don’t know what word has been translated as phony. One thing is certain, at the time of Ta Hui China had no telephones… The word phony comes from telephone, because the voice on the telephone becomes unreal. It loses a living quality; hence the word phony. The word is not Chinese; the word is American – and in America, everything is phony.What word has been translated as phony? It must have been something like inauthentic, insincere. But to call others inauthentic, insincere, phony, not genuine, without giving any reason, because they are…teaching people to control their minds, and sit quietly. To sit to the point where the breath ceases. I call this lot pitiable. I am asking you to meditate in just this way, but though I instruct you like this, it is just that there is no other choice…If there is no other choice then why are you calling those poor people phony? They also don’t have any other choice.So the first thing: intellectuals have a very egoistic, quarrelsome attitude, always ready to start a battle of words. That is not right for a mystic.Secondly, the method that the people he calls phony are teaching is not a right method, but because he himself has never meditated, he does not understand what is right and what is wrong. The method these people are teaching – and he himself is teaching – is to control your mind.Meditation has nothing to do with controlling the mind – because every control is a kind of repression and that which is repressed will take its revenge. Whenever you relax a little, the mind that was in control will immediately come up and start, with vengeance, to stir up everything within you.Meditation is not control, because control creates tension and meditation is based on relaxation. Meditation has a few essential things in it, whatever the method. But those few essentials are necessary in every method.The first is a relaxed state: no fight with the mind, no control of the mind, no concentration.Second, just watching with a relaxed awareness whatever is going on, without any interference…just watching the mind, silently, without any judgment, any evaluation. These are the three things: relaxation, watching, no judgment.Slowly, slowly a great silence descends over you. All movement within you ceases. You are, but there is no sense of “I am”…just a pure space.There are one hundred and twelve methods of meditation; I have talked on all those methods. They differ in their constitution, but the fundamentals remain the same: relaxation, watchfulness, a non-judgmental attitude.So in the first place the method is wrong. He is teaching the same method, he says, “because there is no other choice.” He is not aware of a tremendous choice: one hundred and twelve methods which are as ancient as ten thousand years, at least.The first man to collect all those methods was Shiva, and his statues have been found in Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. These cities flourished seven thousand years ago. They must have been the most cultured cities of those days, because their roads were so wide; they had attached bathrooms, they had hot and cold running water in their bathrooms, and they had swimming pools as big as Olympic swimming pools.In those cities the only thing that we can recognize which still persists is the statue of Shiva – the Shivalinga, the phallic symbol of Shiva. That is the only thing that connects us with Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. Because of this the historians have concluded that Shiva was not an Aryan, because those cities existed before Aryans came into India.But Shiva has, in his book Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, one hundred and twelve methods of meditation. More methods can be created – I have created many more methods – just the essential ingredients should be there. You can change the device according to the times, according to individuals, but you cannot leave out these three things – relaxation, watchfulness and a non-judgmental attitude.So, in fact, just these three things are the only method of meditation; all others are variations of the same theme. Whatever Ta Hui has been teaching is wrong. The others must have been other intellectuals, other teachers, whom he is calling phony, and he cannot see a simple thing: how can you call them phony and pitiable if your teaching also is of the same method?And he is not aware that there are many alternatives – he has never meditated. One does not have to know Shiva’s Vigyan Bhairav Tantra. If one meditates just with these three essentials, he can create as many methods for different situations, different people, as he likes. But one should have his own experience. And to condemn others who are doing the same thing, he must be utterly blind. He cannot see what he is saying.Buddhist disciple Ch’en, you have realized that personal existence is false, and that things are illusory. Amid illusory falsehood you were able to contemplate the saying “a dog has no buddha-nature” – you sent me a letter expressing your understanding. Though in the main your basis is already correct, you are not yet clear about the great dharma – this is a common disease of beginners entering the path.This is an old statement of Lin Chi and of other Zen masters, and there is a possibility it may be from the times of Gautam Buddha himself. It has been asked down the ages by the disciples…because Buddhism says that every living being has a buddha-nature; every living being can become a buddha. Naturally, the question arises, does a dog also have buddha-nature? All the great masters have said yes, and those who have said no, don’t understand at all.It is something to be pondered over. Why should a dog not have a buddha-nature? If every living being has buddha-nature, why should dogs be such exceptional beings? Just because in your minds the very word dog is condemned, you cannot think that a dog can have a buddha-nature – “My God, then what is the point of having a buddha-nature? Even a dog can have it. It is not worth bothering! Years of meditation, long pilgrimages, and finally what you attain is just a dog’s nature.” Naturally those who don’t understand have immediately said no – and Ta Hui agrees with those people who say no.But in fact a dog is just a god spelt wrongly. I for one am absolutely ready to say yes, a dog has as much potential to be a buddha as Gautam Buddha himself. There is no question why poor dogs should be left out, when all beings – donkeys and monkeys and even Yankees – all are included. The dog is a poor animal, innocent. There is nothing wrong in the dog. Perhaps he has to travel a long way to become a buddha, but it is only a question of time. Some day a dog is also going to become enlightened. In some birth, somewhere in the future…You should understand it clearly that in the eternity of time it does not matter whether you become enlightened today, or tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, in this life or in another life. In the eternity of time it does not matter at all. In the eternity of time nobody is ahead and nobody is behind, because there is no beginning in time and there is no end in time.So whenever you become enlightened you are always a contemporary of all the buddhas. They may have become enlightened thousands of years before. If you become enlightened today, suddenly you will find you are raised to a different scale of time, where you are a contemporary of all the buddhas, past, present, and future. So a man who has tasted awakening will not deny to dogs their intrinsic treasure. They are living beings.Old Shakyamuni Buddha said, “This way is all right, and not this way is all right too; this way or not this way, it is all all right.” Just get the root, don’t worry about the branches. Over a long, long time it will sink in thoroughly: don’t worry that you won’t attain oneness. Work on it!He calls this kind of question – whether a dog has buddha-nature or not – a common disease of beginners entering the path. It is natural human curiosity. But at least somebody has entered the path. Such questions don’t mean anything to those who have not entered the path at all. It is not a disease; it is simply a curiosity.If all living beings are intrinsically as capable of awakening as human, it simply makes existence truly communist. As far as I am concerned, I think communism is right only when it is concerned with the ultimate nature of beings. Only in that ultimate stage is there equality. Before that, communism is a utopia and is never going to be fulfilled.Only two buddhas are equal, but ignorant people cannot be equal. Ignorant people are psychologically unequal; hence the whole idea of Karl Marx and his followers that man is equal is psychologically wrong.No two men are equal. They have all the differences that you can conceive, and to force them into equality you will have to destroy democracy, you will have to destroy freedom, you will have to destroy freedom of expression, you will have to destroy people’s individuality, their dignity of being human, their very pride. It is a very strange kind of equality. Everybody is bulldozed, and everybody becomes equal!There was one king in Greece who was a little cuckoo. He had made a beautiful golden bed in a special guesthouse, a great palace. Only a few guests ever stayed in his guesthouse, and they never came out alive because the trouble with the king was that the guest had to fit with the bed. If he was a little long, then his legs or his head had to be cut to size. Or if he was a little short, then traction – he had to be pulled from both ends; the king had four wrestlers practicing traction. But anyway he was going to be killed. In traction his head would be pulled out, because they were pulling his head to make him the size of the bed, or his legs may be pulled out.The king believed in the holy scriptures of the whole world: they all suggest that man is made for them, not that they are made for man. His bed was not made for man, every guest has to fit with the bed. As the rumor reached to other friends, other kings, nobody accepted his invitation. He was continuously inviting guests, but nobody was ready to come because anybody who ever went never came back again: what happened to the guests? In fact the king was practicing a sort of communism, making everybody of equal size. And that’s what has happened in the Soviet Union for seventy years.Just seventy years ago, before the revolution, Russia was one of the giant countries; it had given birth to a great line of geniuses. In seventy years they have not been able to create a single genius of the quality of Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Turgenev, not a single man in seventy years. All these five men existed before the revolution, and Maxim Gorky even remained alive after the revolution for a few years.If you want to choose the names of the ten great novelists of the whole world, of all languages, these five will be absolutely there. You cannot leave a single one of them out of a list of ten: the rest of the world will have only five places, and five places will be given to the Russians. Still those five from the rest of the world will not be really comparable to the greatness of the Russian novelists. What happened?After the revolution, everybody was cut to size. Mind is no longer free. You cannot say anything that is not approved by the government, you cannot write anything that is not approved by the government. There is no freedom of thought. There is no individual expression in anything. Everything has become uniform – people have disappeared. Only a crowd exists, only numbers, not individuals.When Khrushchev came into power and was addressing his first meeting of the communist party, he exposed Joseph Stalin, saying that he had killed almost one million people after the revolution. Anybody who was trying to be himself and was not willing to become a cog in the wheel was immediately killed…In Russia you are not allowed to have any opinion of your own. For everything you have to depend on the government, and the whole country has become a concentration camp, no democracy. The press, the radio, the television, everything belongs to the government. You cannot get information which the government does not release. The Soviet Union lives almost in darkness about the whole world, what is going on in the world. And the Soviet Union is not a small country; it is one sixth of the land of the whole world.Khrushchev addressed the first meeting and exposed how brutal, murderous, Joseph Stalin had been. In the name of communism he had killed all the genius of the people, he had reduced everybody to equal poverty. Certainly there has come a certain equality: everybody is equally poor. Everybody is equally suppressed. Everybody is equally enslaved. Everybody is equally trembling with fear. Any moment and death can knock on the door…. In Russia, the name of death is KGB.When Khrushchev was telling this to the Communist party, one man from the back said, “You have been a colleague of Joseph Stalin his whole life. Why did you not object?”There was a great silence. For a moment Khrushchev looked at the place from where the voice had come, and he said, “Comrade, please just stand up so I can see you better.” Nobody stood. He again said, “Just stand up so I can see who is asking the question.”Three times he asked. Nobody stood, and nobody asked the question again. He said, “Now do you understand why I was silent? Why are you silent? – because if you stand up, you are finished. I remained silent because I wanted to be alive.” To create equality, all human values have been destroyed.No…as far as man is concerned, man needs freedom to be unequal, equal opportunity to be unequal. Opportunity should be given equally to all, but opportunities to grow in their uniqueness, in their own individuality: in short, opportunities to be unequal, but equal opportunities.Only when people become enlightened, when there is nothing but a pure consciousness, is communism possible; otherwise that day is just a utopia.The word utopia is very beautiful. It means that which never comes. Only in enlightenment is there a possibility of equality, and to the enlightened person all beings – they may not be enlightened now – are going to be enlightened someday. So intrinsically, every being – every living being, the trees are included – wherever there is life in any form, they are all on the way, moving, evolving, going higher. And the goal is the same: to become awakened, to become absolute purity, consciousness, blissfulness, ecstasy. So it is not a disease to ask such a question. It is absolutely natural curiosity.I am a communist as far as man’s intrinsic potential is concerned, and I am not a communist as far as man’s actuality is concerned. He should be given every support, every opportunity to grow in his own way. A forced equality is destructive, destructive of all that is valuable. There should be big trees, tall trees reaching to the stars, and there should be small bushes; they both enrich existence. There should be lotuses and there should be roses and there should be marigolds. The variety, the difference, the inequality makes life richer, makes life more livable, lovable.Just think, if everybody goes through plastic surgery and has the same kind of nose – equal noses – has the same kind of eyes, has the same kind of faces, it will be so boring that people will start walking with closed eyes, tired of seeing the same noses and same eyes and same faces. It will be the most hellish world possible. It is beautiful that there are long noses and short noses, and they come in all sizes and all shapes.Inequality in humanity is a psychological truth.Equality is a spiritual truth.One should not get mixed up.A dog has a buddha-nature, just as anybody else has. It is not the disease of a beginner entering the path. It is purely a human curiosity, whether all living beings have the same potential to blossom into the ultimate ecstasy that only very few people – a Gautam Buddha, a Lao Tzu, a Zarathustra – have achieved. I consider it absolutely normal, not a disease.Ta Hui quotes Gautam Buddha, which needs some explanation because you will not understand it. And I don’t think Ta Hui understands it, because he gives no explanation about it.Old Shakyamuni Buddha said, “This way is all right, and not this way is all right too; this way or not this way, it is all all right.”He does not explain why he is quoting this statement. He is simply throwing names, quotations, which is one of the strategies of intellectuals to show their knowledgeability. But I don’t think he understands even the meaning of it, because it is one of the most difficult things to understand.Aristotle is said to be the father of Western logic. His logic is the simplest logic: Black is black, white is white; yes means yes, no means no – a clear-cut division. It is called twofold logic. Gautam Buddha believed – and I think he has far greater insight than Aristotle – in a threefold logic. And if you can understand his threefold logic, only then will this statement become clear to you.For example, if somebody asked Gautam Buddha, “Does God exist?”, according to his threefold logic he will answer, “Yes, God exists. No, God does not exist. Yes and no both: God exists, God does not exist.” Aristotle’s logic is twofold: either God exists, or God does not exist. There is no question of the third possibility, that both may be right.In a certain sense, from a certain angle, it may be said with absolute truthfulness that God exists, for example if you mean that existence is intelligent, that existence is not material, that existence is basically made of consciousness and even matter is only a form of sleeping consciousness – consciousness in coma. If you can mean by God, “universal consciousness,” he exists. But you may mean by God, “a person who created the world”; then God does not exist.But it is possible to conceive of God as consciousness, and also not as a creator, but as the very creativity of existence. It all depends on us and what we mean by God, because God is only a hypothesis, a word; the meaning has to be given by us. If God is not a creator and a person but the very phenomenon of creativity and consciousness, then both are right: God exists and God does not exist.This was the threefold logic. And Gautam Buddha is going to win the future world over to threefold logic. Aristotle is already out of date. But Gautam Buddha’s contemporary, Mahavira, has a sevenfold logic, and he is going to be the ultimate winner as far as logic is concerned because he has gone to all the possible alternatives. These three alternatives are not all the possibilities. For example, Mahavira’s fourth alternative is: perhaps God is not. And the fifth: perhaps God exists and is indefinable; he brings indefinability as the fifth alternative. And the sixth: perhaps God is not, and is still indefinable. And the seventh: perhaps nothing can be said, only that it is indefinable. He has covered all the possibilities and interpretations. Even Gautam Buddha avoided going that far; he remained within comprehensible limits. Now, seeing his statement, you can understand it. Old Shakyamuni Buddha said, “This way is all right, and not this way is all right too; this way or not this way, it is all all right.”Three statements…it makes experience more mysterious. Aristotle demystifies existence. Just dividing it into life and death, into day and night, into right and wrong, into good and bad, into God and Devil is a little childish, a little retarded. Life is more complex than that. He is only taking the two extremes, and he is forgetting the middle point.Buddha has called his way the middle way, so he has to take into account the exact middle point where the opposites meet, where contradictions dissolve into each other and become complementaries. Then it becomes a threefold logic: two extremes and one where extremes merge and melt into oneness. His approach is not only more mystical, it is more scientific too.Modern physics is coming closer to Gautam Buddha and completely abandoning Aristotle. And with Aristotle is also abandoned Euclidean geometry, because that was a by-product of Aristotelian logic. So Aristotle and Euclid have reigned for two thousand years in the West, but modern physics finds that things are more complicated than Aristotle and Euclid thought. Gautam Buddha perhaps is closer to reality because he is taking a more mysterious approach. He is broadening our perception of reality.My own feeling is that ultimately modern physics will have to accept not only Gautam Buddha but Mahavira, because his sevenfold logic is absolutely complete. You cannot add anything more. There cannot be eightfold logic; with seven possibilities, all have been covered. Nothing has been left out, everything has been taken in; it is all-inclusive. Mahavira has been accepted – without scientists even knowing that they are accepting a certain man who lived twenty-five centuries before, a contemporary of Gautam Buddha – because he preached the theory of relativity. Mahavira was the first man to preach the theory of relativity.Albert Einstein would have been immensely happy if somebody had introduced him to Mahavira’s theory of relativity. It is not about physics, it is about human consciousness, but it is the same standpoint. And Albert Einstein would have danced if he had heard the sevenfold logic of Mahavira because he was finding so much difficulty with Aristotle. Reality was big, and logic was smaller; it was not able to help in any way to further research going deeper into matter and energy. It was good for day-to-day work in the marketplace, but it was not good enough for deeper realms.But I think Ta Hui has not got any idea why he has quoted this statement…perhaps just to mystify people, just to pretend that he understands this strange logic of threefoldness, because he does not say anything about it. It is out of context. Anything said must have some meaning, some relationship. It is neither related to the previous sutra, nor is it related to the succeeding sutra. He has just inserted it.My feeling is: he simply wants to mystify people, pretending that he knows great things that they cannot understand. It is one of the significant things to understand about man that whatever he cannot understand he thinks must be right. Because of this, philosophers have been writing in such a way that you will go on reading big phrases, long phrases, long sentences, big paragraphs – so big that by the time you come to the end of the paragraph, you have forgotten the beginning.For example, the German philosopher Hegel was a master in mystifying absolutely nonsensical things, and his whole strategy was just to write big words, pompous, bombastic. A single sentence would run the whole page, and by the time you come to the end of the sentence you don’t have any idea what was in the beginning, what was in the middle….Hegel was thought to be a great philosopher – till he was understood! When he was understood, he was put aside as just a tricky fellow, who was only trying to mystify people. And he had succeeded. At least in his life, he enjoyed the idea of being a great philosopher. Only after his death slowly, slowly scholars looked into it and found that he says nothing. He says so much, but if you condense it, your hands are empty. There is nothing in it.Whenever I have thought about Hegel, I have always remembered a man in my village…He was almost a nutcase; he had crammed the whole Oxford dictionary, and he used to write letters to the president, to the prime minister, to the governor. He was living just near my house.Once in a while he used to come to me to show me his letters – twenty pages, thirty pages, fifty foolscap pages typed out, but not a single sentence making any sense. He knew nothing about language; he knew everything about the dictionary, and that was the trouble. He would simply go on writing big words; it made no sense at all.He was torturing me, so I said, “You do one thing. I don’t have much time and your letters are too long, and it will be helpful also because this big letter the President is not going to read. So with the letter you should write a small summary, just ten lines, twelve lines at the most.”He said, “That’s a good idea. I will write the summary. That is not a problem.”So he went to write the summary, but he left the letter with me. I was surprised; this is something strange, how is he going to write the summary? There was no problem for him; the dictionary was with him…so another ten lines of absolute absurdity. I said, “This is perfectly good. This explains everything! And I can say to you that this much the president is going to read. Twenty pages is too much. You write such great philosophy.”But nobody was answering his letters. He would come to me saying, “Now one month has passed and no answer, not even a receipt that they have received my letter! And I had been working so hard.”I said to him, “I don’t think these politicians have intelligence enough to understand your great philosophy.”He said, “That is right. You are the only man who understands me. Nobody seems to understand.”Every day he was going to the collectorate with a new letter and the collector was tired. One day the collector met me in the library and he said, “Can’t you stop this man? I never read any of his letters, but even to keep them on the table is a torture. One feels inside one’s stomach some disturbance; just to read two or three lines is enough to drive anybody crazy.”I said, “It is very difficult to stop him, because I am the only man who understands him. If you have any difficulty, I can tell him, and he can explain.”He said, “I don’t want you to mention it to him at all! He will come with a bigger explanation.”Once in a while I used to go to my town, and he used to wait for me. I loved the man. He was crazy, but very nice and very sweet and absolutely harmless. I told him, “You have done only one thing wrong.”He said, “What?”I said, “You should have been born in Germany, and you would have been known in history as a great philosopher. I have studied all those great German philosophers; they are all nutcases!”One man who was thought to be one of the greatest German philosophers of this century, Martin Heidegger, started many books, but he never completed any because by the time he was half-way, he had forgotten what he had written. So the first volume would be published, and people would be waiting for the second volume; it never came.This went on happening his whole life; he never completed any book. When asked, he said, “The reality is, I myself forget what I have been writing. It is so complicated that it is better to start a new book rather than to read the old one. Let others read…I don’t want to get involved in it.” It will be a great entertainment to you if you read something of Martin Heidegger.And this shows his great “intelligence”: he was a follower of Adolf Hitler, who was certainly a madman! The greatest philosopher follows an idiot…it does not show anything about Adolf Hitler, but it shows something about Martin Heidegger! I have gone through all his works. In the end your hands are empty. You don’t get anything of what he wants to say, why he wants to say it. Why all this long process of gymnastics without any conclusion? But these people have been impressing the common masses.My understanding is that whatever people cannot understand they think must be great. Because we cannot understand, naturally it has to be something very miraculous, very mysterious. But the truth is always simple: it is mysterious because it is simple.The truth is always obvious.It is miraculous because it is obvious, not because it is complex, not because it is far away. It is so close that you tend to forget it. It is within you, so you don’t even bother to look at it.Truth is simple, obvious, uncomplicated. All that it needs is just a silent awareness, and a great understanding descends on you, an understanding that does not become knowledge, an understanding that deepens your innocence and that deepens the mystery of life.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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See The Tathagata EverywhereWhere do we come from at birth? Were do we go at death? If you know where we come from and where we go, then you can be called a student of Buddha.Who is it who knows of birth and death? And who is it who experiences birth and death? Again: who is it who doesn’t know where we come from and where we go? Who is it who suddenly realizes where he comes from and where he goes to? And who is it who, contemplating these words, blinks his eyes unable to understand, his belly churning up and down, as if a mass of fire were placed in his heart? If you want to know, just apprehend him at the point where he can’t understand. If you can recognize him then, you’ll know that birth and death surely have nothing to do with him.Whenever you’re reading the scriptures or the stories of the ancient worthies entering the path, when your mind doesn’t understand clearly, and it seems bewildering and stifling and flavorless – as if you’re gnawing on an iron spike – this is just the time to apply effort: above all you must not give up. This is the place where conceptual knowledge doesn’t operate, where thought doesn’t reach, where discrimination is cut off, and the path of reason is annihilated. Where you can always explain reasons and apply discrimination. This all pertains to emotional consciousness. Time and again people take this thief as their son. Don’t be unaware of this!Ta Hui seems to come very close to the truth but somehow goes on missing it. In this sutra the beginning part is immensely important because it is not a quotation. He is speaking himself. And what he is saying is one of the most ancient meditations, one which has helped many on the path to the final arrival, to the very peak of their consciousness.Where do we come from at birth?It has not to be asked verbally; verbally it is meaningless, but if you feel existentially… We are here; certainly we must have come from somewhere, and certainly we are going somewhere. It is absolutely certain, the coming and going. If it becomes something like a thirst in the very fibers of your being, if every cell within you becomes a question mark, then this meditation works.Where do we come from at birth? Where do we go at death? If you know where we come from and where we go, then you can be called a– disciple –of Buddha.I will not use the word student; it is too ordinary and has implications of only an intellectual approach. A disciple uses his whole being to approach the ultimate questions of life. A disciple is interested only in realization, not in just knowing about it. The student is interested in knowing about it. And these are very diverse interests. Knowing about it is one thing, but knowing it, not about it…the word about means around and around but never coming to the point.I used to know an old man, Mahatma Bhagwandin. Only two persons were recognized in India as mahatmas, great souls: Mahatma Gandhi and Mahatma Bhagwandin. Mahatma Bhagwandin met me just by coincidence, and he started feeling something for me, so whenever he was moving from my city to somewhere else he would make it a point to stay with me for at least one day, two days, three days, as much as he could afford.He was an old man, a very beautiful man, and I have never come across a man who was more knowledgeable. It seemed he was almost a walking Encyclopedia Britannica. You ask anything and he knows. I have never heard him saying, “I don’t know.” And I have found that what he says is always right – and about strange things with which he has no concern. I used to go with him every day for a walk in the morning and he would tell me about the Latin names of the trees. He knew so much about everything…as if his whole life had been nothing but collecting information.One day I told Mahatma Bhagwandin, “You know all the Latin names of all the trees that we pass but I don’t think you know yourself.” He was shocked but he was a very patient man and he tried to understand why I said that.I said, “You are like a walking Encyclopedia Britannica, but nobody has ever heard that an Encyclopedia Britannica has become enlightened. There is no possibility. You know everything, but I suspect that this is a way to avoid knowing yourself.”He remained silent. He didn’t say anything. We reached home, he took his bath, and after his bath he said, “You are right. But now tell me how to forget all this knowledge.”I said, “There is no need to forget it. Just don’t go on bragging about it, bringing it up again and again, telling it to people. Don’t be an exhibitionist. And the whole energy that you have been pouring into collecting information is enough to bring a transformation to your life.“Only two questions are important: ‘From where do you come, and where are you going?’ Why are these two questions important? – because they will make you aware of your inner being which travels from birth to birth in new lives. And once you have become alert about that greatest phenomenon in life, your own being, then whether or not you know anything else does not matter.”Then for many years I had no chance to see him. I was lecturing at the University of Nagpur, and somebody who knew me and knew Mahatma Bhagwandin told me, “He is here and he is very sick. There is every possibility he will not survive.” So after the lecture I rushed to his place. I could not believe my eyes! He had been a very healthy man, and it had been only four or five years that I had not seen him. And now he was just a skeleton, continuously coughing. Even to talk was difficult for him. That coughing was so continuous…the moment he said something, in the middle of the sentence he would start coughing.I said, “You need not say anything.”But he insisted, “No, I have to talk because I am not going to survive and I am immensely sad that I could not do what you had told me. And now I realize all my knowledge has been futile; it doesn’t help. I am dying as ignorant as I was born.”I said, “This too is a great achievement: that you are dying innocent and fully aware that knowledge is useless. And still there is time…because you are still alive. It may take a few days or maybe a few months…nobody knows. Why don’t you begin to meditate on the same point which is coming closer every moment: Where are you going? From where have you come? And who are you?”He said with tears in his eyes, “I will do it.”I had to leave, so I left him. Just after three days he died. But his friend, Poonam Chand Ranka, with whom he was staying, informed me, “You will be immensely happy that he managed. He died not coughing, but laughing.” And this was his last message to me: that he knows from where he is coming and to where he is going and who this fellow is who is traveling. He has recognized him. He is dying with great joy. At his death he was suffering very much, but he died laughing, smiling. The body suffered, and the mind knew that the body was suffering, but because he had understood the innermost core of his being, it did not matter at all. He knew now that his life source is eternal.This meditation which Ta Hui is mentioning is one of the oldest. He is just using a wrong word: student. He should use the word disciple. The student simply remains concerned with words, theories, philosophies. The disciple is more involved; he wants to know with his own eyes, he wants to experience with his own heart.And who is it who knows of birth and death?That is the central point in the meditation. Birth and death are simply devices, because neither birth is true nor death is true. We have been before birth, so how can birth be true? And we will be after death, so how can death be true? Only one thing is true: the consciousness that comes with you through birth and goes with you through death – perhaps birth is a door, and death too! Perhaps they are the same door, just your direction is different. When you enter this door into life your direction is toward life, and when you leave life you go through the same door, only your direction is outward. There is no need for two doors; one door will do perfectly well. When you enter this door you read the word push, and when you go out the same door, from the other side, only the word changes: pull.But the real thing is: Who is to push and who is to pull?Who is it who knows of birth and death and who is it who experiences birth and death? Again: who is it who does not know where we come from and where we go?It is the same being. Awakened it knows, asleep it does not know.Who is it who suddenly realizes where he comes from and where he goes to?Here he comes very close to the reality of enlightenment, because enlightenment is always sudden. You may have been preparing for it for years, but in those years you were not enlightened; it was not that slowly, slowly you were becoming enlightened. The preparation may be long, of many lives, but when you become enlightened it is just in a single moment. It is always sudden. One moment you were ignorant; the next moment you are laughing hilariously…seeing that, “I am the same person who had been going through all kinds of sufferings, nightmares, worries, humiliations, failures, and now suddenly I am out of it all, as if by magic all the clouds have disappeared and the sun is shining bright.”There are two schools in Zen. One is called the gradual school and the other the sudden school. The gradual school has a little misunderstanding of the point; otherwise nothing is wrong. They include in enlightenment the period of preparation, the period of wanderings – as if all those wanderings have helped, as if they were the cause of enlightenment. They recognize that enlightenment happens suddenly, but that this suddenness has been earned through lives of discipline, meditation, and virtue, so they include the preparation period. Hence they insist it is gradual.But the word gradual is not right for it, because gradual enlightenment immediately gives the sense that you get it in installments: one part and then after a few years another part…and slowly gathering all these parts, one day you have the whole enlightenment.I don’t agree with the gradual idea.Enlightenment is sudden.Preparation for it may take lives or may not take lives – it depends on you. If you are authentically interested in being enlightened it can happen without any preparation, because your inner being is already enlightened – it is just a point of turning in.I had one colleague in the university who was very much curious about enlightenment. Even while I was teaching in the university I was moving around the country, finding people who can belong with me one day…but his interest in enlightenment was only that of a student. One day he came to me and I said, “This day is very special.”He asked, “What do you mean?”I said, “Today, if you want to be enlightened, I can manage it.”He looked worried. He said, “But I have a wife and children….”I said, “Enlightenment does not prohibit you from having a wife or children.”He said, “If this is a day of such a strange quality I should come on some other day.”But I asked, “What about enlightenment?”He said, “Forgive me, I am only curious. I love you and I feel to be close to you, but enlightenment right now…? There are so many things to be done, and moreover do you think as a buddha I will look adequate?”I said, “You don’t be worried about it. Enlightenment has nothing to do with whether you look like a buddha or not. Certainly you will be a special buddha.” He had very strange eyes – one looking this way, one looking that way. I said, “Don’t be worried because I don’t think that is a hindrance for enlightenment. It will be really very hilarious for people to see a buddha…” If he was talking to you he was looking another way. I said, “It will be a little strange when you are delivering sermons, but your eyes can be fixed. You don’t be worried; that is my responsibility. First you become enlightened.”He said, “It is not only eyes. There are many things…I have false teeth. Do you think it will look right for a buddha to have false teeth? And if somebody comes to know…?”I said, “You don’t be worried about these trivia.”But he stood up. He said, “I am going home. First I have to ask my wife. I never do such strange things without asking her; she is a very pragmatic woman.”I said, “It is up to you, but it has never happened in the whole history that somebody who becomes enlightened first asks the permission of his wife. You become enlightened; then you simply go and declare your enlightenment.”He said, “At least give me some time to think.”Then I said, “But such a day may not come again so soon. Today everything is ready.”He said, “I can wait. It will do even if it comes two or three years later.”And from that day he started avoiding me. If I was sitting in the common room he would not enter. He made sure that I was not in the university; then he would move everywhere freely. He would make sure that I was not in the library; then he would go to the library.One day I arrived at his home. I said, “The day has come again.”He said, “My God, I have been avoiding you all this time, and just within three months the day has come again? My wife is absolutely against it!”And then his wife came out and she said, “You should not make him enlightened. He is already a trouble, a nuisance. If he becomes enlightened our whole family’s life will be disturbed. Even in his ignorance he is not what a husband should be and if he becomes enlightened I can visualize troubles and more troubles. You just leave him alone! He has been avoiding you for three months because of my advice. Now this is too much that you have started coming to our house.”And you will not believe that the next day he went to the capital and got himself transferred from that university to another university. After two or three days – I had been looking for him – I went again to his home and the neighbor said, “They are gone!”I asked, “What was the problem?”He said, “You were the problem.”I said, “I was simply trying to make him enlightened.”Enlightenment is such a simple thing that nobody needs to be worried about it. But it has become such… Down the ages religions have been insisting that it is a very great phenomenon; it is not for ordinary mortals, it is only for those who have some special dispensation from God. Ordinary mortals should not try for it because that is trying for the impossible. It is good for a Gautam Buddha because he is an incarnation of God. It is good for Krishna because he is an incarnation of God, but ordinary people are not incarnations of God.And I have been arguing my whole life with people that Gautam Buddha was not an incarnation of God before he became enlightened. Enlightenment came to him first; then you recognized him as an incarnation of God. Neither was Krishna accepted as an incarnation of God until he became enlightened. So your whole logic is false. You try to be enlightened and then people will accept you as a reincarnation of God.If you remain with the idea that it is impossible for you, certainly it is impossible; otherwise it is your intrinsic nature. And because it is your intrinsic nature, its experience can be sudden, without any preparation. Preparation is needed for something which is not your nature. Preparation means nurture, education.Enlightenment is your nature.You are already enlightened; you just don’t know. All that is needed is a simple insight inward.Ta Hui is right when he says,Who is it who suddenly realizes where he comes from and where he goes to? And who is it who, contemplating these words, blinks his eyes unable to understand, his belly churning up and down, as if a mass of fire were placed in his heart? If you want to know, just apprehend him at the point where he can’t understand.This is so pregnant a sentence, you should not forget it. Ta Hui has not been able to make many pregnant statements; he only quotes. But in this sutra he is not quoting at all. It seems something has transpired; it seems he has had a glimpse, because what he is saying can be said only by a man who has at least had a glimpse. He may not be enlightened yet, but certainly he has seen something beyond the mind.I repeat the sentence because it is very important: If you want to know, just apprehend him at the point where he can’t understand.Mind stops when it can’t understand something. That is the whole art of the koan – given an absurd puzzle, you turn and toss and you find this answer and that answer, and everything is wrong from the very beginning because the puzzle is not intrinsically solvable.I have heard about a man who was purchasing toys for his children. He was a great mathematician and he became interested in a jigsaw puzzle. It was meant for small children, but he tried to fix it this way and that way and he failed. He could not believe…if a mathematician of his caliber cannot fix the puzzle, how are small children going to do it? He asked the shopkeeper, who was watching and laughing, “Why are you laughing? And what kind of toy have you produced? I am a professor of mathematics and I cannot solve it. How will my small children solve it?”And the shopkeeper said, “That’s why I am laughing – because this puzzle is not meant to be solved. It is a training for children for their coming life – that life is a puzzle with no solution. So it is just preparing them: ‘Don’t get frustrated if you cannot solve it. You will be facing your life in a thousand ways and you will be amid many problems which you cannot solve.’”Have you ever looked? Have you solved your problem of love? Have you solved your problem of silence, peace? Have you solved your problem of putting the mind aside, just to have a weekend without the mind? Have you solved in any way how to be non-tense – at least for a few minutes every day, how to be without thoughts for a few minutes every day?What have you solved? You are simply living with all your unsolved problems, which go on becoming more and more of a burden to you. By the time of your death you will be burdened with mountains of unsolved problems.The man who created that jigsaw puzzle had some insight.Ta Hui is saying, “The moment the mind cannot understand something, naturally it goes beyond it. It stops, not knowing what to do! This is a great point, because you can apprehend something that is beyond the mind. Because the mind has stopped all its noise for a moment – its continuous turmoil is no longer there – you may have a little glimpse into your authentic being.I say this is a very pregnant statement by a man who has been up to now simply intellectualizing, philosophizing. For the first time he has come close to meditation, although it is only a very small glimpse – but meditation as a glimpse is a great beginning. You have got the seed, now it can grow. Just give it the right soil and as soon as the spring comes you will have flowers dancing in the air, you will have flowers dancing within your being.If you can recognize him then, you will know that birth and death surely have nothing to do with him.If you can have just a glimpse of yourself you will know you have never been born and you have never died. Yes, birth and death have been happening around you but not to you. The body was dying, the mind was dying; the body was being born, the mind was being born again, but you have remained eternally the same.Whenever you are reading the scriptures or the stories of the ancient worthies entering the path, when your mind does not understand clearly, and it seems bewildering and stifling and flavorless – as if you are gnawing on an iron spike – this is just the time to apply effort…This is the time to make the effort to wake up, a great opportunity.…above all you must not give up.This is the moment…make the effort to wake up. Above all don’t give up because such moments rarely come. They come only when you encounter something which is too big for your mind. The mind remains in a kind of awe. This gives you a small window, a small opening, to see beyond the mind. Make every effort and don’t give up!This is the place where conceptual knowledge does not operate, where thought does not reach…This is the first time he is talking about thoughtlessness, transcendence of conceptual knowledge……where discrimination is cut off, and the path of reason is annihilated.It is for the first time in all these sutras that he is taking a quantum jump from reason to a world of mystery.Where you can always explain reasons and apply discrimination. This all pertains to emotional consciousness. Time and again people take this thief as their son. Don’t be unaware of this!Whenever you can explain things, whenever you can give reasons, whenever you feel at ease…this is a dangerous time. Whenever just the opposite happens – mind feels absolutely uncomfortable; something which it cannot comprehend is standing in front of it – it naturally stops. There is no reason for thinking, for rationalization, for explanations; the thing is too big and the mind realizes for the first time its smallness.Hence Ta Hui’s suggestion: Where you can always explain reasons and apply discrimination. This all pertains to emotional consciousness. Time and again people take this thief as their son. Don’t be unaware of this!Up to now he himself has been doing the same – accepting this thief as his son.But some change has happened. One never knows when it will happen. It suddenly comes like a breeze and you feel cool, you feel fresh, you feel younger. All staleness disappears. So even the people who are only intellectually interested in Zen are always in danger: the danger is that their intellectual interest may turn at any moment into an existential longing to experience.Gautam Buddha has a statement: “Don’t prevent people from reading scriptures; don’t prevent people from listening to teachers who don’t know anything, because sometimes it has happened that the teacher was only a teacher but the disciple turned out to be a master.”There is a beautiful story about one Tibetan monk, Marpa. Tibet has known only two great monks – Marpa and Milarepa. Milarepa is already here; Marpa will be coming sooner or later! There was a great teacher with profound knowledge but no experience. He had thousands of students around him. He was influential.Marpa was in search of a master. Seeing that so many people were around this man – he was the most celebrated teacher of those days…Marpa was a very simple man. He went and surrendered himself at the master’s feet and said, “I have come here. Now it is up to you; whatever you want to make of me you can make. I will not have my own will other than you, and I will not have any thought other than you. I will not have my life in any way separate from you; I want to be just a shadow to you.” Among thousands of disciples, the teacher became even more egoistic. When Marpa said this he initiated him into sannyas.Marpa was immensely innocent and trusting. Just within a few days there was great trouble. Sannyasins saw him jumping from high mountains into the valley. They had to go down and it took hours to reach him. He would simply take a jump. It was almost impossible to survive that jump. But they always found – after three hours going round and round down the mountain – that when they reached the valley he was sitting under a tree, unscratched. They could not believe it: “What kind of man is this?” And they became jealous also. They started reporting to the teacher: “This Marpa is not good to keep around. He is trying to influence your students; many have become his disciples. Soon everybody will desert you if you don’t throw him out.”The teacher said, “But what is the quality in him that people are so much interested in him?”And they said, “Quality? He is a miracle. He goes through fire and he is not burned. He sits naked when the snow is falling and it seems he does not feel the cold. He jumps from mountains thousands of feet high into the valley. Just to go into the city for begging we have to take a three hour route; coming and going it means six hours just for one meal. The whole day is lost. And that fellow does it within minutes! And yesterday it was too much: he was walking on water!”The master…the teacher said, “Call him!” And he asked Marpa, “What is your secret?”Marpa said, “My secret? I am just your shadow. Your name is my secret. Whenever I want to do something I simply take your name and pray to you: ‘Protect me’ – and then I simply do it. Just by taking your name I can walk on the rivers, I can jump from the highest mountains, I can pass through fire – nothing is impossible. You are so great; just your name is enough!”The teacher thought to himself: “If my name can do such miracles I must be a fool that I have never tried doing miracles myself. I could have been the greatest master in the whole of Tibet.” So he said, “That’s very good. You have got the right secret.” And he told all the disciples, “This is what trust is.”And he tried to walk on water himself. When his name is enough…of course, for him, walking on water would not be a problem. But just as he took a step he started drowning. Marpa had to jump in and pull him out.And the teacher said, “This is strange – that my name is working and I myself am drowning.”Marpa said, “You have destroyed everything. Now your name will not work. It was not your name – it was my trust. And now seeing you drowning, how can I trust in your name? You have destroyed my innocence. I had come here to learn to be more trusting, to be more innocent. Rather than being a help, you have almost destroyed all my hope.”But Marpa became a great master. His teacher’s name is not known. Marpa managed to transform the whole of Tibet to the path of the Buddha.So sometimes it has happened that the teacher may not know, but if the disciple trusts, his trust can create miracles. Buddha has said, “Let people read the scriptures, let them listen to teachers…the teachers may not know that the scriptures are dead words; but who knows, if these people have trust, their trust can resurrect the dead words. Their trust can get inspiration from people who don’t have anything that can inspire.Finally it is trust in yourself, but it takes a little time to find the trust in yourself. It is easy to trust in somebody else. But once you have understood that it is trust – then why trust in individuals? Why not trust in the whole existence? Then your whole life becomes a mystery, and things start happening around you which you are not doing.Something has happened, because Ta Hui has changed his tone. He has stopped quoting others. For the first time he is saying things on his own authority, and things of tremendous importance: be aware of yourself, who you are. And the right moment to be aware is when your mind for some reason gets baffled, cannot function, and a window opens and you can see yourself.Once you have seen yourself you can never be caught in the snares of the mind. Once you have seen yourself – even just a glimpse – the true pilgrimage has begun.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Before SeekingYou’ve indicated you want me to instruct you by letter in the direct essentials. This very thought of seeking instruction in the direct essentials has already stuck your head into a bowl of glue. Though I shouldn’t add another layer of frost to the snow, nevertheless where there’s a question it shouldn’t go unanswered. I ask you to abandon at once all the joy you’ve ever felt in reading the words of the scriptures yourself or when being aroused and instructed by others.Be totally without knowledge and understanding, as before, like a three-year-old child. Though the innate consciousness is there, it doesn’t operate. Then contemplate what’s there before the thought of seeking the direct essentials arises: observe and observe. As you feel you’re losing your grip more and more and your heart is more and more uneasy, don’t give up and slack off: this is the place to cut off the heads of the thousand sages. Students of the path often retreat at this point. If your faith is thoroughgoing, just keep contemplating what’s before the thought of seeking instruction in the direct essentials arises. Suddenly you will awaken from your dream, and there won’t be any mistake about it.Ta Hui is saying a few significant things. The first is that the consciousness of a three-year-old child, a baby, is there, but it does not create thinking. It remains just like a mirror, reflecting everything around the child, but the child does not start thinking whether something is good or bad, beautiful or ugly.Why three years are mentioned is significant to understand: if you try to go backward in your memory, you will stop at the age of three. You cannot go beyond that. The reason is that only after three years of age do thoughts start stirring the consciousness and impressions start collecting in the memory.Up to the age of three the child is exactly like a sage, only with one difference: this innocence is natural and is bound to be lost, because the child is not aware of its beauty, its richness, its splendor.He does not know how much valuable treasure he is going to lose as soon as he starts thinking. In fact he wants to think as quickly as possible, because he is seeing people all around him who can think better, who are more articulate, achieve to higher positions, greater prestige, more honor. This whole world supports the process of thinking. For any ambition to be achieved, thinking is absolutely essential.The moment the child becomes aware of the fact that thinking is the most essential thing to being someone in the world, somebody special with name and fame, then he starts learning as quickly as possible and transforming his consciousness and its energy into thoughts, into memory, into imagination – not knowing that he is losing his most precious nature, his most precious meditative consciousness.It is true, just as Jesus says: Unless you are born again you will not attain the kingdom of God. He does not mean that first you have to die and be born again; he is only using a metaphor. You have to die as a thinker, as a mind, and you have to be reborn only as an innocent consciousness, just like a child.Once a man has completed the whole circle from childhood to the enlightened man, he comes to the same self-nature, only with one difference: the child was not aware of it, and the enlightened person is nothing but awareness. He recognizes the value, he enjoys the tremendous bliss of it; his is the ecstasy of the ultimate and the eternal.The child was just innocent in a negative sense – he was innocent because he was ignorant – and the sage is innocent because he is wise. All ignorance has been dispelled.The child’s innocence was not meditative; it was simply non-functioning consciousness; it was just waiting for the right time and age to start functioning. Perhaps the reason is…all the animals in the world are born complete; only man’s child is born incomplete. Hence man’s child is more dependent and helpless than any animal in the world.An animal’s children can survive without the family, without the mother, without the father; they will find some way. But it is impossible to think that man’s child can find some way to survive on his own.The reason is very strange; perhaps you have never thought about it. The reason is that man’s child is born incomplete. He has to be born incomplete because the mother cannot carry the child for three years more; that would mean for four years continuously…. Nine months is the ultimate for the mother to carry the child; more than that it is impossible, her womb has not the capacity.So every child is born three years before he should have been born. Those three years he is out of the womb, but almost totally dependent on the mother, on the father, on the family – now this is the womb around him. After three years he starts taking a few steps outside the circle of the womb, the family, and for the first time he starts showing indications of being an individual.Below the age of three, children are almost always referring to themselves in the third person: “The baby is hungry”; “The baby wants to sleep”; “The baby is thirsty.” They don’t say, “I am thirsty”; the “I” has not formed yet. The “I” will need a little time, because it is nothing but the center of the mind. The body is formed; the mind is still in the process of forming. It takes three years for the mind to come to a point from where it starts functioning as an individual.So the body is born when the child has been nine months in the mother’s womb, and the mind is born when the child has been three years out of the womb. That’s why we cannot remember further backward than the age of three. There, suddenly a China wall…Those three years we have lived, and in those three years a thousand and one things must have happened. But they have not left any impact, any footprints on our memory system; the memory system was not ready. The child has every capacity to function as an individual; he just needs a little time for the whole mechanism to be ready to function.The sage has lived as a mind, suffered as a mind, has gone through the whole hell of the mind, and has learned the lesson that unless you go beyond the mind life is going to remain a continuous agony.Mind is agony.Once this experience settles deeply in you, out of your own experience arises a new effort, a new beginning, a new birth…the birth of meditation. Just as at the age of nine months the body is born, at the age of three the mind is born. Somewhere – it depends how intelligently you are watching your experiences, how you are looking at the sources of your misery and suffering – if you are intelligent enough, perhaps by the age of thirty-five you may start feeling a deep urge to go beyond the mind.The seven years between thirty-five and forty-two prepare you to take the quantum leap. If everything goes naturally, unobstructed and unhindered by the society, by organized religions, then the age of forty-two will be the third birth, the birth of meditation, a new beginning beyond mind.It does not happen to everyone at forty-two, because no society wants it to happen. It is the most dangerous thing as far as the society is concerned, that people should start going beyond the mind, because going beyond the mind means going beyond the social order, going beyond the organized church, going beyond the scriptures, going beyond all vested interests, going beyond slavery, going beyond any kind of exploitation, oppression, and attaining to your dignity as an authentic consciousness.This consciousness cannot be imprisoned, it cannot be killed, it cannot be burned. Even nuclear weapons are absolutely impotent as far as this consciousness is concerned.No society wants individuals so powerful in themselves. Every society wants you to remain dependent on it.Your independence is being curtailed in every possible way. And because your independence, your individuality is being curtailed, death comes before meditation comes. Life has been a wastage. Unless you attain to meditation, you have not really lived.I have heard about a man who only became aware that he was alive when he died. Suddenly an awakening… “My God, I have been alive, but now it is too late.” Perhaps this may be true not just about one man – it may be true about every man who has died without meditation. Dead people don’t tell stories; just this one man was an exception. There are a few exceptional men in the world always.While you are alive you are not really conscious how precious life is. In fact it is one of the tricks of the mind: whatever you have, you don’t recognize its value unless you lose it.There was a great king who had conquered many lands and had accumulated immense wealth, but was very unhappy and miserable. There was not a single moment of joy, bliss…. He started asking people, “What is the purpose of all my wealth and all my kingdom? I cannot even sleep. My mind is so full of tensions, worries, there is no space for anything else. Is there someone in my kingdom who can help me?”People had heard about a Sufi mystic and they said, “In your kingdom there is a Sufi mystic, a very strange fellow. He has helped many people, although you have to be a little alert with him because he is not predictable, he may do anything. But one thing is certain: whatever he does, finally you find that it had a reason. In the beginning it will look absolutely irrational. If you have courage enough you can go.”The king said, “Do you think me a coward? I have invaded great lands; my whole life has been the life of a warrior. Can a poor Sufi mystic make me afraid? I will go…and I will go alone, no bodyguards, no army, no advisers.”But he took with him a big bag full of diamonds and rubies and emeralds, just to show to the Sufi mystic: “This is only a sample. I have so much money but it is not helping me at all. First I used to think that when I have money I will relax and enjoy. But now money is there and I’m living in hell.”The Sufi mystic was sitting under a tree. The king went there, got down from his horse, touched the feet of the Sufi mystic and asked him, “Can you help me?”The Sufi mystic said, “What do you want? I will help you immediately.”He had heard that this man was strange – otherwise nobody would tell you, “I will help you immediately.” He is going to do something…. The king was a little afraid: nobody wants to be helped immediately. He said, “There is no hurry, but…”The Sufi mystic said, “Just tell me what you want. Don’t waste my time. You say it; I will give it to you and be finished.”The king said, “You don’t understand. I want peace of mind.”And when he was saying “peace of mind,” the Sufi mystic took his bag of emeralds and diamonds and rubies and ran away. The king said, “My God, what kind of man is he? Is he a mystic or a thief?”He ran – in his whole life he had never run. The village was unknown to him, with small streets. The Sufi was perfectly well known; he lived in that village. The king was shouting, “Catch hold of that thief” – and people were laughing, because people knew that every day something or other happens. And it was really a laughing matter: the king was huffing and puffing and shouting, “Catch him! Why are you just laughing?” – and still running because that old fellow is taking away all his money and he is going so fast.The Sufi mystic gave him a good round of the whole village, made the whole village aware that the mystic is ahead and the king is following, perspiring. Finally he reached to the same tree, sat there, and waited for the king to come. The king came very tired, perspiring, and the mystic gave him the bag. He took the bag, put it on his chest and said, “My God!”The Sufi said, “Have you got some peace of mind? Had not I told you I would help you immediately?”The king said, “Strange is your way…but it is true, I am feeling very peaceful, as I have never felt in my life. And the trouble is that this money was always with me, and I never felt so happy as I am feeling now.”The Sufi said, “I have solved your problem. Your problem is that you have got everything. You need some distance, you need to lose it; only then will you understand what you had. And this is not only true about your money. This is more true about your life itself: because you have it, you have started taking it for granted. It is too obvious it is yours. You are not at all concerned that tomorrow it may not be yours, or even the next second.”The day you become aware that death will destroy all opportunities for growth… Life is a great opportunity to grow, but rather than growing you have been simply accumulating junk which will all be taken away. People only grow old, but growing old is not growing up.Very few people grow up.Growing old is a natural thing; every animal does it, there is nothing special about it. It is horizontal. Growing up is vertical. Only very few people grow up; and meditation is the only path that moves vertically. Mind moves horizontally.Ta Hui is making a few very important statements.The first thing, the first sutra:You’ve indicated you want me to instruct you by letter in the direct essentials. This very thought of seeking instruction in the direct essentials has already stuck your head into a bowl of glue.It seems he is getting free from his own intellectual jargon. He is becoming aware of something more than the mind. He is condemning the very idea of getting instruction through somebody else, and that too through a letter, through words, through language. First from somebody else, second through language…Though I shouldn’t add another layer of frost to the snow…Because whatever I say will become more knowledge to you, it will simply strengthen the power of your mind. What is needed is to weaken the power of the mind so that you can go beyond it without being hindered by it.This has been the problem of all the enlightened people. Ta Hui is right when he says,…nevertheless where there’s a question it should not go unanswered.Why should it not go unanswered? Because every question, if answered by somebody who is not just knowledgeable, can be turned into a quest. The right answer does not mean what it means in schools and colleges and universities; the right answer is that which turns your question into a quest. The right answer does not mean the answer that is given in the books and you are repeating it just like a parrot.As far as the enlightened man is concerned the right answer has nothing to do with your question. He simply uses your energy involved in the question and turns it into a quest; it becomes your thirst.That’s why Ta Hui is right when he says, …where there is a question it should not go unanswered.The opportunity should not be missed to change the question into a quest. Your answer has to be such that the question is not solved but rather deepens into a quest; it becomes less intellectual and more existential. A question about water should be turned by your answer into a deep thirst.All the awakened people down the ages have been answering only for this purpose, not that they are giving you the right answers – there are no right answers. Your questions are being used to provoke in you a search, a deep longing. If the answer can do that, it is the right answer.I ask you to abandon at once all the joy you’ve ever felt in reading the words of the scriptures yourself or when being aroused and instructed by others.He is turning toward his own being. He is not using quotations anymore. He is saying things which just a few sutras before he himself was doing; now he is saying things against them. He is saying, I ask you to abandon at once all the joy you’ve ever felt in reading the words of the scriptures yourself or when being aroused and instructed by others.Why have the awakened people always been against scriptures? This is a great misunderstanding all around the world. The people who have awakened are against the scriptures for a totally different reason than people understand. People think they are against scriptures because scriptures are wrong; they are against scriptures because if you get lost in the words of scriptures you will never come to know your own truth. The scriptures may be right, that is not the point. Perhaps they are right – but they are not right for you; they were right only for those people who had experienced and have expressed something out of their experience.But to you they are just dead words, and if you become too much interested in collecting dead corpses around yourself you will soon be drowned in the dead words. That’s what happens to all the scholars: their great effort simply becomes a suicide. They work hard, but their gain is nothing.Scriptures may have come from people who were awakened, but the moment somebody says… It is no more the same as his own experience. And when it is written it goes even further away. That’s why no enlightened person in the whole world has written anything by his own hand; they have spoken – because the spoken word and the written word have qualitative differences.The spoken word has a warmth; the written word is absolutely cold, ice cold. The spoken word has the heartbeat of the master. The spoken word is not just a word – it is still breathing when it reaches you, it has still some flavor. It is coming from a source of immense joy and light; it is bound to carry something of that fragrance, some radiation from that light, some vibe which may not be visible but will stir your being.To listen to a master is one thing, and to read just the same words is totally different, because the living presence of the master is no more behind the words. You can’t see those eyes, you can’t see those gestures, you can’t see in those words the same authority…you can’t feel those same silent gaps.The presence of the master, his charisma, his energy is missing in the written word. The written word is absolutely dead. No master has ever written except Lao Tzu – and that too under imperial pressure.His whole life he refused to write, and in the end he was going to leave China and go toward the Himalayas for his ultimate rest. The emperor of China ordered the armies on the boundary, “If Lao Tzu passes through that area” – because that was the only gate toward the Himalayas, he was bound to pass by there – “imprison him. Take good care of him, but make it clear to him he cannot go out of China unless he writes his experiences. This is an order from the emperor.”Poor Lao Tzu was not aware what was going on. He simply went to the place where it was easiest to move out of China. There was an army waiting, and he was caught immediately. Respectfully, with great honor, they told him, “This is the imperial order. Forgive us, we don’t want to hinder you, but just to fulfill the order – otherwise we will not be able to allow you to go out of China. And we have made a special guesthouse for you with every comfort, luxury, according to the orders from the emperor. You stay and you write whatever you have experienced, what the truth is that you have realized which has attracted so many people.”Because he wanted to reach quickly to the Himalayas – his death was coming closer and he wanted to die in the Himalayas… The Himalayas have an eternal silence, a peace that you cannot find anywhere else. Under such circumstances he wrote Tao Te Ching, a small booklet.That is the only exception in the whole history when an enlightened man has written anything. But the beginning of the book says, “Truth cannot be written. So remember, whatever I am writing is not truth. I will try my best to be as close to truth as possible, but approximate truth is not truth.” So he has begun his book with the statement, “Whatever is written goes far away from the living experience.” That is the reason why all the awakened people have been against scriptures.But the ordinary masses have always misunderstood them. If I say anything against the Vedas, Hindus are angry; if I say anything against the Bible, Christians are angry.But I am not against the Vedas or against the Bible; I am against your being lost in those dead words. Once they were alive, but now the people whose presence was needed to give them life, to keep their flame burning, themselves have disappeared into the universal consciousness. Just their footprints are left on the sand of time. You can call them holy footprints, but that does not make any sense. You can worship them, you can have photographs of them, you can hang those photographs. You can do all kinds of stupid things, which are being done in all churches, all mosques, all temples, all synagogues.The man who knows has to say something against all that is going on. Ta Hui is right when he says, “Stop having any joy in scriptures; that is dangerous, it is poisonous.”Be totally without knowledge and understanding, as before, like a three-year-old child. Though the innate consciousness is there, it does not operate.Be born again as a child. The greatest achievement in life is if in your old age you can again become a child. You have completed the circle, you have come back home, you have rediscovered your self-nature. Every child comes with it, but first he has to lose it. Only then will he recognize what he has lost in gaining money, power, respectability, which are of no use at all. He has lost himself, he has sold himself in the marketplace for a few pieces of gold.If one recognizes this, one stops accumulating knowledge and starts dropping all so-called knowledge. A simple criterion has to be used: whatever is not your experience is not true. It may be the experience of Gautam Buddha, it may be the experience of Jesus, it may be the experience of Lao Tzu – but it is not your experience.When a Buddha eats, his hunger disappears, not your hunger. If Buddha finds the truth, his darkness disappears, not your darkness. Nobody can help anybody else.I don’t think of it as a calamity; I think of it as one of the greatest privileges of man: at least in this world there is one thing which is absolutely yours – neither can anybody give it to you nor can anybody take it away from you. It cannot be stolen, there is no way to destroy it…but you have to find it yourself. There is no shortcut to it and there is no cheap way to find it.You will have to go into your own aloneness, into your own subjectivity, into the very center of your being where nothing moves and everything is absolutely still. In that stillness you will find again your lost childhood. And to find it again is such a celebration, every cell of your being starts dancing.Ta Hui is saying, “If you can reach to the same state of consciousness when it was there but not operating”Then contemplate what is there before the thought of seeking the direct essentials arises: observe and observe.He is giving you an essential method of meditation. Any thought arising in your mind…rather than finding out the answer, try to find out from where it arises and what was the situation of your inner being when it had not arisen.You will suddenly find again and again the same innocence, the same childhood consciousness, the same golden period. Every thought, if you observe, will lead you to the same state. Then thought is not your enemy, then mind is not your enemy; on the contrary, it becomes an object of observation.…observe and observe. Just watch. A thought arises and a thought disappears. It arises from nowhere. Before it arises there is absolute silence, and then it disappears into silence again, into nothingness. In the beginning is nothingness, in the end is nothingness…and this nothingness is your pure consciousness.The Bible says, “In the beginning there was the Word. And God was with the Word, and God was the Word.”It is possible that in the beginning there was sound – but not word, because word means a meaningful sound. Who will give meaning to it?And in fact, if you look scientifically, when you go into the forest and you hear the sound of running water in a waterfall, there is no meaning in it, but there is sound. You will be surprised to know the scientific understanding: the sound is there only because you are there; without your ears there is no sound.So it will be very surprising to you: when there is nobody around the waterfall, there is no sound, because sound needs ears. In the same way, there is light here – the moment we all are gone there is no light, because the light needs eyes. Without eyes there is no light.When you move out of your room do you think things remain the same? – the blue remains blue and the red remains red? Just forget all that nonsense. The moment you go out of the room all the colors disappear – it is a very magical world – you close the room and all colors are gone, because colors need eyes. Without an eye no color can exist. And just look through the keyhole…they come back.This miracle is happening every day. In fact, even if you are sitting in your room and you close your eyes, all the colors disappear. Don’t try just to see from the corner of your eye whether they have disappeared or they are still there – they will come back immediately!To say that in the beginning there was the word is absolutely wrong. Sound would have been better, but that too is not right. Silence would be even better than sound, but silence also needs ears, just as sound needs ears. Do you think when you are absent from your room there is silence? It is not possible. There is no noise, that is true, but there is no silence either. Noise and silence both are experiences of the ears.So what was in the beginning?No silence…no sound…no word.Gautam Buddha and his approach seem to be far more scientific: there was only nothingness. That nothingness is our very being. We have come out of that nothingness and we will disappear into that nothingness one day.So make friends with that nothingness, because it is going to be your eternal home. To make friends with nothingness is all that is meant by meditation. And as you observe your thoughts, slowly, slowly they disappear, and only a pure nothingness surrounds you. You have come to the beginning of the world, which is also the end of the world. You have come to the source and you have come to the goal.In this state only your awareness is the truth. That’s why Buddha and all those people who have awakened to the ultimate truth don’t recognize the hypothesis of God. In that nothingness they don’t find any God, unless you want to call nothingness “God.” Then there is no problem – but it will give a very wrong understanding about nothingness.I myself have come to the conclusion that rather than saying, “There was no God” – because it will unnecessarily hurt people and will not help in any way – it is better to say, “There was godliness.” Just a quality… That nothingness was not empty; that nothingness was full, overfull. It was full of consciousness, and consciousness is the divine quality; you can call it godliness.And the whole of existence is made of the same stuff. You can call it nothingness, you can call it godliness – it is only a question of whether you prefer a negative description or a positive description, but both the words mean the same thing.As you feel,– says Ta Hui –you’re losing your grip more and more and your heart is more and more uneasy…When you observe your thoughts and this nothingness starts surrounding you, there is always a possibility that your heart will start sinking. You may become afraid, scared.Don’t be scared and don’t be uneasy. It is happening only because of your old habit. You have never experienced nothingness, otherwise there is nothing more blissful, there is nothing more peaceful, there is nothing more alive.…don’t give up and slack off: this is the place to cut off the heads of the thousand sages.This refers to a certain statement of Gautam Buddha. He used to say to his disciples, “If I meet you on the way, don’t hesitate – immediately cut my head. Most probably I will meet you” – because the disciples have loved him so much and the master has showered so much love on them that when they become silent there is every possibility the mind will play its last trick. The last trick will be to bring the master himself…and that will become the barrier to seeing the nothingness.Gautam Buddha is absolutely right: “Cut my head immediately – because I am not there, just mind is playing the last game, the last resort.”It happened in Ramakrishna’s life…He was a worshipper of mother-goddess Kali, and he came in contact with an enlightened wandering monk, Totapuri. Totapuri said to him, “Although you have progressed so much, you are stuck. You are stuck with this goddess…because there is no goddess, nothing; it is just your imagination.”Ramakrishna was already worshipped by thousands of people, but when Totapuri said this to him he immediately recognized that the man was right. He said to Totapuri, “Help me – because when I close my eyes everything else disappears. Only the mother-goddess remains, so beautiful, so radiant that I forget completely that I have to enter into nothingness. She is so beautiful and so charming that I get lost into her beauty and into her energy. And when I wake up I cry, because I wanted to go beyond her but she seems to surround me like a boundary, like a jail, from everywhere.”Totapuri said, “You sit before me, and just look at this piece of glass.”Ramakrishna said, “What is the purpose of that piece of glass?”Totapuri said, “I will watch your face, because I know – I have watched you: when you see the mother-goddess inside yourself your face becomes so beautiful, so graceful that I will know immediately that you have come to encounter your illusion that you have been conditioning yourself with for years. I will immediately cut just on your forehead with this piece of glass, and as I cut and blood starts flowing, you also take courage and cut the head of the mother-goddess.”Ramakrishna said, “It is very difficult. And moreover from where am I going to get the sword?”Totapuri laughed and he said, “If you can imagine the mother-goddess, can’t you imagine a sword? It is all imagination. And if you miss, I am not going to stay here anymore. So don’t miss this chance, otherwise in this life perhaps you will not meet another Totapuri.”Ramakrishna closed his eyes and as he became radiant, joyful and his face started showing that he was seeing something tremendously beautiful, Totapuri cut exactly what in the East is called the third eye. From the top of his forehead he went down to his nose, cutting the skin. Blood was flowing and Ramakrishna gathered courage, pulled out his sword – he could not believe from where this sword had come – and he cut the head of the mother-goddess. It was very difficult because he had loved this mother for years. He had been dancing and singing, chanting; he was creating the illusion – otherwise there are no mother-goddesses, no father-gods, except in man’s imagination, except in man’s childish fixation on mothers and fathers.He cut the head and he could not believe it: the mother fell in two parts, the head on this side and the body on that side. And it was as if a door opened – a door to nothingness, to infinity…for six days he remained in that state.After six days he opened his eyes – there were tears in his eyes – and the first words he spoke to Totapuri were, “The last barrier has fallen. I am grateful to you. You have shown tremendous compassion.”That was the last day. After that he never went into the temple of the mother-goddess; after that he never mentioned the name of the mother-goddess. And after that he was a totally different man – so silent, so peaceful, so joyous, as if there was not a single worry in the world.He lived almost three years after this experience, and those three years were his most precious years. People who have sat by his side – and he was not very ancient, he existed just in the last century, in the last years of the past century. So just a hundred years ago he was here, and I have come across people in Bengal whose grandfathers sat with Ramakrishna, and they still remember their grandfathers telling them about the man.Those three years he was not speaking… Once in a while he would tell a small story, once in a while he would dance, but otherwise he would sit silently with hundreds of disciples, all enjoying and sharing the ultimate nothingness.Students of the path often retreat at this point.Those who are beginners are naturally afraid when they come across nothingness. Naturally the fear arises as if they are drowning, as if this nothingness is going to swallow them. It is true: it will swallow…but only that which you are not. Only your false personality will disappear; just your authentic being will remain in its crystal-clear purity.There is no need to fear. The master is needed at such stages. This is the last stage where the master is needed – not to let you retreat, but to give you a good push, just a little encouragement: “Don’t be worried, I have also been through the same stage; there is nothing to be feared. It is not death. This nothingness is not death; this nothingness is purest life.”If your faith is thoroughgoing, just keep contemplating what’s before the thought of seeking instruction in the direct essentials arises. Suddenly you will awaken from your dream, and there won’t be any mistake about it.Allow this nothingness to take possession of you…and all your dreams disappear; your sleep, your spiritual sleep cannot remain anymore.I have to explain something to you at this point. For thousands of years it has been thought that dreams are a kind of disturbance to sleep, but the latest findings say just the opposite. Dreams are not a disturbance to your sleep, they are very protective and helpful to your sleep. They prevent your sleep from being broken.For example, you feel hungry and you are asleep, and a dream arises that you are going into the kitchen and you are opening the fridge, and you are taking a good share of sweets or ice cream or whatsoever you like – because in a dream there is no question, whatsoever you like… The dream is very generous – and as much you like, because dreams don’t listen to doctors.This way the dream has protected your sleep, otherwise the hunger would have disturbed you. Now you feel you have taken enough and the sleep continues.Recent research about dream and sleep have made many things clear. Out of eight hours you would not think that you are dreaming almost six hours; for only two hours are you asleep, and even that is not in a single piece for two hours – a few minutes here, a few minutes there… In six hours of dreams, for just a few fragments here and there are you asleep.There has been an experiment done in many psychological labs. A person was disturbed whenever he was dreaming. It is very easy to know when a person is dreaming: if you are sitting by the side of your wife or your husband or your friend, the moment you see his eyes start moving under the eyelids he is starting to dream. So it is very easy to know when he is dreaming and when he is not dreaming, because when he dreams then naturally he is seeing scenes, almost like a film, and his eyes start moving. When he is simply asleep his eyes don’t move.Experiments have been done: whenever a person would dream, they would wake him up, they would disturb his dream. They would allow him to sleep, but they would not allow him to dream. And they were surprised that although he had slept two, three hours – which was the most that he would sleep – he was very tired, exhausted, he was not rejuvenated; in the morning he did not feel like getting up. They could not believe it; they were thinking that although his dreams were being disturbed, his sleep would be complete. The old idea had been that it is the sleep that rejuvenates you, revitalizes you.Then they did another experiment. They would disturb the person when he was asleep, they would not let him sleep; he could dream as much as he wanted – his dreaming time they would leave undisturbed. And the strange finding was that in the morning the man was more fresh than he had ever been. He had not slept at all; the whole night he had been in a movie house, and he was not tired.So two things have become clear: one, that dreams are not disturbing the sleep but are protecting and guarding it; second, dreams are more necessary for your health than your sleep, because dreams are throwing out all the garbage that you collect the whole day. They clean your whole being – six hours spring-cleaning – so in the morning you feel fresh.Why am I telling you about this experiment? Because the same applies to the spiritual sleep. The moment your dreams disappear in meditation – thoughts, images; these are all dreams – when they all disappear, then your spiritual sleep cannot remain; your dreams were protecting it. So just as on the ordinary mental level it is true, it is true on the spiritual level too, exactly in the same way. Once dreams have disappeared, that means meditation has come to maturity.And after the dreams are gone, suddenly you will feel a new awakening. You have been waking up every morning, but once you wake up from your spiritual sleep, then you will see the difference, and why in the East we have been dividing sleep into four stages. The first stage is so-called waking; the second stage is dreaming; the third stage, sleep, and the fourth stage, real awakening.The so-called waking we all know; every morning we wake up. The enlightened being knows the real awakening. It has some quality of our awakening, but our awakening is very small, a very thin layer.The awakening of a Gautam Buddha is total. In that total awakening there is a luminous awareness surrounded by a positive nothingness. It is not empty, it is overfull. Rather than say nothingness, Gautam Buddha used to say “no-thingness.” Things have disappeared…and what has remained is inexpressible. We try to express it as blissfulness, as ecstasy, as eternal joy, but these are faraway echoes of the real thing. They don’t represent it exactly – there is no way.In our language we cannot translate the experience of the ultimate awakening, but a few hints can be given.Ta Hui’s suggestions to the young seeker are all significant: …faith is thoroughgoing… It has to be thoroughgoing, but one has to remember it is not the faith in a church, it is not the faith in a holy scripture; it is simply faith in yourself.The function of the master is not to create faith in him, but to create faith in yourself. An authentic master makes you more and more trusting in your own individuality, in your own potential, in your own courage, in your own ultimate possibility of a quantum leap from mind to no-mind.This can be the criterion to judge: if somebody wants you to have faith in him, he is a fraud. And if somebody helps you to have faith in yourself, he is a friend.A true master is a friend. He is not superior, he is not holier than thou; he is just a friend. He has so much to share…he wants many friends because his sources are abundant. But his whole effort is to help you to stand on your own legs. He does not create faith in God, faith in any savior, faith in any priest, faith in any messengers, faith in any scriptures; he creates faith in yourself. And anybody who helps to create faith in yourself obviously cannot be a fraud, because he cannot exploit you.Exploitation is possible only if he creates faith in him; if he asks, “Surrender to me; have faith in me. I will deliver you, I will redeem you. I am the savior. I am the shepherd and you are just sheep.” If something like this is being told to you…beware of such shepherds. They are simply frauds exploiting your helplessness, exploiting your ignorance.The friend will help you to save yourself, to become a savior of yourself.The last words of Gautam Buddha were: “Be a light unto yourself.” Those are the most pregnant words ever uttered by any man.

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The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 01-38Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Don’t Consciously Await EnlightenmentWhether you’re happy or angry, in quiet or noisy places, you still must bring up Chao Chou’s saying, “A dog has no buddha-nature.” Above all, don’t consciously await enlightenment. If you consciously await enlightenment, you’re saying, “Right now I’m deluded.” If you wait for enlightenment, clinging to delusion, though you pass through countless eons you will still not be able to gain enlightenment. As you bring up the saying, just arouse your spirit, and see what principle it is.Constantly take the two concerns – not knowing where we come from at birth and not knowing where we go at death – and stick them on the point of your nose. Whether eating or drinking, whether in quiet or noisy places, you should make scrupulous efforts from moment to moment – always as if you owed someone millions with no way out, your heart sorely troubled, with no opening to escape.Searching for birth, it cannot be found; searching for death it cannot be found – at such a moment, the roads of good and evil are immediately cut off.Haven’t you read how in the old days, Master Tzu Hu said, “The Patriarch’s coming from the West only means that winter is cold and summer is hot, night is dark and day is light.” It’s just that you vainly set up meaning where there is no meaning, create concern where there is no concern, impose “inside” and “outside” where there is no inside or outside, and talk endlessly of this and that, where nothing exists.“No speech is true speech, and no hearing is true hearing.” Thus I am you and you are me: we are not two, you and I, because there’s no duality, no distinction, and no separation.It is good news that Ta Hui is at last coming closer and closer to the point. What he is saying now is not mere knowledge. It seems the sutras had been collected by his disciples from the time Ta Hui started teaching as an intellectual up to the point when he became enlightened.In this way this series is of tremendous importance – it will give you the whole process of mind changing into no-mind, of intellect dissolving into intelligence, of words losing their existence into wordlessness. All sounds become silent…all separations disappear…even the separation between the master and the disciple is no more there. The whole series is significant in the sense that it will show you the path in different stages.Most people who are enlightened speak only after their enlightenment. There is a great distance between you and them – they are on a high, sunlit mountain peak, and you are in the dark valleys of your life. The distance is so much that to expect any understanding arising between you becomes very difficult.But with Ta Hui your dialogue starts when he himself is in the dark valley, and the dialogue continues as he goes on climbing the mountain. Still there is something to be climbed, but it is becoming more and more certain that he will be able to make it. He has reached very close.Because the dialogue with him has started while he was just one of you, that continuity and the slow change in his being can be of great importance for understanding not only him, but your own journey.Perhaps the emperor of China met him when he was enlightened. and that’s why he gave him the honorable title, “The Great Master of Zen.” We have to see whether he makes it or goes astray…because one can go astray at the very last moment. He has just to go one step more, and something – some idea, some accident, some incident – can take him away.There is an old saying in the East that people don’t get lost until they have almost reached. It is a very strange saying, but it has great psychological insight behind it. As people start feeling they are reaching, they start losing the awareness that is needed to take the final jump. They start thinking, “Now it is almost certain I will reach, it is only a question of a few steps more….” Even one step is enough to take you astray, if you become certain. If you remain open, vulnerable, aware that you can still miss it, then there is less possibility of missing it.It is well known to travelers that when they come close to their goal, they start feeling utterly tired – just before the goal. They have been traveling thousands of miles, but they had never felt so tired. And because now they can see the goal has almost been reached, there is no hurry; they can sit down, they can rest – and that is a very dangerous situation.The inner journey is such that you cannot rest and wait, because the goal is not something dead, an objective that will remain there.Even if you are resting outside the temple of your ultimate realization, you can fall asleep again. The old habit…and habits die hard – they can overwhelm you. And if the old sleep comes in the name of tiredness, saying “You can rest now that you have already arrived; tomorrow morning you can enter into the temple. There is no hurry now…” Up to now it was always a hurry, but because you have almost made it, you can rest, you can fall into a deep sleep…and your sleep can take you so far astray that when you open your eyes, the temple is no longer there.So we have to see the whole process of evolution from a student to a disciple, to a devotee, to a master – from just intellectual effort to understanding what enlightenment is, and then to experience it in one’s own being.Ta Hui can be of more help to you than anybody else, because all the enlightened people are recorded only after their enlightenment. Ta Hui is an exception. Because he was a great teacher, very articulate, the disciples started thinking that he was already enlightened and they began collecting his sutras.Meanwhile he is growing…and you can see the growth. Slowly, slowly he is becoming more clear. He is no longer in the mind, he is stating things which are beyond mind and he is making pointers to the ultimate realization in exactly the right direction.This sutra, Don’t Consciously Await Enlightenment, is of great importance. Even awaiting is a form of desire, very subtle, very soft. Desire is a little crude, primitive, unsophisticated; awaiting is more sophisticated, more cultured – but deep down it is still desire. The desire has become decorated, but it has not changed.Enlightenment is possible only when there is no desire at all, in any form, within you. You are not even waiting for it. You are simply relaxed and allowing things to happen. You don’t have a certain will that things should be moving in a certain direction, that things should culminate into the point of enlightenment. You don’t have that any more. You are just in a let-go, watching the flow of experiences, but not getting attached to anything, not bothering about the past and not awaiting any special future.Don’t consciously await enlightenment, otherwise you will miss it.So what has to be done? One has simply to live in a state of let-go – going nowhere, with nothing to be sought, no goal to be reached, no great experience to be expected. One simply lives day-to-day life in utter relaxation, as if this moment is all: there is no concern about the next moment.When you are in this cleanness of no desire, no awaiting, no thinking about the future, simply enjoying the moment that you have got in its fullness, enlightenment comes. It comes always from the back door. If you are awaiting it, you will be at the front door. It comes so silently that if you are waiting to hear its footsteps, you will miss. The change is so silent that when it has happened, only then you know… “My God, what has happened? I am no longer the same person.”This is a beautiful statement, very truthful. And what follows…all the sutras have to be understood clearly – except one statement that Ta Hui has quoted before, which he is quoting again, and which seems to come from some kind of unconscious guilt in him, because he called Buddha ‘the pale face’ and ‘the barbarian.’As he is coming closer and closer inside, in his consciousness, he must be becoming aware that he has misbehaved, that he has not been grateful to the great master – he is a disciple of Gautam Buddha. Although he has come fifteen centuries afterward, he is from the same line, in the same lineage, and he should not have spoken those words. But those words were spoken when he was only an intellectual; they don’t carry any value, except as a historical record.Only one statement shows that he is feeling that he has done something wrong – and to avoid that wrong, he is making another wrong statement. This is the trouble when you don’t understand and start repenting.If you understand, there is no repentance: past is past. You were unenlightened – how can you expect from an unenlightened man anything better than what he has done? He has to be forgiven. He was no one other than you, but you are now on a higher peak. Now you can see better, your perspective is vaster. Then you were in the dark valley where you could not see clearly, and you may have said a few things which now you feel were not right.If understanding is clear, you will simply laugh at the stupidity of intellectuals, of yourself, of those past days – there will be no repentance. But if a certain repentance is there, then you will try to do just the opposite to compensate. And that’s where he is committing another mistake. That is the only statement in the today’s sutras where he is not yet completely free of the past.Whether you are happy or angry, in quiet or noisy places, you still must bring up Chao Chou’s saying, “A dog has no buddha-nature.”Why is he insisting on this statement: “A dog has no buddha-nature”? This statement is not true. Chao Chou’s statement is: A dog has a buddha-nature.Ta Hui does not want to make another derogatory statement about Buddha – he has already made derogatory statements – so he changes the statement of Chao Chou…and it was not derogatory! Just in his mind, the repenting mind, it looks derogatory that a dog has a buddha-nature. It seems that you are putting Buddha in the same category as dogs. But the reality is, you are putting dogs in the same category as the buddhas. Buddha is not insulted; only the dog is raised to its potential, ultimate glory.The statement is not about Buddha; the statement is about buddha-nature. To translate it rightly, buddha-nature means awakening. If he had simply thought about awakening, then Chao Chou’s statement that a dog has also the capacity to be awake would not have created this problem – that he is making a derogatory statement toward Buddha. To avoid that, he changes the statement and says, “A dog has no buddha-nature.”This is a guilt feeling that moves to its extreme. It will disappear; the way he is growing up and the way he is dropping many things, this too will be dropped. But this is the only statement where he is still wrong.Above all, don’t consciously await enlightenment.Absolutely right!If you consciously await enlightenment, you are saying, “Right now I am deluded.”A very beautiful argument. Test the argument that he is making: If you consciously await enlightenment… it means, in other words, you are accepting that right now you are not enlightened, you are deluded; otherwise there is no need to await enlightenment.His argument has tremendous penetration. He is saying that if you await enlightenment, every moment of your awaiting you are insisting that you are deluded. When you continuously insist, “I am deluded, I am deluded, I am deluded” – although you are not saying it, that is what it actually comes down to – you are conditioning yourself, hypnotizing yourself, to be an unenlightened being. Then how can enlightenment happen to you? You are creating a thick wall, and every moment of awaiting is making the wall thicker and thicker.Do you see the beauty of his argument? Naturally, in waiting for enlightenment you are accepting the fact that you are not yet enlightened. And as you go on and on waiting, and your unconscious goes on being conditioned that it is not yet awakened, not yet awakened, not yet awakened…. This idea can become such a great barrier that it will prevent your enlightenment.If you wait for enlightenment, clinging to delusion, though you pass through countless eons you will still not be able to gain enlightenment. As you bring up the saying, just arouse your spirit, and see what principle it is.What principle is functioning? Waiting for enlightenment, you are unknowingly, unconsciously, using a certain principle of autohypnosis.Just here in Pune, some twenty years ago, a young man who was a professor in the university came to see me. He wanted a private interview; he did not want to say anything about his problem before others. And later on, naturally I understood that it must have been embarrassing for him to say it before others. He had from his very childhood learned the habit – which is very strange, because a man’s physiology does not allow it – of walking like a woman.A man cannot walk like a woman for the simple reason that he does not have a womb. It is the womb in the woman’s body that makes her walk differently; without the womb, nobody can manage it. But something must have happened in his childhood of which he was not aware. Perhaps he was born in a house where there were only girls – his sisters – and he was the only boy. And naturally, children learn from imitation: if he was surrounded only by girls, he may have started moving the way they were moving and become almost fixated on it.Everybody was laughing at him, and particularly that he is a professor in the university, and walking like a woman, and all the students laughing…. He had been to doctors, but they said, “What can we do? – there is no disease, no medicine can help. There is nothing wrong in your body. No operation can help.”He had been to psychoanalysts in Bombay and New Delhi and they were also unbelieving, because such a case had never come to them. So none of the advice they could give was the advice of psychoanalysis – because psychoanalysis has no precedent for such a case. In all the discoveries of psychoanalysis, I have never come across a single case like this that has been treated by psychoanalysts.So naturally…the man was a psychoanalyst, but the advice he was giving was just commonplace advice. He said, “You have to try hard to walk like a man. Be alert.” This is commonsense advice. “What can be done? You have to change your habit and create a new habit. So particularly when you go for a morning walk, or an evening walk, try hard to walk like a man.”And that created the trouble: the more he tried to walk like a man, the more his mind was getting hypnotized to walk like a woman. That was why he was trying…otherwise nobody tries. Have you ever tried not to walk like a woman?But if you are so consciously trying hard to walk like a man, you don’t understand the mechanism of hypnosis: you are hypnotizing yourself more to walk like a woman. You are trying hard and you are failing, and every failure is making your autohypnotic situation deeper. So all the advice of great psychoanalysts turned him into even more of a mess. He started walking more like a woman than he had before.When he came to see me, a few friends were there and he said, “I cannot tell you my problem. I want absolute privacy.”So I said, “Okay, you can come into my room.” I took him into my room, and he locked the door. I said, “What kind of problem do you have that you are so much afraid?”He said “It is so embarrassing…I walk like a woman.”I said, “You should not be embarrassed about it. In fact, you have done a miracle. Physiologists cannot believe that it is possible: walking like a woman needs a womb, otherwise you cannot. And you don’t have a womb…”He said, “Whatever may be the case…”I said, “You are somebody to be appreciated. Who says that this is embarrassing? You would win a competition, you would come first in the whole world – a man walking like a woman…no man can compete with you!”He said, “What are you saying? You are trying to console me.”I said, “No. I am simply trying to make it clear to you…you have listened to psychoanalysts and other advisers who have told you to make hard and conscious efforts to walk like a man – and what has been the result?”He said, “The result has been this, that I am walking more like a woman than before.”I said, “Now, listen to my advice. You try hard to walk like a woman…”He said, “You will make me look absolutely stupid.”I said, “You try it just here in this room, before me. Make a conscious effort to walk like a woman. I want to see how you can walk…because it is physiologically impossible. It is just a psychological conditioning, and it can be broken – but not by the opposite extreme.” He was afraid, but I said, “You try, just around the room – but be conscious and make it as woman-like as possible.”And he failed, he could not manage it. He said “My God, this is strange!”I said, “Now go out, go to the university, and walk consciously as a woman. Watch women, how they are walking…find the best woman and just walk like her.”And after seven days, when I was leaving, he came back and he said, “You have done a miracle. The harder I tried to walk like a woman…I could not do it. People have even started looking at me strangely, because they expect me to walk like a woman and I am walking like a man. I am trying my hardest, my best, to walk like a woman, and nothing succeeds!”I said to him, “This is the way to break through your autohypnosis. Autohypnosis is unconscious. If you consciously do the same thing, then the autohypnosis will be broken. It cannot stand the light of consciousness.”Ta Hui is saying, …just arouse your spirit and see what principle it is. Why are you not enlightened? The question is not that you should be enlightened – how have you missed being enlightened? What is the principle of your missing it? Desiring it, waiting for it, is the principle that is making it difficult to become enlightened.If you drop the whole idea, and you simply enjoy the moment, enlightenment comes. It is nothing that comes from outside; it is something that in your peaceful, silent, let-go arises within you. The moment you are not desiring for anything, not waiting for anything, no ambitions – this means there is no tension in you at all.Let-go is the right preparation for you suddenly to discover that you have always been enlightened. Enlightenment is your nature. You are creating a hypnosis that you are deluded, that you are not enlightened. By making the effort to attain enlightenment, you are going far away. Just drop all effort.Constantly take the two concerns – not knowing where we come from at birth and not knowing where we go at death – and stick them on the point of your nose.He says, rather than bothering about enlightenment, you should take only two concerns, which are not possible for you to discover – they are koans. The first is: From where are you coming?A young boy was asking his father, “Tell me, dad – from where have I come?” The father looked a little embarrassed, but finally – he was an educated man and thought himself to be very advanced – he told the whole story of how he made love to the boy’s mother. The boy was watching the father with wide open eyes and thinking, “What nonsense is he talking? I have asked a simple question – from where do I come? – and he is telling me things that don’t make any sense.” But he silently listened.The father was perspiring and telling him, “I made love to your mother…” and how love is made. The boy thought that he had asked a simple question, but he allowed the father to explain to him the whole of sexology. And when the father ended, he asked, wiping his perspiration, “Have you understood?”The boy said, “You have not said a single word in answer to what I have asked. Johnny Jones in my school says he has come from New Jersey, and I want to know from where I have come. I will look so stupid telling what you have been telling me to all the boys of my class. They will make me a laughingstock: ‘You are an utter idiot. People come from New Jersey, people come from New York, people come from Washington – but you are a very strange fellow. What kind of route have you followed?’”You cannot find out from where you are coming, and you cannot find out where you are going. Then why is he telling you to make this your sole concern? So that the mind is absolutely engaged. These are not desires; these are explorations, inquiries. And you cannot succeed – that is certain.A koan has to be made in such a way that you cannot succeed. If you can succeed, then mind has taken possession of you; if you cannot succeed, then mind – in utter failure – stops functioning.Where are you coming from and where are you going? This is to stop the functioning of the mind. The mind cannot… The mind came after your birth, so it does not know from where it is coming. And the mind goes into a coma before your death, so it never comes to know where it is going – so birth and death both remain beyond mind. Facing such impossible questions, the mind becomes tired, utterly tired, and stops functioning.In that state, when mind stops functioning, you may have the visitor arise within you, for whom you were not even waiting. You may see your luminous being with all the blessings possible.The whole strategy is to put the mind into a non-functioning state. Desire keeps it functioning, awaiting keeps it functioning, ambition keeps it functioning. Whether you are ambitious for money or whether you are ambitious for enlightenment, it does not make any difference to the mind. Whether you are seeking power or you are seeking truth, it makes no difference. The object is not the problem.Mind needs desire, ambition, expectation.Mind is always projecting into the future, and if you can stop the mind projecting…Zen has found the best way. There have been thousands of other traditions in the world, and there have been many ways of stopping the mind, but nothing is comparable to Zen. It is the most scientific, the most psychological – and the quickest.Just take any koan…and this koan is very beautiful: From where are you coming and to where are you going? And mind will stop – you will make it so tired, day after day you go on… That is why Ta Hui says, …and stick them on the point of your nose. Don’t forget the concern with the koan even for a single moment.And it is also significant that he says, …and stick them on the point of your nose. You may not be aware, but the East has been aware for thousands of years that before you die – six months before – you stop seeing the tip of your nose. You will know, when you stop being able to see the tip of your nose, that the journey has come to an end. And why do you stop seeing the tip of your nose?When a man dies, you must have seen that people immediately close his eyes. Nobody dies with closed eyes, because to keep the eyes closed needs energy, and a dead man has no energy. A dead man is no longer there, so who is going to keep them closed? No dead man dies with a fist. Every child is born with fists, and every old man dies with open hands, because to make a fist you need energy, it is an effort; with an open hand you don’t need any energy. The same is true about your eyes: everybody dies with open eyes.Then why do people immediately close the eyelids? The reason is that to see a dead man with open eyes is a very traumatic experience, because his eyes turn upward: all you can see is just the white part of the eyes. To see the white part of the eyes may give you nightmares – you have never seen such eyes.So just to save others – there are children, there are women, there are other people, why make them unnecessarily freak out? – the eyes have to be closed. But this turning of the eyes upward starts happening six months before; slowly, slowly the eyes start moving upward. It takes six months for them to go completely beyond your vision, until you can see only the white.His saying, …stick them on the point of your nose, has a double meaning. One is that you should remember constantly; and the second is that enlightenment has to happen before you stop seeing the tip of your nose – because enlightenment needs a tremendous energy explosion.Once the eyes have started turning, you are dying fast. Within six months you will be gone. It is a very beautiful symptom to remember: while you are capable of seeing the tip of your nose, let enlightenment happen. But your concern should not be enlightenment directly; your concern should be something that engages your mind in a futile exercise, an exercise which cannot come to any conclusion.Whether eating or drinking, whether in quiet or noisy places, you should make scrupulous efforts from moment to moment – always as if you owed someone millions with no way out, your heart sorely troubled, with no opening to escape.Searching for birth, it cannot be found; searching for death, it cannot be found – at such a moment, the roads of good and evil are immediately cut off.This same man was talking in the previous sutras about doing good acts, earning virtue, not being in the grip of evil acts, and all kinds of things. Now he is saying that…at such a moment – when your mind has stopped functioning – the roads of good and evil are immediately cut off. You are beyond good and evil.Friedrich Nietzsche has written a book by that name exactly – Beyond Good And Evil. Although his book has not the depth of the mystic, it has tremendous power of intellectual penetration. He has some insight. It is not beyond mind yet, but he is struggling hard to find a place where you are beyond good and evil – because that is the place of nirvana.That is what enlightenment is: when you are neither good nor bad, just innocent.Haven’t you read how in the old days, Master Tzu Hu said, “The Patriarch’s coming from the West only means that winter is cold and summer is hot, night is dark and day is light.”You can see the change of climate in the consciousness of Ta Hui. He has been quoting before, but those quotations looked out of context. Now he still quotes, but they fit exactly what he is trying to explain; those quotations don’t seem to be unnecessarily put in, to show his knowledgeability.This question is concerned with Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma went from India to China, and it became a tradition among the disciples of Bodhidharma – because he is the first patriarch of Zen in China – “The Patriarch’s coming from the West… What is the meaning of it? Why did Bodhidharma come to China?It had been asked of Bodhidharma himself: Why had the patriarch come such a long way? Such a tedious journey – three years it took him to reach China – an enlightened man…why should he bother to come to China? And what he said has become a tremendously significant statement of suchness, of thusness. “The Patriarch’s coming from the West only means that winter is cold and summer is hot, night is dark and day is light.”Just accept things as they are. A very simple statement, but of immense meaning: …winter is cold and the summer is hot, night is dark and day is light. To teach this, Bodhidharma had to come to China.It’s just that you vainly set up meaning where there is no meaning, create concern where there is no concern, impose “inside” and “outside” where there is no inside or outside, and talk endlessly of this and that, where nothing exists.Now Ta Hui is speaking the language of a master: Things are the way they are.Once this simple statement is understood, you stop desiring, you stop willing that things should be different. All that your prayers consist of is that winter should not be cold, that summer should not be hot; all your prayers are asking that nature should not be what it is. Your prayers are your complaints, your grudges, your frustrations. A man who has understood that this is the way things are – that a roseflower is a roseflower and a thorn is a thorn, there is nothing to be done about it…Understanding this brings a great relaxation to you – when you don’t……vainly set up meaning where there is no meaning, create concern where there is no concern, impose “inside” and “outside” where there is…only one existence – there is no inside, there is no outside – and talk endlessly of this and that, where nothing exists.“No speech is true speech, and no hearing is true hearing.” Thus I am you and you are me: we are not two, you and I, because there is no duality, no distinction, and no separation.In this non-duality, in this meaningless splendor of existence, in this state of unconcern – not waiting for anything, not desiring for anything – you become so innocent, so open and so vulnerable, that the greatest experience simply arises in you. You have prepared the ground.Enlightenment is not a goal; it is your intrinsic potentiality. When you are relaxed, the lotus flower of enlightenment opens its petals. And not only you, but the whole existence rejoices in this tremendous experience. There is no meaning in it but there is great splendor. There is no meaning in it, but there is great significance. There is no meaning in it, but there is great contentment and fulfillment and a feeling that you have come home.